Former congressional candidate Hung Cao to challenge Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine in 2024

Hung Cao, who ran unsuccessfully in 2022 for the House of Representatives in Virginia’s 10th Congressional District, announced Tuesday that he is running for the Republican nomination to challenge incumbent Democratic Virginia U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine in the 2024 general election. 

Like many other top Republican Senate candidates, Cao holds extreme right-wing positions on reproductive rights, democracy, gun safety, climate protection, and LGBTQ equality that put him at odds with public opinion. He has also promoted debunked conspiracy theories about the Biden family.

According to the Washington Post, during his 2022 campaign Cao told voters he opposed abortion: “I’m pro-life, that’s where I’ll always be, in every single thing I do.”

On his 2024 campaign website, he falsely claims that Kaine, a co-sponsor of a bill to codify abortion rights in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, “believes abortion should be legal until and including the moment of birth,” the same accusations he made against his Democratic opponent, Rep. Wexton, in 2022. His website also asserts, “It is Tim Kaine and Democrat politicians like him who are extreme in their views and support for unlimited abortion on demand.”

Cao falsely accused California Democrats of wanting to legalize infanticide during a May 2022 campaign event, according to the Post. “The Nazis did this,” he reportedly said. “They take Jewish babies and just take the legs and just smash the babies and kill them. You think that can’t happen in this country?”

He has pushed debunked claims about the Bidens while staunchly defending former President Donald Trump and his insurrectionist backers.

“Let’s address the elephant in the room. Most Americans believe what happened to President Trump was politically motivated. It’s the weaponization of the Justice Department and the basis of a banana republic,” he writes on his website. “Now we are supposed to believe the United States Secret Service can’t figure out how cocaine got into a secure location in the White House. Everybody in America knows how it got there, but we’re supposed to pretend they can’t figure it out.”

In a kickoff video, he spouts conspiracy theories, warning of “Joe Biden arresting his challenger in the next election, a former president of the United States” and, over images of Hunter Biden, claiming: “And the Biden family? Well, that’s how it works in a dictatorship. The rules don’t apply to the rulers. We are losing our country. You know it, but you also know you can’t say it.”

According to Virginia Public Media, in April 2022 Cao cast doubt on whether Biden had legitimately won the 2020 presidential election. “It’s just very difficult for me to understand what happened in 2020 when [Biden] sits in their basement for the whole election cycle and they got more votes than Barack Obama.”

According to a press release issued at the time by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, in response to a 2022 candidate survey question about Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrectionists, Cao pledged “to vote to release and seek compensation for persons unlawfully detained, or imprisoned, who were denied their right to know the charges filed against them, or denied their right to speedy trial, or who suffered excessive fines.”

In his current campaign, he attacks “the Left” over stringent gun safety policies, such as universal background checks, red flag laws, and safe storage requirements, linking them to higher rates of crime.

“The Left demands we not believe the accounts of rising violence in American cities. Americans know the places that have the most gun violence are the places that have the strictest gun control laws,” he claims on his campaign page.

A 2022 study by Everytown for Gun Safety found, however, that states with weaker gun laws had higher rates of gun deaths than states with stronger gun safety laws.

In May 2022, Cao told the Loudoun County, Virginia, news site LoudounNow that gun laws were useless and incorrectly claimed that more people are killed by stabbing or bludgeoning than gun violence:

Gun control has never stopped anyone. Most people get bludgeoned to death and stabbed to death than they get shot. I mean it’s a tragedy, it’s an absolute tragedy. But if it’s not guns it’s going to be with pipe bombs. Or knives or hammers. People get bludgeoned to death a lot. What do we control? Fentanyl has killed a lot of people. It’s just evil there’s a lot of evil in the world and we’re not going to stop it with gun control.

Cao strongly opposes efforts to address climate change and curb greenhouse gas emissions, even as rising temperatures are already causing dangerous sea-level rise along the Virginia coast. He suggested in a 2022 debate that climate change was not really a problem for the United States and should be solved by making other countries reduce their emissions. “Look, America has one of the cleanest, safest practices for petroleum, oil recovery and resources recovery,” he claimed.

On his website, he says that climate protections should be left up to industry, a conservative policy stance that ignores industry’s role in producing greenhouse gas emissions and pollution. “American energy producers have the cleanest practices in the world, yet the Biden-Kaine administration continues to punish our domestic energy industry and force an American dependence on unclean foreign energy sources,” his website says. “The American mining industry follows regulations and focuses on protecting the land they mine.” 

Cao opposes equal rights for transgender people and supports policies that restrict the rights of the LGBTQ+ community.

In an April 2022 campaign forum, he opposed the participation of transgender athletes on sports teams that correspond with their gender identity. He also believes transgender people should not be allowed to use the bathroom that matches their identity. At the same event, he said that the military shouldn’t pay for gender-affirming care.

According to WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., Cao backed Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s proposed regulations that would require schools to out transgender kids to their parents before calling them by their requested names and pronouns, even when doing so could put the youths in danger. “That right belongs to the parents,” Cao said. “A school can’t even give a kid an aspirin, but you’re saying that school can decide what sex your child is?” Youngkin’s administration announced the finalization of the policy on Tuesday.

Despite more than $100,000 in backing from the National Republican Congressional Committee, Cao lost his 2022 House race to Wexton 53.2%-46.7%.

Cao will likely face several lesser-known Republicans for the 2024 nomination, but Republican leadership reportedly asked him to run, and he met with the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee in March.

Kaine is considered by election experts to be the favorite; however, Republicans won statewide elections in Virginia as recently as 2021.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.