In December 2016, Riggleman filed papers to seek the Republican nomination for governor of Virginia in the 2017 gubernatorial election. His opponents in the Republican primary were former President George W. Bush counselor and Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie, Prince William County Board of Supervisors chairman Corey Stewart, and state Senator Frank Wagner of Virginia Beach. Riggleman suspended his campaign on March 16, 2017.
Riggleman had expressed interest in running for Governor in 2021 as an independent or third-party candidate, citing his belief that the Republican Party of Virginia is broken.
In the 2018 elections, Riggleman was the Republican nominee for the United States House of Representatives election for Virginia’s 5th congressional district. He defeated Cynthia Dunbar, who had lost the Republican nomination in the 6th district just weeks before, in the final round of voting to win the nomination. The Republican incumbent, Tom Garrett, did not run for reelection.
In the November 2018 general election, Riggleman defeated Democratic nominee Leslie Cockburn with 53% of the vote to Cockburn’s 47%
The Rappahannock County Republican Party criticized Riggleman after he officiated a same-sex wedding between two of his friends, and in September he was censured by party officials who claimed that he had “abandoned party principles” over fiscal and immigration policy.
On September 26, 2019, Campbell County Supervisor Bob Good—who also worked as an athletics official at Liberty University—announced his intention to challenge Riggleman in the 2020 Republican primary. In his announcement, Good accused Riggleman of “betraying” the trust of conservative voters in the 5th district along with casting votes that were not in his constituency’s best interest. Riggleman secured key endorsements on the right, including from Liberty University President Jerry Falwell, Jr.
The local party leaders of the 5th Congressional District Republican Committee chose to determine the 2020 nominee for the fifth district by a convention instead of a primary election. On June 13, 2020, Good defeated Riggleman at the nominating convention with 58% of the vote to Riggleman’s 42%
Riggleman is the only member of the Republican party to speak on the House of Representatives floor against QAnon. He is a co-sponsor of 2020 US House resolution H. Res 1154 “Condemning QAnon and rejecting the conspiracy theories it promotes”. He is also one of the co-authors of the Network Contagion Research Institute (affiliated with Rutgers University) report called “THE QANON CONSPIRACY: Destroying Families, Dividing Communities, Undermining Democracy” where he wrote before the Jan 6, 2021 storming of the US Capitol “When ideas or fantasy are weaponized, there is a metamorphosis from harmless, bizarre theories to a dangerous bloom of tribalism and dehumanization of others. This bloom expands digitally from person to person, absorbing and then converting a tribe that believes alternate realities based on a directed stream of algorithmically and group targeted data, ignorant analytic white papers, memes, ideas and coded language.”
Since leaving Congress in January 2021, Riggleman has been working with experts and academics at the Network Contagion Research Institute to study disinformation and how to combat it
Disgruntled loser with TDS. The NCRI is Soros funded.
Thanks for the backstory. So he’s lying when he says, “I think the party left me some time ago,” - makes me suspicious if he was ever a sincere pubbie (we know he isn’t a conservative)?
I never got into QANON, and really have NO idea what it did or stood for..HELP??.