U.S. Rep. Jen Kiggans, a Republican, and former Rep. Elaine Luria, a Democrat, recently traded barbs over congressional stock trading. Kiggans said Luria unfairly enriched herself while in Congress; Luria said that claim was wrong and that she left with less wealth than when she started.

But both candidates, who meet in a rematch for Virginia’s 2nd District seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, are wealthy. They could be insulated from the effects of the affordability crisis, which has been a heavy talking point this campaign season.

Financial disclosure statements show Luria left Congress with assets valued between $3.4 million and $12.9 million. As a candidate in 2017, those disclosures show that she had between $3.8 million and $13.6 million. That means that her overall wealth declined over the time she was in Congress from 2018 to early 2023.

But in 2021, Luria’s wealth climbed dramatically — her assets were valued between $7.7 million and $36.4 million. That growth was driven by an apparent increase in value of stock Luria owned in Nvidia, a technology company that develops chips.

Members of Congress are required to disclose their assets in ranges of dollar amounts — as the numbers get higher, the ranges get wider. For example, in 2021, Luria had stock in Idera, a database management company, valued somewhere between $1 and $1,000. The same year, she had stock in Uber valued between $250,001 and $500,000 and in Netflix between $500,001 and $1 million.

For most of her time in Congress, her stock in NVIDIA was worth between $1,000,001 and $5 million, but in 2021, it was valued between $5,000,001 and $25 million. The broad ranges make it difficult to assess just how much that value spiked, and the Luria campaign did not provide a specific number. By the time she exited Congress, the range for Nvidia had fallen once again to between $1 and $5 million.

The Kiggans campaign was critical of those investments, and noted that Kiggans does not own or trade individual stocks.

“Luria also invested about $25 million in the chip company Nvidia before voting for semiconductor legislation that provided billions of dollars to support chip manufacturing,” Kiggans campaign spokesperson Calvin Moore said in a statement. “So she handed massive subsidies to industries she had millions invested in and stood to benefit from. That was up 149% within a year of passage.”

Luria did vote for the CHIPS and Science Act in 2022, which included $39 billion in subsidies for chip manufacturing in the US. She held stock in NVIDIA in 2017 before she was elected to Congress. The company is involved in designing, not manufacturing chips, though the industries are related.

Today, Luria holds stock in those companies and others, and her assets total somewhere between $14.5 million and $50.6 million.

Meanwhile, recent financial disclosure statements put Kiggans’ assets between $1.9 million and $7.4 million.

Rank-and-file members of Congress make $174,000 a year, a rate unchanged since 2009. The median household income in Hampton Roads is $90,023.

“There is so much wealth in Congress that it is sort of normalized,” said Alex Keena, a political science professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. “You either have to be rich, or have a lot of rich friends, or say things that rich people like in order to be viable in running for Congress.”

More than half of the members of Congress are millionaires. A poll from earlier this year found that 80% of Americans think members of Congress are unable to get anything done because they focus on enriching themselves and their donors.

The Virginian-Pilot and Daily Press asked both candidates to describe in broad strokes what their expenses look like generally — how much they spend on things like groceries and gas — and whether they were worried about politicians being insulated from the affordability crisis. Neither campaign addressed those questions.

“Jen Kiggans has been caught lying about Elaine in a sad and desperate attempt to distract voters from her record of voting with Donald Trump 100% of the time to drive up the cost of gas, groceries, and health care,” a spokesperson for the Luria campaign said in a statement. “Meanwhile, during her time in office, Jen Kiggans has seen her net worth skyrocket by as much as 150% and has stayed silent as Donald Trump makes billions.

“Virginians simply can’t afford Kiggans’ lies, corruption, and extremist agenda.”

Keena said congressional wealth is starting to move the needle as an issue.

“I think there’s growing sentiment that our policies, our national legislature, our Congress is really being taken over by wealthy interests, and people are starting to realize this in ways that previous generations perhaps didn’t fully grasp,” Keena said. Kiggans and Luria said they would support legislation that bans congressional stock trading. For Luria, that’s a policy reversal — she told the Washington Post that “in light of the blatant corruption coming out of this White House, it’s incumbent on members of Congress to set an example.”

“I think that both the Republicans and the Democrats know that this is a liability, it makes them look bad,” Keena said. “So many members of Congress are trading stocks, and the corruption is so widespread that it really threatens both parties.”

Independent candidates Matt Baker and Bishop Staten are also running for the 2nd District seat. Early voting runs through Oct. 31, and Election Day is Nov. 3.

______

©2026 The Virginian-Pilot. Visit pilotonline.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.