While electoral boards across the state finalize their results, let’s catch up on some more implications from this week’s primaries.
1. Virginia will likely send fewer women to Washington
The number of women who represent Virginia in Congress is likely to decline after November’s elections.
Virginia currently has a record number of four women in its House delegation:
- Jen Kiggans, R-2nd District in Hampton Roads.
- Jennifer McClellan, D-4th District in Richmond and part of eastern Southside.
- Abigail Spanberger, D-7th District in the Piedmont parts of Northern Virginia
- Jennifer Wexton, D-10th District in Northern Virginia.
Of those, two are retiring: Spanberger is leaving to seek the Democratic nomination for governor next year, for which right now she is the only aspirant. Wexton is retiring for health reasons. Both of those will be replaced by men.
It’s theoretically possible we’ll see women elected elsewhere, it’s just not very likely.
Let’s take a look.
McClellan will almost certainly return; she’s in one of the most Democratic congressional districts in the state. Her predecessor, the late Donald McEachin, won reelection in this district with 65% two years ago. McClellan won a special election to succeed him with 74%.
The 2nd District will be represented by a woman, no matter what happens. Democrats this week nominated Missy Cotter Smasal to challenge Kiggans. This has historically been a swing district, although the redistricting that created the current maps made this a little more Republican than in the past.
Democrats have nominated women in the 1st, 5th and 9th districts: Leslie Mehta to challenge incumbent Rob Wittman in the 1st District that runs from the Chesapeake Bay to the Richmond suburbs, Gloria Witt to challenge the winner of this week’s Republican primary in the 5th, Karen Baker to challenge incumbent Morgan Griffith in the 9th District in Southwest Virginia. However, all three of those are also longshot bids for Democrats. Two years ago Wittman was reelected with 56% of the vote; Griffith won with 73% of the vote. In the 5th, Bob Good won two years ago with 58%. Right now, it looks like Good has gotten knocked out by John McGuire (see my Thursday column for why Good supporters shouldn’t hold out hope for the late-arriving mail ballots to change things), but that won’t change the conservative nature of the district.
While the number of women Virginia sends to Washington seems set to decrease, the number it sends to statewide offices in Richmond could increase next year. If Republicans nominate Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears for governor — a distinct possibility — then Virginia would have a choice between two women for governor. Right now the Democratic races for 2025 are shaping up, while the Republican side is quiet (at least on the surface) while Earle-Sears and Attorney General Jason Miyares decide what their plans are (and likely waiting on the outcome of November’s presidential election to see what the political temperature in the state might be next year). I discuss more about 2025 in this week’s edition of my free political newsletter, West of the Capital. You can sign up for it right here!
It’s far too early to handicap multicandidate races for lieutenant governor and attorney general, but it’s theoretically possible that Democrats next year could nominate women for all three statewide offices.
2. Redistricting set to claim a second member of Congress
In Thursday’s column, I laid out the numbers to show how the redistricting map approved by the Virginia Supreme Court in 2021 led to Bob Good’s apparent defeat in this week’s 5th District Republican primary. The short version: The new map reduced the number of Bedford County voters in the district (what remained of Bedford voted 58% for Good) and added six counties in the eastern part of the district, one of which (Goochland County) brought in Good’s opponent and five of which voted for that opponent, John McGuire.
There were certainly other reasons why Good appears to have come up short — having former President Donald Trump endorse his opponent and call Good “bad for Virginia” certainly wasn’t helpful, to say the least. But the redistricting map didn’t help him, either.
If Good goes down, as it looks like he will, he would be the second member of Virginia’s U.S. House delegation to fall victim to the new maps. In 2022, Rep. Elaine Luria, D-Virginia Beach, lost her reelection bid in the 2nd District to Kiggans. Again, lots of reasons why that happens but a big one was the redistricting map that took away some Democratic-voting parts of the district and added some Republican ones in the rural areas west of Hampton Roads. I wrote about this in a column after that election.
Will those maps impact any other congressional races this fall? The one to look at most is the 7th District. Spanberger won that two years ago with 52.2% of the vote. However, she also had the power of incumbency behind her. This time, that will be an open seat, with a race between Democrat Eugene Vindman and Republican Derrick Anderson. They’ll be running against the backdrop of a presidential campaign. At the moment, that would seem to benefit Republicans more than Democrats, but that advantage could be fleeting.
The 7th has also changed shape so much that it’s hard to call it a modification of the one that existed prior to the new maps. Seven of the 10 counties that were in the district in 2020 are now elsewhere. The basic political outlines, though, remain the same: In both versions of the district, Spanberger had to run up big numbers in the suburbs to offset losses in rural areas. The only difference was that in 2020 those suburbs were in the Richmond area; by 2022 they were in Northern Virginia.
Here’s a question: Will there be any push in the General Assembly to modify either the constitutional amendment that now requires a redistricting commission or the statues that govern that commission? And is there any reason to think the redistricting commission in 2031 will be any better to resolve partisan differences than the one in 2021? If not, the Virginia Supreme Court will once again have the duty of appointing “special masters” to draw the lines.
3. Republicans out-vote Democrats in two of three districts with both primaries
This is not always the best measure but it is a measure, so take this for whatever you think it’s worth: We had three congressional districts where both parties held primaries to pick House nominees. In two of those, more Republicans than Democrats turned out.
5th District:
Republicans: 62,473
Democrats: 24,358
7th District:
Republicans: 35,798
Democrats: 33,538
10th District:
Democrats: 43,020
Republicans: 26,691
Lots of things can influence this. The intensity of the campaigns on each side certainly matters. (The 5th District Republican primary was about as vicious as they come; the Democratic primary was a genteel affair where the three candidates all met up the next day in Danville for a unity event.) Republicans also had more to vote for — they had a Senate primary on the ballot as well, although it was a low-intensity contest. (That primary drew fewer voters than three of four previous GOP Senate primaries in Virginia.) The general lay of the land also plays into this. The 5th District is a Republican-leaning district so we shouldn’t be surprised that more Republicans voted than Democrats. Ditto, the 10th District, just the other way around — it’s a Democratic-leaning district.
However, what we really want to know out of these kinds of comparison is the enthusiasm level on each side. That ebbs and flows. In the 7th District, does it mean anything that 2,250 more Republicans voted than Democrats? Maybe. Maybe not. We’ll know more in November. If Anderson takes the 7th this fall, we can look back to this statistic as a harbinger. If Vindman wins, it won’t mean anything at all.
In this week’s West of the Capital:
I write a free weekly newsletter, West of the Capital, that goes out every Friday afternoon. Here’s some of what will be in it this week:
- Bob Good for lieutenant governor? That’s the new buzz.
- A look ahead at the 2025 statewide races, which are starting to take shape.
- Sen. Tim Kaine rolls out his first ad, hitting Republican Hung Cao for things he said about Staunton and Abingdon.
- Rep. Ben Cline, R-Botetourt County, seeks a leadership role among House Republicans.
- State health commissioner to speak at Cardinal’s “Confused about cannabis?” conference on Oct. 15.
- Del. Nick Freitas, R-Culpeper County, who has more than 1 million followers on Instagram, rolls out a video for Jeremy’s Razors.
You can sign up for West of the Capital, or any of our other free newsletters here: