Lynchburg Republicans fought a battle for the soul of their party Saturday and the hard-right won.
Dwight Williams, who had talked up a Reaganesque-style “big tent” party, lost his bid for unit chair.
Instead, with 64% of the vote, Lynchburg Republicans reelected Veronica Bratton, who last year oversaw the executive committee’s censure of Republican Vice Mayor Chris Faraldi, an action later overturned by a larger group of Republicans. (Update: Bratton says that later action was not a legitimate meeting, a point that remains in contention between the two factions. Rachel Mahoney reported on Saturday’s meeting for Cardinal.)
“Lynchburg is officially #UltraMAGA,” declared council member Marty Misjuns on his Facebook page.
If we ever needed evidence that the party of Ronald Reagan has been remade as the party of Donald Trump, here it is.
Much of the time it doesn’t matter who unit chairs are. This vote is different. This will have implications in the Hill City, and perhaps beyond. Let’s look at what we know — and what we don’t. (Hint: There’s more of the latter than the former.)
This will mean more conservative candidates for the Lynchburg City Council.
Anyone can run for council, of course. However, we all know it’s often hard to find candidates for public office. That’s where unit chairs (the phrase is unique to Republicans) come in. They are often the ones tasked with recruiting candidates. It seems fair to say that “UltraMAGA” Bratton will recruit different sorts of candidates than “big tent” Williams would have. Ultimately, Lynchburg voters have the final say on who wins but, realistically, their options are limited. What’s a conservative-leaning voter to do if their choice is between a MAGA candidate and a Democrat? Voting for a Democrat is a hard ask for many of those voters.
The choice of candidates may be most apparent this fall in Ward I, now represented by MaryJane Dolan. Lynchburg Democrats recently posted a picture of their fall candidates and Dolan wasn’t among them, so she’s apparently retiring, with Randy Smith as the apparent Democratic candidate in this ward. The others listed were incumbent Sterling Wilder in Ward II, James Coleman in Ward III and April Watson in Ward IV.
Ward III and IV are currently held by Republican incumbents — Jeff Helgeson in the former, Chris Faraldi in the latter — which focuses attention on Ward I. This is a ward that Republicans carried in the last at-large elections, so it seems a prime battleground this fall. Could just any Republican win this ward, though? That’s one of those things we don’t know. Donald Trump carried this ward 4,566 to 4,004 over Hillary Clinton in 2016. Because so many votes were cast early in 2020, and counted as part of a central absentee precinct, we can’t say that the Trump-Biden vote was in this ward. All we know is that citywide in Lynchburg, Trump’s totals declined slightly from 2016 to 2020 (from 17,982 to 17,097) while Biden ran far stronger than Clinton (18,048 versus 14,792) and narrowly carried Lynchburg, the first Democrat to do so since Harry Truman in 1948. Those “extra” 3,256 Biden votes had to come from somewhere; we don’t know how many came from Ward I, but if they were evenly divided between wards (and they probably weren’t), then 814 would have been from Ward I, enough to tip that ward into the Democratic column. It seems safe to say that in a November election, Ward I would be a swing ward with a slight Republican lean, but would a candidate too far right be in danger of losing to a Democrat? We’ll find out.
This election shows the difference between party politics and general election politics.
This was a showdown between the two Republican factions on the city council. Mayor Stephanie Reed, who led the balloting in the most recent at-large council election, backed Williams. Misjuns, who finished third, backed Bratton — yet the third-place candidate’s favorite triumphed over the first place candidate’s choice. Should we read into that result that Misjuns is ascendant in Lynchburg while Reed is in decline? No, and here’s why not:
Lynchburg Republicans had an unusually large turnout to pick the unit chair — 315 votes were cast. In winning 203 of them, Bratton is said to have received more votes for unit chair than any other Republican in Lynchburg history. However, that figure is small compared to the number of people who would turn out in an actual state-run election. Case in point: The recent presidential primary was a low turnout affair, as presidential primaries in Virginia go, but 5,355 people in Lynchburg voted in the Republican side of that primary. In context, that means the 315 people who voted Saturday accounted for just 5.8% of those who voted in the primary, and the 203 who voted for Bratton accounted for just 3.7%.
This illustrates how primaries produce wider turnout than party-run affairs. No matter who won Saturday, neither Bratton nor Williams can claim to be representative of those 5,355 Republican presidential primary voters — the sample size is simply too small. Maybe they are representative, but once again, we just don’t know. Saturday’s vote tells us a lot about the thinking and direction of hardcore party activists in Lynchburg, but can’t tell us anything about what the larger Republican electorate is thinking.
We don’t know what this means for Lynchburg’s Republican primaries for council.
Lynchburg will likely have two Republican primaries for council nominations on June 18.
Peter Alexander, a favorite of the hard-right faction, is challenging Faraldi for the Republican nomination in Ward IV. Beth White has said she’ll challenge longtime incumbent Jeff Helgeson, another member of that hard-right faction, in Ward III. We’ll know for sure after April 4 who has actually made the ballot, but for now let’s assume these are the only two council primaries in Lynchburg.
(All these terms are meant as shorthand. Faraldi is hardly some moderate; he’s endorsed Trump, for instance, so we’re talking relative degrees of separation on the ideological scale. Many of their disagreements between the two factions seem to be stylistic. For instance, Del. Wendell Walker, R-Lynchburg, is one of the most conservative members of the General Assembly. He’s also one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet. He called Bratton “the most divisive unit chair I have ever seen in my 30-plus years out here in leadership positions.” Those are strong words coming from the mild-mannered Walker.)
Bratton’s victory is certainly good news for Alexander and Helgeson — it’s always better to win than not win. However, let’s do a math-based reality check.
We don’t know how many of those 315 voters Saturday were from which ward, but it doesn’t matter. In last month’s presidential primary, Ward III saw 829 Republican voters and Ward IV saw 1,581.
Until we see the results of the June 18 primary, we have no way to know whether Saturday’s voters for unit chair were representative of the general Republican electorate we’ll see in the primary. Maybe they are, maybe they’re not. We just don’t know.
We do know one thing, though. While Misjuns indirectly defeated Reed on Saturday in their choices for unit chair, Reed ran ahead of Misjuns in both Ward III and Ward IV in their at-large races. (She had 2,273 votes to Misjuns’ 2,142 in Ward III; 2,978 to Misjuns’ 2,701 in Ward IV.) Now, there’s an obvious fallacy here: Those were general election results from November 2022, and what we really want to know are the primary results from June 2024. There could well be people who would vote for Reed in a general election but might not show up in a Republican primary. However, my point is, to the extent that both a White-Helgeson primary and an Alexander-Faraldi primary are indirectly referendums on Misjuns and Reed, or at least their two factions, the Reed-backed candidates could well have a slight advantage. Here’s a thought experiment: How would voters in each ward respond if they realized these elections aren’t just choices for who represents that ward, but who is ultimately mayor — Helgeson if the Misjuns-Helgeson faction wins, or Reed if the Reed-Faraldi faction wins? That’s part of what’s at stake in the June 18 council primaries.
Rep. Bob Good’s involvement is unusual.
Good hasn’t been reluctant to get involved in Lynchburg city politics. He lobbied Faraldi to back Helgeson for mayor last year, and seemed to suggest political repercussions if Faraldi didn’t go along. He didn’t, and now here are some of those repercussions: Good is backing Faraldi’s primary opponent. He also pushed hard for Bratton — one of Faraldi’s nemeses — for unit chair, sending out a text message the day before the vote, warning that she was opposed “by a well-organized group opposed to our conservative principles.” He was on hand Saturday to celebrate with Bratton.
I’ve followed Virginia politics for almost as long as Good has been alive and I’ve never seen a member of Congress get this involved in local politics. Most have stayed far away from such factional in-fighting because they want to stay on the good side of all combatants. Not Good. His involvement is much more reminiscent of, say, former U.S. Sen. Harry Byrd Sr. back in the days of the Byrd Machine when Byrd wanted to make sure his lieutenants were in charge.
Saturday’s vote shows that Lynchburg’s Republican machinery is in Good’s grasp, but I have to wonder what the 35.5% dissenting vote means. And that brings us to this:
We don’t know what this means for the Good-McGuire primary.
Good faces a nomination challenge from state Sen. John McGuire, R-Goochland County. McGuire’s challenge is unusual in that he’s trying to run to Good’s right — I didn’t realize there was any space to Good’s right — but McGuire has focused his campaign on how he’s a true believer in Trump while Good initially backed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
We’ve seen some interesting endorsements in this race — former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has backed McGuire, for instance — but I’ve not put much stock in those. Gingrich might have a national profile, but how many voters in the 5th District can he move? Again, I don’t know, but I’d be much more impressed by endorsements by actual figures in the district. On Friday, McGuire picked up one: Lynchburg Mayor Reed. “Bob Good has attacked, divided and torn down so many good people in our community,” Reed said in a statement. “It’s time for a leader who will bring us together.”
One of the first rules of politics is you want to secure your base. For Good, who is from Campbell County, that means the Lynchburg metro. McGuire has now picked up an endorsement from a politician whose popularity in his backyard rivals his (Good won 12,508 votes in Lynchburg two years ago; Reed won 12,287 votes in her council race. Both figures are more than either Walker or Sen. Mark Peake, also R-Lynchburg, won in last year’s legislative elections.) This would seem to be quite a coup for McGuire. Whether this is a one-off endorsement, and whether this can be replicated elsewhere, that’s another of those many things we don’t know. However, Saturday’s vote — even though it went Good’s way — shows there is restiveness in Lynchburg’s Republican ranks. If McGuire can capitalize on that, and reduce Good’s margin in what should be his strongest area, that’s clearly to his political advantage.
The big thing we really don’t know.
Will Trump get involved in the 5th District primary? Both McGuire and Good back Trump, but Trump’s co-campaign manager, Chris LaCivita, earlier this year told Cardinal News that “Bob Good won’t be electable when we get done with him.” We’re still waiting for that roughing up to begin — if it’s going to happen — but there’s plenty of time yet and Trump is often a master of timing. If Trump stays out of the race, then McGuire’s claim to be the true Trump candidate will ring hollow. But if Trump does get involved, then Good will have far more to worry about than the mayor of Lynchburg calling him out for not being a team player.
