The Democratic Party is pushing to field more veterans as candidates in hopes of appealing to skeptical voters.
Rebecca Bennett was addressing about 30 voters, many of them veterans she knew from her work in the community, in a gaming store owned by one of her supporters that featured bookshelves lined with board games such as “Eldritch Horror” and “Lost Ruins of Arnak.”
Bennett was trying to explain what serving in Congress has in common with her service as a Navy helicopter pilot. “If you don’t land exactly where you need to, you’re going to crash and people are going to die,” she said. “The stakes were life and death then, and they are life and death now.”
Bennett is one of a crop of military veterans that Democrats are urgently recruiting to run for Congress in 2026. Party leaders fret that a large number of voters — conservative, rural, traditionalist, White — have been written off by Democrats, and they hope veterans can persuade some of these voters to at least consider them again.
