Former Virginia GOP congressman forms exploratory committee for possible statewide run

Former Republican Rep. Denver Riggleman (Va.) said he has formed an exploratory committee to run for statewide office as an independent.

“That’s why we started an exploratory committee, because I think there needs to be somebody who’s willing to drag the axe and tell the truth regardless if there’s an R or D behind people’s names,” Riggleman told Bloomberg TV on Tuesday.

“There’s a lot of people who’ve asked me, they don’t have to force me. Nobody’s going to force me to do anything," he continued. “But it was interesting to see the amount of support I had just for an exploratory committee.”

Riggleman said running for lieutenant governor is “absolutely a possibility.” The former congressman, who is a businessman, said he was not sure if he could run for governor and was looking at potential “conflicts of interest.”

In Virginia, governor and lieutenant governor candidates are elected separately.

Riggleman was elected to represent Virginia’s 5th Congressional District in 2018 but was ousted in a GOP convention by conservative Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.).

The former congressman is a vocal critic of President-elect Trump and endorsed Vice President Harris in the 2024 presidential election as a part of the campaign’s Republicans for Harris initiative.

Riggleman was endorsed by Trump in two campaigns, but he broke with the former president on Jan. 6, 2021.

The former lawmaker also lamented the two-party system, saying the things he saw on either side of the aisle “frighten him based on special interests.”

Virginia will likely become the center of the political universe later this year with its off-year elections set for November. Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears (R) and Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) are seen as the likely standard-bearers of the Republican and Democratic tickets. Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney and three other Democrats have thrown their names in the ring for lieutenant governor, while business consultant John Curran is running on the Republican side.

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