Taking the 5th? Here’s the challenge facing any Democrat who wants to take on McGuire in the midterms.

Lynchburg Republicans have filed a federal lawsuit to challenge the state law that has been interpreted as a mandate that parties must nominate their candidates through primaries, as opposed to some party-run process such as a convention or a mass meeting.

I say “interpreted as” because the law’s sponsor — Del. Dan. Helmer, D-Fairfax County — says it wasn’t intended as a 100% bar on other methods, just a requirement that those methods meet certain thresholds for allowing for the participation of military personnel and others who might not be able to attend in person. However, Attorney General Jason Miyares and others (including the lawyer for the Republican Party of Virginia) have ruled that the only practical way to satisfy the law is through a primary.

I recently wrote about the Lynchburg Republicans’ suit, then followed up in that week’s Friday political newsletter, West of the Capital, with a scenario about how the Lynchburg suit could return former Rep. Bob Good to office. The short version: If 5th District Republicans could hold a convention, rather than a primary, Good might stand a better chance at ousting Rep. John McGuire as the Republican nominee. 

That observation prompted a response from one Democratic reader, who felt I was giving short shrift to the possibility that a Democratic candidate could defeat either Good or McGuire next year — so the Republican method of nomination wouldn’t matter. The 5th District has long been one in Democratic sights, so it’s natural that Democrats looking ahead to next year’s congressional midterms would be wondering what their prospects are in that district.

To state the obvious: Midterms historically work against the party in power — at the moment, Republicans. The most vulnerable Republican in Virginia’s congressional delegation will be Rep. Jen Kiggans of Virginia Beach. The 2nd has long been a swing district and even last year, in a good Republican year, she won reelection with just 50.7% of the vote. Whoever holds that seat is almost always going to be vulnerable.

The most vulnerable Democrat will be Eugene Vindman of Prince William County, who won last year’s 7th District election with just under 51.2% of the vote. As with the 2nd, the 7th is also a swing district no matter who is in office.

McGuire won last year’s 5th District race with 57.26%, which seems pretty standard for that district. In 2022, Good won it with 57.6%. Those are the only two elections held in the 5th in its current configuration. That’s an important point. Democrats remember how L.F. Payne once represented the district for almost nine years, how Tom Perriello won the district in 2008 and how Leslie Cockburn and Cameron Webb came close in 2018 and 2020 — but the district has changed shape since those elections, and in ways that help Republicans, not Democrats.

Example: The most recent redistricting took away Brunswick County (which Webb won with 58% of the vote) and added Republican-voting counties (Amelia, Powhatan, Goochland, Louisa and part of Hanover County); the Republican vote share in the 2022 midterms started at 64% in Goochland and worked its way up to 75% in Amelia and Goochland). It’s not the same 5th District that it used to be.

Even if it were the old 5th District, that wouldn’t necessarily help Democrats because the nation’s political polarization has made Republican counties more Republican and Democratic counties more Democratic. However, in the 5th, those Republican counties have become redder at a faster rate than the Democratic ones have become bluer. When Perriello won his election, his best county was Albemarle, which he won with 63.3% of the vote. Last year’s Democratic candidate, Gloria Witt, won Albemarle with 64.6%. By contrast, Perriello’s worst county was Campbell County, where Republicans took 64.4%. Last year, Republicans upped their vote share in Campbell to 74.5%.

There were similar increases in the Republican vote share across the district. One exception was in Buckingham County, where the Republican trend has been even stronger. If we go back to the 1980s and ’90s when Democrat L.F. Payne represented the 5th, he won Buckingham County in every election, taking 60.6% of the vote there in his last run. By the time Perriello ran in 2008, he still won the county with 50.2% of the vote. The Republican share that year was 49.8%. By 2020, Bob Good took 55.1% in Buckingham. Last year, McGuire rolled up 62.8%. That highlights the central challenge for Democrats in trying to win the 5th: They’d need to roll back a longstanding Republican trend among rural voters that has shown no signs of abating.

Nonetheless, McGuire’s winning share of 57.26% district-wide isn’t so high as to be impossibly out of reach. Let’s look at what Democrats would have to do to win the district. For that, I’ll go back to the 2018 election, the midterms of Trump’s first term. We have no way of knowing to what extent next year’s midterms will mirror Trump’s first midterms. He’s done more this time, but that can work both ways. Right now we’re seeing the protests, but we don’t really know what the people not protesting are thinking.

That year’s election pitted Republican Denver Riggleman against Democrat Leslie Cockburn. Riggleman won with 53.2% of the vote. That election was under the old redistricting map. The district then contained 23 localities. Democrats won just five of those, four of which remain in the current 5th District: Albemarle County, Charlottesville, Danville and Prince Edward County. Any successful Democratic bid has to start there.

To make a fair comparison, we’ll look at how the localities that are in the 5th District now voted then, and compare those with the only midterm election the current 5th District has had: the Bob Good-Josh Throneburg election of 2022 that Good won with 57.6%. Also, while I’ve cited percentages thus far, what really matters are the actual vote totals — and the margins for one side or another. So let’s go!

OK, here’s what that shows. In the four most Democratic localities in the 5th District, the Democratic vote was 4,424 votes higher in 2018 (the Trump midterms) than in 2022 (the Biden midterms), with more than half that vote drop in 2022 coming in Danville. Clearly, Democrats in 2026 will need to mine those four localities for as many votes as possible, particularly Danville. However, that vote wasn’t enough to win before, so what needs to change for them to win this time? Even if Democrats doubled their 2018 margins in their best localities, they’re still nowhere close to winning. 

Good’s winning margin in 2022 was 47,195 votes. If Democrats had produced those 4,424 missing votes in their four best localities, they’d have still lost by 42,771 — so the party’s challenge is to find those votes (and a few more) in the rest of the district. Can they?

Let’s next compare the 2018 margins and the 2022 margins in the 10 localities that were in the district both times. (I’m leaving out an 11th, Bedford County, because both times the county was split between districts but the split changed, and while I’m doing a lot of math here, we can get the general picture without that math.)

What we see here is that in these “core” counties in the 5th, the Republican margin grew by 9,241 votes from 2018 to 2022 while the Democratic localities saw the Democratic margins fell by 4,424. Whether that was because of Democratic overperformance in 2018 or Democratic underperformance in 2022 is a matter of debate — probably some of both. Regardless, what if a Democratic candidate next year could restore the 2018 margins in those counties? They’d pick up 9,642 votes but that still leaves the party 33,129 votes short districtwide.

We still have all those “new” localities added to the 5th — mostly in the eastern part of the district — but here’s the problem for Democrats: All those “new” counties vote Republican at an higher level than many of more traditional counties in the district. Amelia and Powhatan counties voted 75% Republican in the 2022 midterms. Democrats will want to cut into those margins but those counties are less fruitful Democratic territory than any of the traditional counties in the 5th. One possible exception is on the western side of the district, where Lynchburg was added. It’s a Republican-voting city but at a lesser percentage than the rest of the 5th District. Every now and then, Democrats do manage to win in Lynchburg. Joe Biden carried the Hill City in 2020, for instance. Not by much, but he did carry it.

In Lynchburg next year, the congressional race might get overshadowed by city council elections. Lynchburg’s three at-large seats will be on the ballot, and to say that the city’s council politics the past few years has been contentious is something of an understatement. Whether that works in favor of Democrats or Republicans is yet to be determined, but Democrats would like to think it’s to their advantage. If they’re right, that would help a Democratic congressional candidate, but that’s still not enough to win districtwide. In 2022, Good carried Lynchburg with a margin of 1,688 votes. Let’s suppose that a Democrat next year wiped out that Republican margin in Lynchburg and carried the city by the same margin that Biden once did (951 votes) — that’s still a margin change of just 2,639 districtwide when Democrats need more than 33,000 votes.

At the national level, Democrats seem to have signalled that the 5th will not be a priority for them next year. House Majority Forward, a Democratic group, has been buying television ads in 13 districts around the country now represented by Republicans, looking to soften up those incumbents in anticipation of midterms. The latest round of ads deal with President Trump’s tariffs, and the group has bought ads in two Republican congressional districts in Virginia but neither is the 5th. Instead, the group is putting money into the 1st District, now held by Rob Wittman of Westmoreland County, and the always-swingy 2nd District seat in Hampton Roads held by Jen Kiggans. The 5th has more jobs exposed to retaliatory tariffs than either of those districts but that still wasn’t enough to persuade House Majority Forward that the 5th is a winnable district for Democrats.

I’m not saying it can’t be done. I’ve seen many unexpected things in my time, from the Washington Nationals winning the World Series to Trump winning the White House, not once but twice. However, I am saying that for a Democrat to win in the 5th District next year, he or she will need to go into the rural heart of the district and win votes at levels Democrats haven’t seen in many years.

While this column is about the 2026 elections, don’t forget that we have elections in 2025. Early voting starts May 2 for the June 17 primaries. To see who’s running, and find other voter information, check out our Voter Guide. We’ve sent questionnaires to all the candidates running in those primaries. We’ll post their responses shortly before early voting begins.Candidates who have questions about the questionnaire can contact us at elections@cardinalnews.org.