Congress doesn’t seem quite sure what its job is these days. As impeachment inches forward in the House, the policy priorities that both Democrats and Republicans made central to their campaigns have succumbed to gridlock.

For Daniel Gade, that ineffective governance was the catalyst to jump into the Republican primary for the 2020 Virginia Senate race. After 25 years in the military and a career since then as an advocate, a stint in the George W. Bush White House, and, most recently, a professor at American University, Gade thinks it’s time to take his experience to Capitol Hill. As he explained over coffee in September, running for Senate is “a continuation of my decades of public service.”