If this were 1804, we might be preparing for a duel in Lynchburg on the order of Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton.
Instead, this is 2024, so the only shots being fired are right now on Facebook as Lynchburg prepares for city council elections — and a potentially party-defining choice for the Republican nominee for the Ward IV council seat.
Over the past few weeks, city councilman Marty Misjuns has posted the following about fellow council member (and vice mayor) Chris Faraldi:
We need principled leaders that are going to cast the right vote, every time, consistently. 2024 is going to be a great year to remove incompetent fraudsters at the ballot box.
Why would someone respect a liar, and opportunist that pretends to be a conservative but actively fights everything that matters to conservative voters?
This is what’s wrong with the GOP establishment. If they can’t get their way, they will do whatever it takes to shut you up or get you out of the way. This is exactly what Vice Mayor Chris Faraldi is a part of, because he’s too scared to oppose taxpayer funding of illegal and discriminatory DEI concepts in the workforce. We need a City Council representative for Ward IV that is principled, willing to fight for the people, and not in bed with the establishment swamp.
Other posts have simply included the hashtag #FireFaraldi.
Tough words, but as the famous quote from the Chicago writer Finley Peter Dunne said back in the 19th century, the voice of his fictional character Mr. Dooley, “Politics ain’t beanbag.”
Still, there are at least three notable things about Misjuns’ posts about Faraldi.
First, these are members of the same body — with just one council member sitting between them.
Second, they’re both members of the same party — the Republican Party.
Third, they’re not running against each other. Misjuns is an at-large member whose seat won’t be on the ballot again until 2026; Faraldi represents one of Lynchburg’s four wards on the council.
I have followed politics for a long time and have seen some famous feuds — the rivalry between two Democratic governors, Douglas Wilder and Charles Robb, in the 1980s and 1990s was legendary. However, I’ve never seen this level of vitriol, and certainly not at the local level. It’s even more extraordinary when you consider that what separates these two politicians is essentially no more than a policy dispute.
Technically, they’re not even on opposite sides, at least in the classic sense of that term. As for the diversity, equity and inclusion policies that Misjuns references, it’s not that Faraldi is some “woke” leftist — the dispute is essentially whether the council needs to pass some resolution against these policies (as Misjuns believes) or whether this is already being handled through existing city policies (as a majority of the council believes). Another dispute is over a tax cut — not whether there should be a tax cut, but when and how it should be delivered. Misjuns and Helgeson wanted a tax cut in the middle of a budget cycle and a refund issued out of the city’s surplus; Faraldi and others said that wasn’t allowed because the city’s surplus came from other funds so in bookkeeping terms there wasn’t a surplus from the tax being cut.
Granted, these aren’t my taxes being cut but in the big picture, these seem like pretty minor disputes. Cutting taxes versus not cutting taxes, now that’s a big issue. But the timing of a tax cut that both agree on seems a detail that feels too small to merit this level of rancor. There’s actually a name for this kind of thing. It’s called Sayre’s Law, after Columbia University political scientist William Sayre, who once observed: “Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low.” That’s been transformed into this formulation: “In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake.”
I have seen lots of local governing bodies that are split politically — Montgomery County has long been famous for its 4-3 majorities one way or another (although now it’s a 5-2 Democratic majority). There’s nothing wrong with governing bodies being split like this. A city council or a board of supervisors isn’t a corporate board of directors, where everyone is expected to close ranks; it’s a miniature legislature where differences, if they exist, ought to be aired.
What’s unusual in Lynchburg is how personal these differences seem to be — between members of the same party. As I’ve pointed out before, Lynchburg’s seven-member council may be split between five Republicans and two Democrats but it’s really a three-way split, with Democrats MaryJane Dolan and Sterling Wilder in one camp, Republicans Faraldi, Stephanie Reed and Larry Taylor in another, and then Misjuns and Jeff Helgeson in yet a third.
I used to count Taylor as a “floater” but he did vote last year as part of a 5-2 majority to censure Misjuns for “disorderly behavior and misconduct,” a censure that Misjuns has since appealed into the court system since it came with a fine attached.
Lynchburg has seen dueling censures. The Lynchburg Republican City Committee’s executive committee voted last summer to censure Faraldi for his disputes with Misjuns and Helgeson (although other Republicans were voting against Misjuns and Helgeson, too); a larger gathering of Lynchburg Republicans later rescinded that censure. Then came the council’s censure of Misjuns.
I’ve never seen this kind of political dysfunction before. This didn’t exist in previous iterations of the council; it’s only happened on the current one. Before, Faraldi and Helgeson were the only two Republicans on the council and whatever disagreements may have taken place never made their way to the outer world; it’s the introduction of Misjuns to the mix that has now made the Lynchburg City Council infamous. I’ve had a Republican member of a different governing body tell me that he and his fellow office-holders look on aghast and have vowed to not let themselves fall into the same state that the Lynchburg council has.
Lynchburg voters will have to wait to cast judgment on Misjuns. At least some of them will get a chance to weigh in on Faraldi sometime this spring. He’s widely expected to draw an opponent for the Republican nomination — the name most mentioned is that of Veronica Bratton, the chair of the Lynchburg Republican Committee, the same committee that has repeatedly sided with Misjuns.
What’s really happening here, for those trying to follow this from afar, is a dispute over what kind of Republican a Republican today should be. Lynchburg is hardly the only place where this is happening, but it is, for us, the closest and the most dramatic.
A new state law that took effect Jan. 1 makes it all but impossible for political parties to choose their nominees through anything other than state-run primaries. Lynchburg Republicans have almost immediately set out to test the size of that small loophole by holding a party-run “firehouse primary.” The trick will be to design a system — never before tried — for the party to accept absentee ballots in a way that can withstand any legal challenge. The law’s author, Del. Dan Helmer, D-Fairfax County, has already asked Attorney General Jason Miyares to look into the Lynchburg situation to make sure Lynchburg Republicans are complying with the law. I suspect Miyares isn’t keen to get pulled into in some fratricidal intraparty warfare.
Proponents of this “anything but a state-run primary” approach say they want to avoid a state-run primary because Virginia doesn’t register voters by primary, meaning anyone could vote in a Republican primary. They want a Republicans-only nominating process. Politically, though, nomination processes other than a primary are seen as a way to limit participation. In this case, it’s seen as a way to limit participation to hard-core party activists who might not be as friendly to Faraldi as the general public might be.
In effect, a Faraldi versus Brand X candidate becomes a proxy battle between Faraldi and Misjuns, and which version of the Republican Party those voters want. We’ll see whether Misjuns’ attacks on Faraldi weaken Faraldi, or have the opposite effect and inspire a bigger turnout on behalf of the vice mayor. (I notice Faraldi has responded to none of this, by rhe way.) Lynchburg voters are quite capable of settling their own political differences, but I remain struck by the venom in Lynchburg between members of the same party in contrast with the collegiality I often see in Richmond between members of opposing parties — who then proceed to vote against one another on the things they hold most dear, but don’t seem to bear any grudges. Sometime this spring, voters in Lynchburg’s Republican firehouse primary will tell us which version of politics they prefer.