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Hung Cao, one of five candidates seeking the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate to oppose the Democratic incumbent Sen. Tim Kaine in the fall, on Wednesday doubled down on his remarks referring to the Staunton News Leader as a “podunk local newspaper.”
During a virtual town hall meeting hosted by the Fauquier County GOP, Cao alleged that the newspaper is run by left-wing hacks. “Everybody in Staunton knows that, they laugh at those people. You wouldn’t even wrap your fish with that,” Cao said in a video recording of the town hall meeting obtained by Cardinal News.
The Loudoun County resident also implied that he doesn’t consider it worth his time to travel to Southwest Virginia to debate his primary opponents for the statewide office.
“I’ll sit here [behind the camera] all night if you want to, but for me to drive six and a half hours down to Abingdon or something like that and to stand there with four other dudes and to have 30 seconds to answer questions, it’s just ridonkulous, it’s just crazy,” Cao told moderator Pam Brisky.
Cao’s campaign said in an email Thursday that he has praised meeting formats where voters from all across the commonwealth have the opportunity to ask him questions.
“What he has been critical of are forums that result in Republican candidates attacking one another in front of Democrat trackers, for the benefit of shady news outlets that are used to take out the trash against the one Republican candidate who can win,” the email said.
Kaine, who is hoping to win a third term in the Senate, visited Tazewell and Abingdon just last week to take questions from constituents regarding the Israel-Hamas conflict.
“What I want them to know is that I may live in Richmond, and I may work in Washington 36 weeks a year, but I come to Southwest Virginia a lot, and I have over the years, and I take seriously the priorities that people have here,” Kaine told reporters at his event in Tazewell.
Cao, a retired U.S. Navy captain who came to the United States as a refugee from Vietnam when he was still a child, faces fellow Republicans Jonathan Emord, Eddie Garcia, Scott Parkinson and Chuck Smith in the statewide primary election on June 18. Having raised more than $2 million as of March 31, he has a significant lead in the money race, according to data from the Virginia Public Access Project, a nonprofit that tracks money in politics.
But Cao faced scrutiny after Elizabeth Beyer, a journalist with Gannett’s USA Today Network formerly based in Wisconsin, reported in a recent story that the Unleash America PAC — the political action committee that Cao launched last year to support Republican candidates in 2023, particularly those running for the Virginia General Assembly — did not benefit “a single Republican candidate for state or local office.”
Instead, Beyer reported that much of the PAC’s money went to people or companies associated with Cao’s U.S. Senate campaign.
The story was published in two Virginia newspapers — the Staunton News Leader and the Petersburg Progress-Index — as well as nine other Gannett newspapers across the country.
When the story was posted on the Virginia Public Access Project, which also aggregates links to political stories across the state, it was attributed to the Staunton paper, prompting Cao to blast the 120-year-old publication as a “podunk local newspaper” on a podcast hosted by Alec Lace, a conservative talk show host, on Tuesday.
At the virtual town hall the next day, Cao clarified that he did not mean to offend the city of Staunton with his remarks on the podcast.
“Staunton knows me, I would never disparage the town. I love rural towns, my hometown is half the size of Staunton. This is them trying to twist things around. Anybody who believes the media … I mean, come on. We can’t believe half the stuff they say. They brought in a journalist from Wisconsin to write a hit job at me. So who’s paying for her to write that hit job at me and why are they printing it?”
Whether Cao’s comments on the newspaper and his dismissive remarks about Abingdon — a town in Virginia’s heavily Republican 9th Congressional District — will impact his bid for the Senate remains to be seen. Adam Tolbert, the chairman of the district’s Republican committee, did not respond to phone calls and text messages Thursday.
But Susan Swecker, the chair of the Democratic Party of Virginia and a Highland County native who grew up on a small farm, challenged Cao to come to the 6th Congressional District “and say that to our faces if he thinks we are all podunk.”
Cao made it clear that he does not think traveling to rural areas is worth the drive, Swecker said. “His comments prove the elitist that he is, and Virginians don’t deserve a senator who won’t represent them or their values, unlike Tim Kaine, who has traveled to every part of the commonwealth and has delivered for rural areas as a governor and senator.”
In the fall of 2018, Corey Stewart, a former chairman of the Prince William County Board of Supervisors and then the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate, learned a similarly hard lesson. When he depicted Danville as a failed city in decay during a visit there, seven local representatives, including the mayor and city manager, stood up and walked out.
“Danville’s not sad and feeling sorry for itself,” Lee Vogler, the city’s vice mayor and former chairman of Danville’s Republican Committee, told The Roanoke Times at the time. “What’s sad is a candidate for United States Senate for Virginia continually bashing a city that he hopes to represent.”