An “America First” pro-Second Amendment Democrat mounting an upstart Senate run is excoriating his own state party over its “morally offensive” gerrymandering gambit, gun control and a host of other issues.
Mark Moran, 34, a former Wall Street investment banker and reality TV star who describes himself as “Virginia & America First” in his X bio, is challenging Democratic Virginia Sen. Mark Warner in the party’s open Aug. 4 primary. The candidate told the Daily Caller News Foundation in an interview that the “reactionary” Virginia Democratic Party is “completely wrong” in its support for restrictive gun laws and a proposed, lopsided House map that would likely flip four seats blue in the midterms.
Moran called it “absolute tyranny” that the state Democratic Party, Gov. Abigail Spanberger and one of the gerrymander’s architects — Democratic State Sen. L. Louise Lucas — “uses [President] Donald Trump as an excuse for authoritarianism.”
“I try to boil everything down to principles of fairness, that when you look at the gerrymandered map, it is so morally offensive to anyone,” he told the DCNF regarding the Spanberger-backed redistricting amendment, which seeks to change Virginia’s House delegation from six Democrats and five Republicans to 10 Democrats and only one Republican.
If the map is enacted, Democrats will likely hold 91% of the state’s congressional seats — even though under 52% of Virginians backed Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.
The state’s voters will decide the gerrymander’s fate at the polls on April 21 — and Moran has publicly confirmed he will vote “no.” Warner, meanwhile, has indicated he “strongly” supports the redistricting amendment, which he called “temporary” and suggested is a way to fight back against Trump-backed GOP-friendly redraws in red states such as Texas.
In a March 23 post to X, Moran blasted the plan as “extremely anti-democratic.”
Lucas, the 82-year-old state lawmaker behind the push for the 10-1 Democratic gerrymander, responded to his post the following day writing, “If you want to oppose redistricting you picked the wrong primary to run in.” She added that she supports Warner in the Senate race and that “Anyone against our redistricting efforts to stand up to Donald Trump doesn’t share our values as Democrats.”
I’m going to say this despite what it will do to me politically – I think the Virginia redistricting is extremely anti-democratic and that it is a reactionary policy to Donald Trump that was created by DC consultants…
In 2020, 66% of Virginians voted for bipartisan maps…the…
— Mark Moran for U.S. Senate (@itsmarkmoran) March 23, 2026
Moran called the fact that the map would put heavily Republican areas “90 minutes outside of Richmond” in the same district as “one of the wealthiest, if not the wealthiest, neighborhoods of” the Washington suburb of Arlington “totally preposterous.”
“If we’re saying that this is fair because we have to fight back against Donald Trump. OK, well, one wrong plus one wrong doesn’t make a right,” the candidate told the DCNF. “It’s a reactionary move.”
“The Democratic Party, and specifically the Virginia Democratic Party, fails because they don’t lead with ideas. They lead with reactionary responses to Donald Trump,” he continued, calling his state’s leading Democrats “a bunch of career politicians who will never get anywhere close to the executive branch and work together essentially in coordination.”
“Virginia is the birthplace of revolutionary thought that starts with [John] Locke, and the Enlightenment went to [George] Mason and [Thomas] Jefferson, and now we’re led by these people who distort and manipulate or create whatever rules they can to gain control,” Moran added. “That’s just as tyrannical as what anyone on the left will say Donald Trump is doing.”
In addition to the gerrymandering amendment, the candidate also bucked his party on the Second Amendment and opposed a sweeping gun control bill passed by the Virginia State House of Delegates.
“The Second Amendment isn’t about hunting. It’s about power…the people’s power,” Moran’s campaign website states. “It’s the final check on a government that seeks to control its citizens. It’s exactly what Jefferson warned us about.”
The Democratic challenger told the DCNF that his “knowledge and understanding” of the issue “has significantly advanced since I had a personal security threat around the beginning of this campaign.”
Since the establishment is already mad at me, here’s another truth…Virginia Democrats are completely wrong on the Second Amendment.
After facing a personal safety issue, I got a gun.
It made me realize how extreme our party’s stance has become. Dan Helmer’s (loser) July 1st… https://t.co/yP7hIMEG9J
Should Virginia voters reject the proposed gerrymandered House map?— Mark Moran for U.S. Senate (@itsmarkmoran) March 24, 2026
“Once that happens to you, you really start to understand the intent and the reason we have the Second Amendment,” he added.
“After facing a personal safety issue, I got a gun. It made me realize how extreme our party’s stance has become,” Moran wrote in a March 24 post to X. “The founders wrote the 2A to protect us from tyranny…whether that tyranny comes from Donald Trump or a state legislature trying to disarm you.”
In his interview with the DCNF, the upstart Democrat singled out the House-passed bill’s sponsor, Democratic Virginia State Del. Dan Helmer, noting that there is a “congressional district in this redistricting literally created for him.” Critics have pointed out that the proposed gerrymandered district Helmer is running in resembles a lobster.
Along with Lucas, the delegate is regarded as one of the key architects of the proposed map up for vote in April, although he recused himself from the actual drawing of the districts, The New York Times reported.
“Dan Helmer’s (loser) July 1st ban literally classifies regular handguns as ‘assault firearms’ so the government can take them away,” Moran wrote in his March 24 social media post.
In 2013, during his first Senate term, Warner voted against a so-called “assault weapons ban.” However, he stated five years later that he regretted the vote and has since supported and initiated gun control legislation.
Moran, who previously had a career as an investment banker on Wall Street, also told the DCNF that he thinks the U.S. is becoming an “asset stripped corporation” where “moneyed institutions are more dangerous than standing armies,” as Thomas Jefferson had warned.
“We’re fighting wars for other countries that we cannot afford, and we’re sending our sons and daughters to die for other countries while we become poorer and poorer as a nation,” he said. “I cannot help but think that it is by design and that we have been just too dumb to realize it, that we have oversight to understand the larger plan that our enemies have against us, and it’s to destabilize, to dehumanize and to devalue us as people.”
“They have captured our political class through their lobbyists and through their donors, and that donor system we have has led to it that you have to be part of the system,” Moran told the DCNF. “You have to accept money from people who will get you, as a politician, to change your views. And that is what’s led us here, now to the point where we look at it, we have all these problems.”
He said that it “infuriates” him when he sees more Ukraine flags than U.S. flags “in front of mansions” in some parts of Virginia.
“It shows me traitors to this country who, through the military-industrial complex, ripped it off,” Moran said.
The candidate also believes his experience as a contestant on the HBO Max reality dating show “FBoy Island” has uniquely prepared him for his run for office in the current era.
“It always makes me laugh when people think Donald Trump is dumb. Donald Trump understood the power of the medium of reality TV earlier than anyone else, and he saw that to have any sway over the American populace, you had to control the hearts and minds … of the American people,” he told the DCNF. “This is a concept that goes back to Thomas Jefferson.”
“I’ve always known that I would [run for office], and in looking at reality TV, I saw an opportunity to learn firsthand this … is the only medium right now, aside from social media, that can capture the attention of over 50% of Americans. Fox News can’t do that. CNN can’t do that, but reality TV can,” he said. “The Kardashians saw that. What you learned is you’re essentially a caricature of yourself.”
“You play an aggrandized version of yourself, which Trump does masterfully,” Moran added. “And why people love him is he is so unapologetically American. And that is the thing that people come to love about certain reality TV individuals, whether it’s the Kardashians or it’s “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City,” all of this that they’re just themselves, and they don’t apologize for it.”
Moran competed on the first season of the dating show, hosted by comedian Nikki Glaser, in which two groups of men, “FBoys” and “Nice Guys,” vie for the hearts of women. Moran was one of the Nice Guys.
Since Virginia does not have party registration, self-identified independents and Republicans can vote in the primary election in which Moran is running.
“I’m just sick of these people who come into Virginia, like Spanberger, who’s from New Jersey … who do not understand what this Commonwealth has been and what it should be, and who view it as a weak, opportunistic place to enact their radical agendas,” Moran told the DCNF. “And I want to stand against that.”
A spokesperson for Warner did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
(Featured Image Media Credit: Screenshot/YouTube/Mark Moran for U.S. Senate)
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