With Honor Action released its tracking on 9 June, current as of 1 June. It found 752 veterans running for federal office across all 50 states, up 47 percent from 513 in 2024. That beats the group’s previous high of 744 in 2022.

Inside that total sits a sharper number. Researchers identified 95 women with military backgrounds seeking House and Senate seats, against 40 in the last cycle. So the women’s figure grew by 137 percent while the overall figure grew by 47 percent. Of those 95, roughly 56 percent are Democrats and 28 percent Republicans.

Now compare that to who actually holds office. Eight women veterans serve in Congress right now. Three are Democrats and five are Republicans. The party producing most of the candidates holds the minority of the seats, which is the same pattern we found across the whole veteran field earlier this month.

In February, The 19th reported that four Democratic women veterans had formed a Signal group they call the Hell Cats, after the first women Marines of the First World War. At the time none of them had faced a primary. Since then, three have won one.

Rebecca Bennett flew Navy helicopters and still serves in the Air National Guard. She won the New Jersey seventh district primary on 2 June and faces Tom Kean Jr., who holds one of the most closely divided seats in the country.

Cait Conley graduated West Point in 2007 and spent 16 years in the Army, including combat in Iraq, before working on the National Security Council. She took the New York seventeenth on 23 June with about 49 percent against four rivals. Her opponent is Mike Lawler, who sits in a district Kamala Harris carried.

JoAnna Mendoza served in the Navy from 1994 to 1997, then the Marine Corps from 1998 to 2016, with two tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. She became the Arizona sixth district nominee on 21 July. Juan Ciscomani is the incumbent, and both parties rank the seat among the closest in the country.

Maura Sullivan is the fourth, and she has not voted yet. A Marine Corps veteran who later served as an assistant secretary at the Department of Veterans Affairs under Obama, she faces a nine-way primary in New Hampshire’s first district on 8 September.

Leela Gray is on the ballot in Florida’s thirteenth district as we publish this. She retired from the Army as a brigadier general after a career that sources put at somewhere between 27 and 30 years, commanded the 86th Training Division, and served in two combat operations along with a peacekeeping mission. Later she advised Army Cyber Command on information warfare policy.

She is the top Democratic fundraiser in her primary, and Pete Buttigieg endorsed her. If she wins tonight, her opponent in November is Anna Paulina Luna, an Air Force veteran. That would make it the second race this cycle where both nominees wore the uniform.

The other veteran against veteran race is already set. Elaine Luria won the Virginia second district primary on 4 August and will face Jen Kiggans in November. Luria spent 20 years in the Navy and retired as a commander after six tours. Kiggans flew Navy helicopters before becoming a nurse practitioner. Whichever way that seat goes, a woman veteran wins it.

Three arguments cut against us here, and the second one is the serious one.

Start with the count. With Honor says plainly that its figures include people who announced a campaign and later withdrew or suspended it. So 95 is a tally of announcements as of 1 June, not a headcount of live campaigns in August. Any piece treating it as the latter, including the ones that ran in June, is overstating the field. We do not know the current active number, and neither does anyone quoting the 95.

Then there is New Hampshire, which is the case that genuinely hurts. Maura Sullivan is the only veteran in that field. She has VoteVets, four sitting members of Congress, more than 140 state figures and three former service secretaries behind her. She has led the money race for most of the cycle. Still she trails Stefany Shaheen, whose main asset is her mother’s surname. The Saint Anselm poll in late June had Shaheen at 22 and Sullivan at 15, which was an improvement, and prediction markets this month put Sullivan’s chance somewhere between one in eight and one in five. A record that cannot clear a primary against name recognition is not doing what we say it does.

The third argument is subtler. Virginia’s second gives you a woman veteran either way, so it tells you nothing about whether service helps Democrats. Florida’s thirteenth may end up the same. When both parties field veterans in the same race, the record stops being a difference between the candidates and becomes background.

We concede the first two without argument. On the third we would say the collision is the finding, not a problem with the finding. We reached the same conclusion in Alaska last week with the parties swapped, where the Republican has 30 years in the Marine Corps and trails a Democrat who never served. A service record is worth something. It is not worth something against another service record, and it is worth less than a famous surname in a low-turnout September primary.

Two of these races are clean tests and two are not. Separating them now beats arguing about it after the count.

New Jersey seven and New York seventeen put a woman veteran against a Republican who never served, in districts that lean close to even. If service moves independents the way this site has argued for three years, those are the seats where it should show. Arizona six is nearly as clean, though Juan Ciscomani has an incumbency advantage that muddies the reading.

Virginia two and Florida thirteen will not settle anything about the thesis, because both sides have the uniform. They are still worth watching for a different reason. Kiggans beat Luria by four points in 2022 under lines drawn to favour Republicans, so a reversal there would say something about the environment rather than about biography.

One precedent sits outside Congress and is worth keeping in view. Mikie Sherrill flew Navy helicopters and now runs New Jersey, which is the clearest case this cycle of a woman veteran converting service into executive office. Whether that transfers to a House race against an incumbent is exactly what these six candidates test.

And the number to write down now is eight. That is how many women veterans sit in Congress today. If the figure has not moved much by January, the record field of 2026 will have produced a lot of nominees and very few members, which is the outcome the last three cycles kept delivering.