Dave Brat

During an October 2018 debate, Brat characterized Spanberger as a disciple of Nancy Pelosi. Brat referred so often to Pelosi that it started to draw laughs. According to the Washington Post, a conservative estimate is that he referred to Pelosi 25 times.

In November 2017 the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported that a campaign staffer was using her personal Facebook profile to debate commenters on his Facebook posts. The woman did not identify herself as a paid campaign staffer. When asked about this, Brat said, "Her job is to clarify issues and put out my policy positions from my vantage point. It’s not to argue with people." Brat had another run-in with social media on March 1, 2018, when it was discovered that his campaign Twitter account had "liked" several controversial tweets, including one that questioned whether one of the survivors of the Parkland school shooting, David Hogg, was a "crisis actor". After an outcry from concerned constituents, Brat's office issued a statement that attributed the likes to a campaign staffer who believed they were logged into their personal account. He also said that safeguards were being put in place to ensure it did not happen again.

During his 2018 reelection campaign Brat falsely claimed that The Washington Post fact-checker had given "four Pinocchios" to his opponent Abigail Spanberger for claims she made about Brat's position on health care. The Washington Post fact-checker asked Brat to comment on his misrepresentation but did not receive a response.

Brat ran for a third term in 2018 against Henrico native and former CIA officer Abigail Spanberger. The race was rated "Safe Republican" by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report until October 13, 2017, when Cook updated the rating to "Likely Republican." On February 8, 2018, the rating was changed to "Leans Republican," and on July 7, 2018, the race was rated a "Toss-up."

Brat faced heckling by 150 people at a "raucous" town hall meeting in the small town of Blackstone, Virginia, on February 21, 2017. Some questioned him on the border wall, health care, and President Trump's policies. Several of Brat's supporters left the meeting early. He was criticized for not meeting with his constituents because he claimed there were paid protesters among them. On January 28, at a meeting held at Hanover Tavern with "the GOP-friendly audience", he had lamented that, "[s]ince Obamacare and these issues have come up, the women are in my grill no matter where I go. They come up — 'When is your next town hall?' And believe me, it’s not to give positive input." He also urged his fellow conservatives at the Tavern to write newspaper articles because "we’re getting hammered." Brat considered running in Virginia's 2018 Senate election.

Brat opposed the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). In March 2017 he said he opposed the initial version of the American Health Care Act, which was the GOP's replacement for Obamacare, and that he intended to vote against it in the House Budget Committee. On May 4, 2017, Brat voted to repeal Obamacare and pass the revised version of the American Health Care Act. He said the bill contained protections for preexisting conditions and would lead to lower prices; The Washington Post noted that the bill would have allowed insurers to charge higher premiums for individuals with preexisting conditions, and that an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office estimated that average health care premiums would increase as a result of the bill (more so for older Americans).

Brat supported President Trump's 2017 executive order to temporarily curtail immigration from the Muslim-majority nations of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen until better screening methods are devised. Brat said that "the temporary halt on migration from seven countries will last only a few months until we have solid vetting procedures in place" and that "these seven countries with a temporary travel ban have been identified by both the Obama administration and our intelligence agencies as being the greatest threat to our national security because they have a history of training, harboring, and exporting terrorism."

In September 2017 Brat said that Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which provided temporary stay for unauthorized immigrants brought to the United as minors, allowed minors to "bring in their entire extended family once they reach a certain status" and could bring in up to 4 million additional immigrants. PolitiFact disputed Brat's figure.

Brat defeated Democrat Eileen Bedell with 57.7% of the vote in the general election on November 8, 2016.

On January 6, 2015, Brat was one of 25 House Republicans to vote against John Boehner's reelection as Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. Boehner, who needed at least 205 votes, was reelected with 216 votes. Though Brat supported Boehner earlier, he reversed his support after the House GOP leadership did not allow him to make an amendment to block a controversial executive order signed by President Barack Obama in a spending bill.

Brat called for the National Security Agency to end bulk collection of phone records and stated his support for statutory protections for e-mail privacy. He argued that domestic intelligence activities have "spun out of control" and that "the NSA's indiscriminate collection of data on all Americans is a disturbing violation of our Fourth Amendment right to privacy." In an April 21, 2015, interview with radio talk show host Rusty Humphries, Brat claimed that the terrorist group ISIS had set up a base in Texas. "In our country it looks like we have an ISIS center in Texas now...You can't make up what a terrible problem this is." After the Texas Department of Public Safety responded that there was no substantiation for the claim, Brat's office said that he had really meant Mexico, not Texas, citing the conservative group Judicial Watch, which declined to provide any substantiation for its report.

Brat came to national prominence when he defeated House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in the district's 2014 Republican primary. Brat's primary victory over Cantor made him the first primary challenger to oust a sitting House Majority Leader since the position's creation in 1899. He lost his reelection bid in 2018 to Democrat Abigail Spanberger.

Brat's run for the House of Representatives in 2014 was notable in its lack of resources and traditional campaign tactics. In his challenge of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor for the Republican nomination, Brat was outspent by Cantor 40 to 1: Cantor spent over $5 million, while Brat raised $200,000 and did not spend all of it. Brat's primary campaign was managed by 23-year-old Zachary Werrell. An analysis of campaign filings conducted by the Center for Responsive Politics concluded that Brat did not receive any donations from political action committees (PACs), noting "it's almost impossible to profile Brat's typical donor, because he had so few." Brat's victory garnered national attention, as it was the first time a sitting House Majority Leader was defeated in his primary race since the position was created in 1899. Brat defeated Cantor by a 12-point margin.

Although the national media were shocked at Brat's victory, Richmond-area media outlets had received signs well before the primary that Cantor was in trouble. The Richmond Times-Dispatch reported two weeks before the primary that a number of Cantor's constituents felt he took them for granted. The Times-Dispatch also revealed that Cantor's attempt to brand Brat as a liberal professor actually made more people turn out for Brat. The Chesterfield Observer, a local paper serving Chesterfield County—roughly half of which is in the 7th—reported that Tea Party-aligned candidates had won several victories there, and at least one Cantor loyalist believed Tea Party supporters smelled "blood in the water." One local reporter told David Carr of The New York Times that many constituents believed Cantor was arrogant and unapproachable. Due to massive cutbacks, the race was severely underpolled by local media. Few Capitol Hill reporters were willing to go to Cantor's district for fear that they would be out of Washington if a major story broke.

According to an article in The Boston Globe, Cantor announced plans to aid Brat by resigning from the United States Congress on August 18, so that a special election for the balance of Cantor's seventh term could be held on the same day as the general election for a full two-year term. Thus the winner, in a race in which Brat was favored, would take office with two months' more seniority over other first-term Republicans elected in the 2014 midterm elections and the ability to participate in the lame-duck session of Congress.

Brat was sworn in on November 12, 2014, to finish Cantor's term. He was a member of the Freedom Caucus.

In a paper titled Is Growth Exogenous? Taking Bernanke Seriously, Brat criticized Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, asserting that Bernanke's work on economic growth overlooks religious institutions—in particular Protestant—in a country's economic growth, and that while savings rates, population growth, and human capital accumulation help drive economic growth, the larger factor is "the Protestant religious establishment", which Bernanke ignores.

Brat promised to vote against raising the debt ceiling for the first five years while he was in Congress, and attacked Cantor during the primary campaign for voting to end the federal government shutdown of 2013. Brat advocated an end to tax credits, deductions and loopholes, and called for a flatter and more efficient tax code. He opposed TARP, the Troubled Asset Relief Program of 2008, and said that, if elected, he would "vote against bills that benefit big business over small business". "I'm not against business. I'm against big business in bed with big government", he said.

In August 2011 Brat announced he was running for the Virginia House of Delegates seat for the 56th district. There was no primary, and six Republican leaders met and chose Peter Farrell as the Republican nominee for the November 2011 general election.

In 2011 Brat criticized the political right for simultaneously advancing the pursuit of individual liberty while pushing laws restricting abortion, gay rights and gambling, and the political left for simultaneously supporting progressive liberal individualism while coercing others to "fund every social program under the sun". Brat's website said he supported "the life of every child, both born and unborn."

From 2010 to 2012 Brat headed Randolph-Macon's BB&T Moral Foundations of Capitalism program, one of 60 similar programs and chairs in the philosophy and economics departments at United States universities devoted to the study of capitalism and morality, endowed by the BB&T Corporation.

Brat faced Democratic nominee Jack Trammell, another professor at Randolph-Macon, and James Carr, the Libertarian candidate, in the November general election. Brat was favored because of the 7th's significant Republican leaning (the district has a Cook Partisan Voting Index of R+10, showing it to be the most Republican district in eastern Virginia).

In 2006 Brat was appointed by Virginia governor Tim Kaine to the Governor's Advisory Board of Economists, a position he continues to hold. He has also served on the board of directors of the Richmond Metropolitan Authority, and on the advisory board of the Virginia Public Access Project.

From 2005 to 2011 Brat worked as a special legislative assistant to Virginia state senator Walter Stosch in the area of higher education. In 2006 he was appointed by Democratic governor Tim Kaine to serve on a bipartisan economic advisory council. He was later reappointed by Republican Governor Bob McDonnell.

According to Kevin Roose in a New York Magazine article, Brat "sees free-market economics as being intricately linked to ethics and faith and he makes the case that Adam Smith's invisible hand theory, should be seen in the context of Christianity". Furthering the central theme of Max Weber's seminal book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Brat argues in his 2004 paper Economic Growth and Institutions: The Rise and Fall of the Protestant Ethic? that "institutions such as religion, democracy and government anti-diversion policies all significantly enhance a country's long-run economic performance," and concludes that "the religion variable may be the strongest ex ante, exogenous institutional variable in the literature."

After working for Arthur Andersen and as a consultant for the World Bank, in 1996 Brat joined the faculty of Randolph–Macon College, where he served as chair of the department of economics and taught courses including "Britain in the International Economy", "International Economic Development", and "Business Ethics".

Brat moved to Virginia in 1996 with his wife, Laura. They live in Glen Allen, a suburb of Richmond. They have two children.

A court-ordered redistricting significantly changed the 7th's configuration. It lost its share of Richmond to the neighboring 4th District; the 7th and its predecessors had included all or part of Richmond for over a century (it had been numbered as the 3rd District before 1993). It also lost Hanover County to the 1st District.

Brat earned a B.A. in business administration from Hope College in 1986, a master's degree in divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1990 and a Ph.D. in economics from American University in 1995.

David Alan Brat (born July 27, 1964) is an American academic and politician who is the dean of the Liberty University School of Business. A member of the Republican Party, he served as the U.S. Representative for Virginia's 7th congressional district from 2014 to 2019.

David Alan Brat was born in Detroit, Michigan, on July 27, 1964. His father, Paul, was a doctor of internal medicine; his mother, Nancy, was employed as a social worker in Alma, Michigan, where he was raised. His family moved from Alma to Minnesota when David, the oldest of three boys, was in junior high. Brat graduated from Park Center Senior High School in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota.