Today is primary day in Virginia. Polls are open 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. For more on who’s running, see our voter guide. Once the polls close, we’ll have live results from Associated Press, and I’ll post analysis through the evening.
There’s been such buildup to the outcome of the 5th District Republican primary between Bob Good and John McGuire, it’s tempting to think that Tuesday’s result, whatever it may be, settles things.
It doesn’t.
Instead, it simply sets up the fall contest between the winners of the Republican and Democratic primaries in that district. I’m under no illusion that the fall campaign will have more of a high-minded discussion of the issues than the primary was. I’ve covered far too many campaigns for that. Candidates often aren’t particularly interested in that; neither are many voters, for that matter. For many, the fall campaign will come down to a simple question: Democrat or Republican?
Nonetheless, I feel compelled to point out some issues of unique interest to the 5th District that its next representative will have to deal with (or ignore).
1. Amtrak
The 5th District has more Amtrak trains than any other district in Virginia that’s represented by a Republican except one. Both the 5th and the 6th (currently represented by Ben Cline, R-Botetourt County), have three stops. For the 5th, that’s in Danville, Lynchburg and Charlottesville. For the 6th, that’s Clifton Forge, Roanoke and Staunton. The difference is that the 5th has more trains, making Amtrak more important to that district than the passenger service is in the 6th.
Amtrak has often had to beg for federal funding, and when Donald Trump was president, he wanted to cut funding in half and phase out some long-distance routes (such as the Amtrak Crescent that runs through the 5th). Under his plan, Danville would have lost all Amtrak service. By contrast, the Biden administration has pumped money into passenger rail (although not as much as Amtrak has wanted).
How important is passenger rail service to the 5th District, and how much should it be subsidized?
2. Battery plants
The Southeast has become a hug for battery plants — many, but not all of those, connected to the growth of electric vehicles. Just about everything electronic these days involves some kind of battery. That “battery belt” hasn’t crossed the state line into Virginia yet, but could. It was recently revealed that a California company is looking at building a battery plant in Lynchburg, which would bring 100 jobs to the Hill City. That deal is backed by $100 million in federal funding.
Last year, Ford was looking at putting a battery plant at the Southern Virginia Megasite in Pittsylvania County until Gov. Glenn Youngkin vetoed the deal, citing Ford’s relationship with a Chinese battery maker. Ford later took the project to Michigan, although Ford has since scaled back the project from 2,500 workers to 1,700. In the meantime, the Southern Virginia Megasite remains available for large-scale tenants; and while there’s no guarantee that such a tenant would be a battery manufacturer, that is where a lot of the economic development action is these days.
What policies would the 5th District’s representative support that would encourage the growth of the battery industry and make it more likely that a) the Lynchburg deal happens and b) something lands in the Southern Virginia Megasite?
3. Demography
The usual way that politicians (at least Republican ones), talk about immigration is in terms of a porous southern border, and that’s certainly important. However, that’s not the entirety of the immigration issue. Here are some other aspects to immigration that don’t often get headline attention but perhaps should. Our entitlement programs depend on a certain number of people paying into them. Social Security, for instance, isn’t a bank account; it’s a program where each generation pays for the one ahead of it. As birth rates fall, the math there becomes more challenging. One argument for immigration is that we need more younger workers to pay into the system; otherwise, at some point, we either have to cut benefits that older Americans felt they’d been promised, or raise taxes on younger workers. How much immigration should we have, and how should it be managed?
That question isn’t unique to the 5th (although with a lot of localities that skew older, it’s one that’s more important there than some districts). This question is more 5th District-centric: Most localities in the district are losing population. How much, if any, immigration would the next representative support as a way to help make up for those population declines? (For more on Virginia’s demographic trends, we’ve collected all our stories in one place.)
4. Energy
Specifically, how does the next representative feel about nuclear energy? Republicans often like to talk about an “all of the above” energy strategy, which presumably includes nuclear. The Biden administration, though, has specifically pushed nuclear energy as a way to decarbonize the electric grid. In March, it announced a $1.5 billion loan to restart a shuttered nuclear plant in Michigan. In Virginia, both of the major utilities — Dominion Energy and Appalachian Power — have shown interest in a new generation of smaller nuclear plants known as small modular reactors, or SMRs. (Disclosure: Dominion is one of our donors, but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy.) While no decisions have been made, Dominion has indicated that if it decides to go with SMRs, one logical place to put them would be its existing North Anna nuclear power plant in Louisa County. Meanwhile, a study for the U.S. Department of Energy focused on how easy it would be to convert coal-fired power plants to nuclear and identified the Clover plant in Halifax County — co-owned by Dominion and the Old Dominion Electric Cooperative — as a possible location.
How does that next 5th District representative feel about nuclear energy, especially given the possibility that SMRs could wind up in the district, either in Louisa or Halifax? (See our FAQs on SMRs.)
5. Tariffs
The 5th District is home to some of Virginia’s top agricultural counties; Pittsylvania County, in particular, ranks in the state’s top 10. This raises a lot of issues that extend beyond the farm: for instance, the tension over tariffs. Donald Trump has been a big fan of tariffs, and Joe Biden has some enthusiasm for certain tariffs. The purpose of tariffs is to raise the price of imported goods and make it easier for domestic producers to sell their products. That’s good for manufacturers, but agricultural producers often feel differently, because they often depend on exports — and those exports often get hit with retaliatory tariffs. It would be interesting to know how the district’s representative intends to balance those competing demands. What’s good for the factory worker may not be good for the farmer, and vice versa.
Those are five issues for the 5th. Clearly, there are lots more. The candidates may not talk about them, and the voters may not ask about them. But the next representative may have to cast votes that relate to all of them.
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