Leslie Byrne was the first person to represent Virginia’s 11th District when the seat was created after the 1990 election. She won in 1992, thanks largely to a strong anti-Republican mood, and lost in 1994 to Tom Davis.
Now she want’s back in Congress:
Democrat Leslie L. Byrne, the first woman to represent Virginia in Congress, said today she has filed papers to run for the U.S. House in a seat she held until she was defeated more than a decade ago.
U.S. Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R), who recently announced he would not run for U.S. Senate, has not yet said whether he will run for re-election in Virginia’s 11th District, which includes parts of Fairfax and Prince William counties.
“When I decided to do this, I decided to do this based on what I could bring to the race and to the 11th district,” she said today.
Byrne, who hopes to work on consumer, budget and environmental issues, won the seat in 1992, but lost to Davis in 1994 in a national Republican landslide. She narrowly lost the race for lieutenant governor two years ago.
So the question is — will Davis run against for re-election and set the stage for a rematch, or will he step down and virtually guarantee that the seat gets handed to a Democrat ?
As much as I dislike Tom Davis given his record over the past 13 years, I dislike Leslie Byrne even more — though I’ll admit that part of that is because I worked on the campaign of the guy she beat back in 1992.
