Cao pulled off a stunning upset in the May primary, winning the right to challenge Democrat Jennifer Wexton in the general election.
Hung Cao has issued a warning to Democrats: He is President Biden and House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s “worst nightmare.”
Cao, a Republican who is running for Congress in Virginia’s tenth congressional district, told National Review in a recent interview that as a Vietnamese refugee, he easily busts the myth that the GOP is the party of racism, bigotry, and white supremacy.
“I don’t meet their narrative and everything they try to call us,” said Cao, who served 25 years as a commissioned Navy officer. “I’m a patriot. I love this country. I’ve done everything to protect this country and its Constitution, and they’re basically destroying everything that I believe in.”
Frustrated that Cao defies their stereotypical image of Republicans, progressives will instead attack him as “white-adjacent,” Cao predicted.
Nonetheless, Cao won an eleven-way, party-run firehouse primary with 53 percent of the vote in an area where 44 percent of voting-age people are minorities, including 17 percent who are Asian American, according to the Washington Post. Immigrants make up around 27 percent of the total population in Northern Virginia, according to a 2019 Commonwealth Institute report.
He feels he was able to reach voters in the primary and show them that he is “the face of the new Republican Party.”
“I mean I came to this country for the same reasons, right? We came for freedom, we came for opportunity, for education, we valued family. I think the [far Left] has really destroyed all that — everything that it means to be an American,” he said.
Cao, a political newcomer, pulled off a stunning upset in the May primary, defeating Prince William Board of County Supervisors member Jeanine Lawson for the right to challenge Representative Jennifer Wexton, a Democrat, in the November general election.
Lawson, the most well-funded candidate in the race, secured just 34 percent of the vote in the primary, which used a ranked-choice voting system.
The tenth district is home to Clarke, Frederick, and Loudoun counties, as well as parts of Fairfax County and Prince William County. Republicans are hopeful they can flip the seat after Republican governor Glenn Youngkin lost the redrawn district by less than two points last year.
Cao said he was drawn to run for Congress after watching the United States’ botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. Having served there until January 2021, he says it “kind of broke my heart” watching it fall apart.
“You wonder, ‘What was all this for?’” he said. “What really struck me was the visual of mothers handing babies to Marines, just for . . . opportunity for the kids.”
Cao, who was born in Vietnam and fled the country before the fall of Saigon in 1975, said the scenes from Afghanistan reminded him of his own childhood, when his mom sewed money and little notes into his clothes saying, “Please take care of my child in case we get separated,” while fleeing.
While Cao felt a fire in his belly to run, his wife initially urged him not to. She had a change of heart, however, after watching their friends get kicked out of the military for defying Covid-19 vaccine mandates. Cao said while he is not an anti-vaxxer, he is a supporter of religious freedom and found the purge of Christian service members worrisome.
Now, Cao says Congress should remain focused on getting the economy back on track as Americans contend with soaring inflation and record-high gas prices.
“When you go to the gas pump there’s a selection switch for credit or debit, but there’s no selection switch ‘We’re Democrat or Republican,’ So we’re all paying the same price of that policy,” he said of Biden’s inflationary spending.
As a lawmaker, he would also urge Congress to focus on securing the southern border in the name of national defense, given that an open border allows not only migrants from the south to enter the U.S., but special-interest aliens — people who potentially pose a national security risk to the U.S. or its interests — from countries like Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Nigeria, Russia, and China.
“They’re coming across this country and doing nefarious things,” he said.
Cao added that the U.S. must work to keep China in check, calling the Chinese Communist Party the “biggest threat to this country.” He expressed concern about Chinese spies doing research at top American universities and the dangers that a potential Chinese takeover of Taiwan would pose, given that the country now accounts for 92 percent of the world’s most advanced semiconductor manufacturing capacity.
Education, which likely proved to be a defining factor in Virginia’s gubernatorial election last year, is also a top priority for Cao. The father of five homeschooled children said Democrats are “destroying education” and “teaching garbage.”
“They’re trying to indoctrinate [students] in social issues — that’s not what school is,” he said. “School is there to educate children in science, technology, engineering, math. That’s what we need to be concentrating on. Not all these weird one-off social issues.”
He has also closely watched a battle over admissions requirements unfold at his alma mater, the elite Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology.
Fairfax County Public Schools eliminated the school’s entrance exam and its $100 application fee in an attempt to diversify the student body at the magnet program. The new process evaluates students on “experience factors,” including socioeconomic background.
However, opponents argued the changes to the admissions process discriminated against Asian-American students and lowered standards at the school, which is often ranked No. 1 in the country.
In June 2021, the first class of applicants admitted under the new system included far fewer Asian students than has historically been typical: 55 percent rather than 70 percent.
Coalition for TJ, a group of parents, filed a lawsuit challenging the new admissions policy, though the Supreme Court chose to leave the new system in place in April.
Cao predicts the situation at Thomas Jefferson will be a major motivator among Asian Americans in the district.
“I mean, every parent should have a say in the way their kids are educated,” he said — a concept that is apparently controversial among some Democrats. (Democrat Terry McAuliffe infamously argued during a Virginia gubernatorial debate last year that parents should not tell schools what to teach.)
Cao says his primary win, as well as the 2021 elections for governor and lieutenant governor, show Virginians are “tired of the same old.”
“They don’t want political insiders, they want outsiders to come in and get a fresh set of eyes and fresh approach to solving the problems that we have as a country.”
Though he is a political newcomer, he believes the leadership skills he sharpened over more than two decades in the Navy would make him an effective lawmaker.
“You have to build the consensus, you have to build a coalition, and you have to motivate people to do things” in the military, he said. “There’s 435 members in Congress and how do you build that coalition? How do you build that and get the backing of not just your peers, but also people from the other side, as well as your constituents.”
“I want to use what I’ve learned in the military about leading people and making hard decisions and bring that to the fight,” Cao added.