Early voting is now underway in Virginia. For more information on early voting or who’s on your ballot, see our Voter Guide.
All indications point in favor of incumbent Democrat Tim Kaine retaining his Senate seat.
Kaine has outpaced his Republican challenger Hung Cao in fundraising, having raised nearly $16 million to Cao’s $3.1 million. Polls consistently show Kaine ahead by at least 10 percentage points, and the University of Virginia Center for Politics’ Sabato’s Crystal Ball describes the race as “Safe Democrat.”
But both candidates wish to remind voters that, in the most recent statewide election, Virginians voted in Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a political newcomer, over Terry McAuliffe, a former governor well-known in Virginia politics.
“The margin was super tight, less than 64,000 votes, but I’ve long been a student of Virginia politics and close elections are what we do here,” Kaine said in a campaign fundraising email.
Backed by Donald Trump at the top of the ticket, Cao, a Vietnam refugee and retired U.S. Navy captain, believes he will become the senator to flip the Senate red: “President Trump and I will win in November, we will secure the border, we will protect Social Security, and we will save America. I spent 25 years fighting for this country, and I’m not done.”
Here’s a look at both candidates: 
Tim Kaine
Although he may be most famous for a failed 2016 vice presidential bid, Kaine has never lost an election in Virginia.
Now running for his third term as senator, Kaine served as Virginia’s governor from 2006 to 2010. He also was a member of the Richmond City Council and then served as Richmond mayor before his first statewide election — to lieutenant governor, in 2002.
Originally from St. Paul, Minnesota, Kaine grew up in Kansas and graduated from the University of Missouri and Harvard Law School. At Harvard, he met fellow law student Anne Holton, a Roanoke native whose father, Linwood Holton, served as Republican governor of Virginia in the early 1970s.
Kaine and Holton married in Richmond in 1984 and have lived there since. The couple have three children.
In a recent interview, Kaine said that because of visiting his wife’s family and his love of the outdoors, he is familiar with all of Southwest and Southside Virginia.
“I have a real personal connection to Southwest Virginia because my wife grew up in Roanoke and her family on her dad’s side was from Big Stone Gap,” he said. “So long before I ran for Richmond City Council in 1994, I was coming to Big Stone, Roanoke, Saint Paul, Abingdon, Lynchburg — members of her family live in all those communities. Although I live in Richmond, I feel very close to Southwest Virginia.”
Kaine has written about his passion for the Virginia outdoors in his book “Walk Ride Paddle” — “a remarkable three-year journey that got me even more connected, I think, to Virginia,” he said.
“I love the outdoors in Virginia anywhere, but, you know, Southwest Virginia is particularly beautiful,” he said. “We went to bat for a project that got Floyd $9.5 million to help preserve Buffalo Mountain, which is in a beautiful natural area preserve. So I’m always trying to look for ways to enhance local projects.”
Sometimes he must deal with challenges posed to the region, like the black lung benefit program that was not fiscally sustainable, he said. “We fixed that in the Inflation Reduction Act,” he said. “The coal miners’ pension and health care plans for retirees were going bust. We fixed both of those. So sometimes it’s fixing a problem, but other times it’s trying to put the region on the map with exciting news like preserving Buffalo Mountain.”
He touted other wins, including a Volvo plant expansion in Pulaski County with an $8 million federal investment, matched by a company investment of $208 million, to further the electrification of over-the-road vehicles.
The Coalfields Expressway linking U.S. 23 in Virginia to major highways in surrounding states, is a large, bipartisan, ongoing project that has received more funding recently due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“To my way of thinking, the biggest challenge in Southwest Virginia, once you get significantly west of I-81 is just connecting communities,” he said. “It’s an economic development challenge, and it’s a challenge for everyday folks trying to go from one community to the next or to get to work. And the Coalfields Expressway, I think, is really going to make the area more attractive for investment and make people’s everyday lives easier.”
He first heard about the Coalfields Expressway when he was running for lieutenant governor. “It had long been planned, but no shovels in the ground,” he said. “But the project has taken off, and two parts of federal money have helped. In the initial CARES Act, and then later the American Rescue Plan, states received significant funding that they could use for economic development projects. Obviously, there was not just a public health emergency, but there was also an economic challenge. And since a lot of that money was one-time money, elected officials decided to use some of this money for capital projects.”
In addition, the November infrastructure bill increased transportation money coming to the state, some of which has gone to building the Coalfields Expressway.
“I was a strong supporter and worked on the infrastructure bill. It’s a bill where we provided funding for six years,” he said. “We’re going to have to do a reauthorization sometime in 2027. And I’m definitely going to do all I can to make sure that we reauthorize the bill so that those additional funds keep coming.” He projects that the expressway will be complete before 2030.
Access to high-speed internet is another significant challenge for rural Virginia, Kaine believes.
“The infrastructure bill provided funding for Virginia for rural broadband. Although the state-level investments through the tobacco fund have helped put us ahead of some states, there’s still a need to close the gap,” he said. The infrastructure bill guaranteed every state half of $1 billion for broadband, he said.
“But Virginia has a really good program and competed hard, and we received word that we would get $1.2 billion to use for broadband, and the state is now implementing that,” he said. “And some communities are now saying, ‘We are 100% broadband accessible’ — King and Queen County in eastern Virginia and Floyd County in Southwest.”
Another challenge, not specific to rural Virginia, is finding high-quality and affordable housing for the region’s workforce. He said the infrastructure bill, along with others he has worked on in recent years, will help run utilities to development sites so that building housing is cost-effective.
Another issue plaguing the area is the ongoing opioid crisis, Kaine said he finds hope in stopping the import of fentanyl at the southern border.
“Most fentanyl comes in on trucks,” he said. “It’s because they know they’re not going to get inspected because we don’t have the technology to inspect every vehicle crossing the border without completely jamming commerce. But we now do have the technology. It is being piloted at a busy border crossing in Brownsville and McAllen, Texas. It was exciting to go see that in operation and see how quickly you can screen every vehicle that comes in. We need to make a bigger investment in that technology at all the border crossings.”
On the treatment side, Kaine said the key is training more people to work in the behavioral health and substance abuse field. “We had a shortage of behavioral health workers before COVID. Then COVID made it even more challenging because we lost folks through burnout. So we need to really dramatically increase the training of behavioral health professionals,” he said.
“Southwest Virginia, I know it well,” he said. “A couple of weeks back I played at the Floyd Country Store Friday night and at the Galax Fiddlers Convention the next day. My wife’s a great flat-footer, so we have a lot of fun when we come in.”
Asked about the part of the job that brings him the most joy, Kaine said he loves being in Washington and learning every time he sits down in a meeting. He also enjoys traveling around the state.
“If I’m playing music with a band, if I’m sitting down around the table with local officials to talk about an economic development project, if I’m celebrating like I’ll be this afternoon at the Volvo plant — and they’re going to let me drive one of the electric trucks, too — it’s really cool that being in Virginia with Virginians is that part of the job that makes me joyful,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter whether I’m in a part of the state that votes for me or not. Some of the counties in Appalachia might be the ones where I get the lowest vote totals, and yet people always say at the end of meetings that they appreciate you and they mean it. And my staff always fights to come with me when I come to Southwest Virginia because, in some ways, they’re the most fun trips we have.” 
Hung Cao
With his run for the Senate, Hung Cao is making his first bid for statewide public office.
He ran and lost to Democrat Jennifer Wexton in his 2022 bid to represent Virginia’s 10th Congressional District, but by moving the needle toward red in a reliably blue district, Cao has been the Republican frontrunner for Senate since the beginning of primary season.
“We moved the 10th District by 13%,” he said on a Loudoun County debate stage. “This is where Joe Biden won by 19 percentage points and we lost by only 6%.”
During the primaries, Cao received the most media attention because of a Federal Election Commission complaint on his super-PAC and because of his reaction to the resulting news coverage in the Staunton News Leader and elsewhere, which has been to attack the messenger and call Staunton “podunk.” He also told an interviewer that it would be “just ridonkulus” for him to make the hours-long drive to visit Abingdon.
Cao would only answer questions from Cardinal if they were emailed but has uploaded answers to questions in our Voter Guide.
In that email exchange, when asked what issues specifically impacting rural Virginians’ abilities to thrive would he champion if elected, Cao highlighted border security among his top priorities.
“We need to secure our border,” he said. “I will work to secure our wide-open southern border so illicit drugs such as Fentanyl do not kill our youth. Everything that’s going wrong in our country stems from our open border. We can address so many problems by simply refusing to spend American tax dollars on illegal aliens. We need to send them back where they came from and prioritize those who have been waiting patiently in line. My family waited seven years, and the last thing that hung over my father’s bed was his naturalization certificate. That’s how proud he was to be an American.”
Cao immigrated to the United States from Vietnam with his family in 1975, and he says he understands the work and the goals of immigrants, and that his is a story that could only happen in America.
“I was a refugee from Communism at four years old. America literally saved my life. I spent 25 years in the Navy trying to repay my debt,” he said by email. “Let me be very clear to everyone who comes here: Don’t ask for the American Dream if you’re not willing to obey American Laws and embrace our American culture, because I did. In fact, I loved this country so much that I wrote a blank check up to and including my life to defend it.”
Cao grew up in Virginia and graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria. From the U.S. Naval Academy, he was commissioned as a special operations officer doing explosive ordinance disposal and deep sea diving. He served with special operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia.
“Veterans issues will always be near and dear to my heart. Our service members and veterans deserve to have access to appropriate and timely healthcare, and mental health services,” Cao said by email. “The idea that we are feeding and clothing illegal aliens while 80,000 of our veterans are homeless on the streets makes my blood boil.”
Upon returning from overseas, Cao worked on Navy budget matters at the Pentagon with the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force. He received his master’s degree in physics from Naval Postgraduate School, with fellowships from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.
Cao lives in Purcellville. He and his wife have five children and, now, one grandchild.
“April and I welcomed our first grandchild early this morning. Life is precious, and my granddaughter is one more reason to fight for our country,” Cao said in a social media post last week.
Cao describes himself as a pro-life Christian who believes the issue of abortion should be handled by the states. He said he is supportive of the fertility treatments that his own family has benefited from. “I will work to ensure families can receive IVF treatments to build and grow strong, healthy families,” he said.
He said parental roles are critical in improving education.
“Schools need to focus on reading, writing and arithmetic and be transparent so parents can be more involved in their children’s education,” he said. “I will work to ensure parents have a voice in their child’s education and they can choose from school options. We need to put families first and that begins with putting Americans first.”
Along with border security, Cao listed a number of ways that “putting Americans first” would help Southwest and Southside Virginia, including energy independence, keeping manufacturing jobs and trade policies.
“We should be not only energy independent but energy dominant. We should not be buying oil from people who hate us,” he said. He calls Southwest Virginia an energy hub and mentions his Navy experience with nuclear energy, calling it a safe and inexpensive option.
“We need a diversity in energy. We rely on coal and hydroelectric. The pushes for solar and wind are premature because of the deficits in energy storage capabilities. Investments in nuclear energy, especially in Small Modular Reactors, provide safe, clean and cheap energy to the Commonwealth. As senator, I would help the governor push SMRs [small modular nuclear reactors] and help streamline the lengthy certification process through the Department of Energy.”
He calls for increased jobs creation, specifically in manufacturing, and the need to “stand up to unfair trade practices by other countries, especially China, even if those other countries threaten to retaliate. A country is more than just the sum of our GDP.”
