Rep. Jennifer Wexton announces retirement for dire health reason

Rep. Jennifer Wexton (D-Va.), representing a district she flipped in the 2018 Midterms, will not seek reelection in 2024. Her reason: she has lately received a diagnosis of a dire – and terminal – neurological condition.

Jennifer Wexton declares: “I’m going to die.”

Jennifer Wexton, 55, made her announcement in an interview with The Washington Post, as The Western Journal quotes it. She had acknowledged suffering from Parkinson’s Disease, but that turned out to be far too mild. In fact she suffers from progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare and serious disorder for which neither treatment nor cure exists. The National Institutes of Health emphasizes that nothing known today can slow or stop this disease.

In the interview, she said that when her doctor confirmed the new, more dire, diagnosis, she asked whether she could run for reelection. Said he, “Why would you want to?” She later acknowledged, in a text to the Post, that the rigors of campaigning would have killed her.

Virginia’s Tenth District has swung gradually from Republican to Democratic and back and forth, largely on the power of incumbency of various people who have represented the District. Demographics – meaning the moving-in of federal employees, have “left-ized” the District in recent years. The District includes Loudoun County, notorious for controversies involving transgender-identifying youth in its public schools. Their superintendent of schools lost his job nine months ago for failure to protect against sexual assault in that context.

Wexton flipped the District in the 2018 Midterm, probably on anti-Trump strength. She won election in 2020 and again in 2022, but her last reelection was by a margin 3 percent closer. In her text to the Post she described her district as “tough” to campaign in.

Electoral complications

On crime, guns, health care, immigration, labor law, and Alphabet Soup affairs, she has taken consistently leftist positions.

Her announcement makes Virginia’s Tenth District an open seat, for the first time since the minor readjustment of the district following the 2020 Census. Thus far no one is even speculating on who will take the nominations in the Republican or Democratic Primaries.