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Gov. Glenn Youngkin barnstormed through the 5th Congressional District on Monday in what had been hailed as a “unity tour” after a fractious Republican primary that saw state Sen. John McGuire oust Rep. Bob Good as the party’s nominee.
It also served another purpose: to rev up the rural base that Republicans increasingly depend on in statewide elections.
There’s no denying that there are hard feelings among some Republicans in the 5th District after the Good-McGuire primary, which was ultimately decided by a scant 366 votes — and a recount. Some Good partisans have vowed to cast write-in votes for their candidate in November; The Washington Post quoted a former Campbell County Republican chairman who said he was “as unmotivated as I have been in my life,” so unmotivated that he might not vote at all in November.
Virginia Republican Party chair Rich Anderson discounts this chatter of a write-in campaign. “People’s political DNA will kick in,” and they will eventually come around to the party nominee, he said Monday. I asked him and Will Pace of the Pittsylvania County Republican Party how they’d rate the divisions among 5th District Republicans on a scale of 1-10, 10 being the highest. Pace put the hard feelings at a three. “I was going to say four,” Anderson said, “but that will dissipate to zero over time.”
Pace pointed out that 5th District feelings have been through this before, when Good ousted Rep. Denver Riggleman in 2020. Riggleman, though, has moved into a different orbit entirely — he’s now part of Republicans for Harris — while Good has already filed to run again two years from now. Maybe that’s just a paperwork thing; maybe it’s not. We’ll see.
It’s clear there are still some Republicans in the district who are not excited about McGuire. The first person I met while I waited for the tour to arrive at the Dairy Freeze in Altavista was Pittsylvania County Supervisor Tim Dudley, who had been a Good supporter. He’d just come from the tour’s previous stop in Chatham and said of McGuire: “He’s got a long way to go to impress me.” On the other hand, McGuire is the Republican nominee, so Dudley was there, not just for one but two stops.
At a later stop in Bedford, I saw multiple Good supporters, including Curt Diemer, a Republican city council candidate in Lynchburg. “Every Republican leader I’ve spoken to is ready to unite and win,” he said.
How the 5th District voted in 2020
Computing the presidential vote by congressional district isn’t as easy as you might think. The 5th District has 24 localities but three of them are split between congressional districts. I added up the vote totals in the 21 “whole” ones. That was simple. The three split ones are trickier. That’s because in 2020 there were a lot of absentee votes from early voting, but those votes weren’t attributed to specific precincts. Now, thanks to a new law sponsored by state Sen. David Suetterlein, R-Roanoke County, they are, but that doesn’t help our 2020 analysis. I can add up the precinct totals for those three split counties — Albemarle, Bedford and Hanover — but I know that leaves out the absentees from those precincts. That means the ultimate numbers aren’t precise, but, for my purposes here, they’re close enough. Albemarle involves just one precinct. Bedford and Hanover involve more and, while absentee votes generally trend Democratic, in those two localities they went Republican. That means I’m probably underestimating the Republican margin in the 5th District by maybe a few thousand votes.
That said, what I came up with was Trump 226,590, Biden 190,659. We know that Good polled 31,219 votes in this year’s Republican primary — so even if all of those Good voters sat out the election, and the 2024 numbers mirror 2020, then Republicans would still have a majority in the 5th District, although not a very big one — 195,371 Republican votes. We also know there’s always some drop-off from the presidential race to down-ballot races, but the point is to show that while the Good-McGuire primary was contentious, the number of potential Republican voters in the district is far larger than those who took part in the primary.
While every political party desires unity, as a practical matter McGuire doesn’t need any of Good’s primary supporters to vote for him. Even if they all sat out the election, he’d still win the 5th District — as long as the presidential vote mirrors four years ago, and as long as every Trump voter (save those Good partisans) stuck with him. See the accompanying box that walks through the math on this.
If someone had shown up at any of those political events Monday and didn’t know the backstory, they might not have known there’d been a vicious primary. Youngkin never mentioned it and McGuire touched on it only lightly: “If you voted for me, I love you. If you didn’t vote for me, I love you.” Instead, the main purpose seemed to be to fire up voters in the Republican heartland for the whole ticket.
“The way to win elections in Virginia is to blow out the vote in Altavista,” Youngkin told a small crowd at the Dairy Freeze that was surprised to see the governor and his entourage roll in. (That entourage included not just McGuire but also Senate candidate Hung Cao.) It was also an adoring crowd, as many people lined up to get their picture taken with him. This should come as no surprise: He took 74% of the vote in Altavista when he ran for governor, and that wasn’t even his best precinct in Campbell County. (That was Three Forks, where he took 89.5%.)
In Bedford, where Youngkin spoke at the opening of the local Republican headquarters, he again emphasized how important rural voters are: “We must win Bedford with 80% of the vote.” Consider that a stretch goal but not by much: When Trump ran in 2020, he took 73.1% in Bedford. “We have to turn out and vote,” Youngkin told the crowd. “When we do that we can overcome the other parts of Virginia.” He said when he met with Trump earlier this year, the governor told the former president the key to carrying Virginia was to do “less bad” in Northern Virginia, run strong with military veterans in Hampton Roads, and then “we’ve got to blow it out in our red counties.”
Here’s where I could write about the colorful part of Youngkin’s tour Monday through some of those red counties — the governor taking ice cream orders for fellow Republicans at the Dairy Freeze in Altavista. Or I could write about the math.
The picture below will have to suffice for the color. Let’s go with the math.
I went over some of these numbers in a previous column but they bear repeating (and elaborating upon). We all know that there’s a geographical divide in our contemporary politics — with Democrats dominating in cities (and many but not all) suburbs, while Republicans crush them in most rural areas (the ones with large minority populations are the exceptions). However, here’s what’s not so well understood, but may be even more important: In Virginia, the Democratic vote in many rural localities did not decline very much from 2008 to 2020, with the exception of the state’s westernmost counties. Across Southside, Democratic declines — as measured in terms of actual votes, not percentages — were often rather slight. In Campbell County, for instance, the Democratic vote only went down 0.26% over 12 years. In Bedford County, it declined only 0.4%. The demise of the rural Democrat (again, outside those westernmost counties) is greatly exaggerated.
What's happened, though, is that Republicans have increased their number of voters — even in counties that are losing population.
Let's look at Pittsylvania County, where Youngkin's tour began Monday. Yes, it's important to know that the Republican percentage there has increased from 61.5% in 2008 to 69.4% in 2020. Here's what's more important, though: The raw Republican vote there has increased from 18,730 for John McCain in 2008 to 23,751 for Trump in 2020 — even though the Democratic vote declined only slightly, and even though the county overall lost population. It's not that Democratic voters converted to Republican ones (although some may have), it's that Republicans have produced new voters in a place where few thought they could be found.
We see this over and over across rural Virginia. In Campbell County, the Democratic vote from 2008 to 2020 dropped by just 21. Democrats are just as numerous in Campbell as they always have been. However, the Republican vote in that time grew by 3,801, even though the county's overall population barely changed.
Here's another way to think about that: In 2020, 17 of the 20 localities with the biggest increases in turnout were Republican ones. according to figures compiled by the Virginia Public Access Project. Obviously that wasn't enough — Trump lost Virginia then. Still, every election starts from zero and Republicans hope to both repeat that big rural turnout from four years ago — and increase it. Is that possible? Mathematically speaking, yes. Even with those big turnout increases four years ago, many Republican-voting rural localities still vote at lower levels than some of their Democratic-voting counterparts in metro Virginia. That means Republicans are still leaving some votes uncast. (Case in point: Democratic-voting Falls Church had a turnout of 79.1% four years ago; Republican-voting Buchanan County had a turnout of 64.9%.)
Can Republicans squeeze even more votes out of rural Virginia? To do that, they'll need to increase turnout, and to do that, they may need to turn to something that's been anathema to some Republicans: early voting.
Youngkin has pushed early voting before, and he did so again Monday. In Bedford, he devoted a goodly portion of his talk to emphasizing how secure Virginia's voting systems are: “We have paper ballots,” “We have counting machines, not voting machines,” “Ballots are held in a secure location.”
He pointed out that voting begins next week — early voting begins Sept. 20. “I didn't make the rules,” he said, but emphasized that Republicans shouldn't trust to turn out voters on just one day when Democrats are trying to do it over 45. Turning to a sports metaphor, Youngkin urged Republicans: “We have got to flood the zone.”
I prefer data to anecdotal observation, but I'd be remiss if I didn't pass on this anecdotal observation: I'm seeing Trump signs this year in front of houses where I didn't see them four years ago or eight years ago. That doesn't mean those are new Trump voters; they may have always been Trump voters but this year felt moved to put out a sign. Still, my sense — as someone living in a part of the state where the Republican vote routinely tops 70% — is that there is more intensity this year than there has been in previous years. That may wind up meaning nothing. However, if any of those people take Youngkin's advice seriously — to recruit 10 other voters — then we could well see more rural voters for Trump this year than before. Will that be enough to carry Virginia? That depends on which polls you believe (see accompanying box). However, it does suggest to me that there could well be “hidden” Trump voters, both in Virginia and, perhaps more importantly, in other states that clearly are swing states.
New poll shows Harris ahead in Virginia but it comes with a consumer advisory
The recent Roanoke College poll gave Kamala Harris an edge of 3 percentage points over Donald Trump in Virginia. On Monday, a Morning Consult poll came out that shows Harris leading Trump in Virginia 52% to 42%.
I'm not in a position to dispute a poll, but I will point out some consumer advisories. The Roanoke College poll is ranked 31st for accuracy by the Five Thirty Eight data website, while Morning Consult ranks 116th. I don't have access to the Morning Consult crosstabs and without those, it's difficult to make a good assessment of this new poll. It's entirely possible it's accurate. However, I think Democrats who dismissed the Roanoke College poll are letting enthusiasm triumph over data. I'll just gently point out that two other polls — both by unranked pollsters I'm not familiar with — had results similar to Roanoke College. It's also possible that all these polls are right; the whole point of campaigns is to change people's minds. Perhaps Virginians' minds have.
The best measure of polls, though, is to watch the campaigns: Where are they campaigning? Trump and Vance came to Virginia but haven't been back since. Neither Harris nor Tim Walz has been here, but lower-level surrogates have been. That tells me the action right now is somewhere else but Democrats aren't completely certain about Virginia.
I prefer data to anecdotal observation, but I'd be remiss if I didn't pass on this anecdotal observation: I'm seeing Trump signs this year in front of houses where I didn't see them four years ago or eight years ago. That doesn't mean those are new Trump voters; they may have always been Trump voters but this year felt moved to put out a sign. Still, my sense — as someone living in a part of the state where the Republican vote routinely tops 70% — is that there is more intensity this year than there has been in previous years. That may wind up meaning nothing. However, if any of those people take Youngkin's advice seriously — to recruit 10 other voters — then we could well see more rural voters for Trump this year than before. Will that be enough to carry Virginia? That depends on which polls you believe (see another accompanying box). However, it does suggest to me that there could well be “hidden” Trump voters, both in Virginia and, perhaps more importantly, in other states that clearly are swing states.
I'll have more to say about this poll in my weekly political newsletter, West of the Capital. You can sign up for it or any of our other free newsletters here: