Tom Perriello

Thomas Stuart Price Perriello (born October 9, 1974) is an American attorney, diplomat, and politician.

For over four years until July 2023, Perriello served as the executive director for U.S. Programs at the Open Society Foundations.

Thomas Stuart Price Perriello was born on October 9, 1974, in Charlottesville, Virginia, and grew up in Ivy, a small, affluent, unincorporated community west of Charlottesville.

He is the son of Linda (née Gillooly), a financial analyst, and Vito Anthony Perriello Jr., a pediatrician.

His paternal grandparents were Italian immigrants, and his mother is from an evangelical Christian family from Ohio.

He attended Murray Elementary School, Meriwether Lewis Elementary School, Henley Middle School and Western Albemarle High School in the county school system, and then graduated from St. Anne's-Belfield School, a private school.

He attained the rank of Eagle Scout in Boy Scout Troop 114 in Ivy, and was a legislative page in the Virginia House of Delegates.

He received his B.A. (1996) and J.D. (2001) from Yale University.

From 2002–2003, Perriello worked for the UN-mandated Special Court for Sierra Leone, where he eventually becoming special adviser to the prosecutor, David Crane.

He has worked as a consultant to the International Center for Transitional Justice in Kosovo (2003), Darfur (2005), and Afghanistan (2007) where he worked on justice-based security strategies.

Perriello has also been a fellow at The Century Foundation and consultant to the National Council of Churches of Christ.

Perriello won a narrow (50.1% to 49.9% ) victory over Republican six-term incumbent Virgil H. Goode Jr., a longtime figure in Virginia politics who had previously represented a large portion of the district in the Senate of Virginia.

Perriello had trailed Goode in the polls by 30 percent only three months before the election.

Politico reported that Goode's campaign was impaired by remarks by Goode that were interpreted as anti-Muslim and by a flap over Goode's tenuous connection to a gay-themed movie.

The traditionally Democratic urban areas of the district gave Perriello significant margins over Goode.

While Goode won 13 of the 20 county-level jurisdictions in the district, Perriello won all but one independent city, Bedford, which went for Goode by only 16 votes.

Ultimately, Perriello prevailed largely on the strength of a more than 25,000 vote margin in Charlottesville and surrounding Albemarle County.

Perriello's performance showed the most dramatic improvements over past Democratic voting in the more conservative areas of the district hardest hit by decades of job loss and economic slowdown.

As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama also improved on past Democratic performance, but he ultimately lost this district by around 7,500 votes (2.5 percentage points).

For example, Perriello significantly outperformed Obama in the district's strongly conservative southwestern portion.

Ironically, this was Goode's base; he had represented much of the district's southern portion for 35 years at the state and federal level.

Perriello may also have been helped by coattails from atop the ticket, as Mark Warner won the district in a landslide with 65 percent of the vote.

Perriello lost to Republican nominee State Senator Robert Hurt in a race between the two and Independent candidate Jeffrey Clark.

During the race, Perriello was noted for touting Democratic achievements during his two years in office rather than running from them.

In recognition of his support for gun rights, Perriello received the endorsement of the NRA Political Victory Fund.

He also received the endorsement of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in the race in recognition of his "strong support for veterans, national security and defense, and military personnel issues."

Perriello ran for VA's 5th congressional district in the United States House of Representatives in 2008.

He narrowly defeated six-term Republican incumbent Virgil H. Goode Jr. by 727 votes out of over 317,000 cast.

At the time he served, the district included much of Southside Virginia and stretched north to Charlottesville.

His reelection campaign was targeted by the national Democratic party, as the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sent financial resources, ads, and staff to the district in an effort to protect a seat that Perriello had won for the Democrats by a razor-thin 727 vote margin in 2008.

As early as two weeks after being elected in 2008, Perriello was targeted for defeat by national Republicans and by outside groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Koch brothers' funded Americans for Prosperity.

His effort to maintain his seat was marked by full days of campaigning, including one period called "24 hours of Tom" in which the congressman held one or two events every hour for twenty four hours in the final weeks of the election.

Ultimately, Perriello lost by 3.9 percent, which was considered a surprisingly close result in the Republican-leaning district.

Perriello was defeated in the 2010 election by Republican state senator Robert Hurt.

As a point of comparison, Glenn Nye, another freshman Democrat in the similarly Republican-leaning Virginia's 2nd, lost by 11 points to his Republican challenger in the same cycle.

The two congressmen took dramatically different approaches to campaigning, with Perriello embracing his short congressional record that included votes for progressive legislation like the Affordable Care Act, and Nye attempting to distance himself from his party.

In February 2014, he was appointed United States Special Representative for the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, serving until July 2015.

From July 2015 to December 2016, he was Special Envoy for the Great Lakes Region of Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo, succeeding former U.S. Senator Russ Feingold.

Perriello ran for the Democratic nomination in the 2017 Virginia gubernatorial election, but lost to Ralph Northam.

On February 26, 2024, He was appointed as U.S. Special Envoy for Sudan by President Biden Administration.