What used to be farmland around Harrisonburg is now growing subdivisions, strip malls and something even more unusual in the Shenandoah Valley: Democratic voters.
In less than two decades’ time, Harrisonburg has flipped from being a reliably Republican city to an even more reliably Democratic one — the classic blue dot in a bright red sea. As recently as 2009, Harrisonburg cast 57.7% of its votes for the Republican candidate for governor. By last fall, the city voted 61.4% for the Democratic candidate for president.
Harrisonburg’s Republican vote has stayed about the same, in terms of total number of votes, but the population growth that had pumped up city’s population by 28% since 2000 has brought in overwhelmingly Democratic voters to a city now dominated by James Madison University — a school which long ago expanded beyond its original grounds to turn what had been forestland across Interstate 81 into a second campus.
Now, all those population changes could be felt all the way to Richmond.
Out of 100 House of Delegates districts, only two of those outside the urban crescent are considered competitive this year, at least measured by which districts have been officially targeted by either Democrats or Republicans.
One of those is in the New River and Roanoke valleys, where Democrat Lily Franklin is challenging Republican incumbent Chris Obenshain in a rematch of their 2023 race. That was a close race before (Obenshain won by 183 votes) and will likely be close again, no matter who prevails.
The other race is in Harrisonburg and part of Rockingham County, where Democrat Andrew Payton is challenging Republican incumbent Tony Wilt. The district — House District 34 — is still considered “leans Republican” by the Virginia Public Access Project. It voted 52.7% for Donald Trump last year and Wilt holds a significant financial advantage — ($245,284 cash on hand at the end of August to $88,347 for Payton). Still, the fact that Democrats have chosen to target this race at all shows how much the community is changing. Almost exactly half the voters in the district (50.09%) are in Harrisonburg. In a year where polls show Democratic voters are more enthusiastic so far than Republican ones, it’s not hard to imagine the district tilting Democratic.
In many ways, Payton’s campaign is a textbook Democratic challenge this year. Much like Democratic gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger, he emphasizes the theme of “affordability.” His advertising hits Wilt for voting against expanding Medicaid and against creating a Prescription Drug Affordability Board, and for being too friendly with electric utilities.
Republican legislators felt that Medicaid expansion was too expensive and that the drug board wouldn’t be effective. The part about utilities seems to turn on Wilt’s vote for a bill that would allow Appalachian Power to recover the cost of developing a small modular nuclear reactor, or SMR; that depends on who you think should foot the bill — ratepayers or investors — or perhaps how you feel about nuclear energy in general. For what it’s worth, Wilt’s district is not in Appalachian’s service territory, so his constituents wouldn’t have been affected, but many Democrats these days are looking for ways to run against power companies.
One thing that does set Payton’s campaign apart, though, is a line of attack that essentially accuses Wilt of being on the take. Many campaigns have a sharp edge to them, but usually they’re over policy differences. The accusations here are ones we don’t see very much, so let’s look into them. There are two particular charges:
The charge: ‘Tony Wilt voted to spend millions of taxpayer dollars on major projects benefitting his company.‘
The reality: Wilt voted to raise his own taxes.
The footnotes in the ad cite House Bill 2718 in 2019 and an April 11, 2019, issue of Bond Buyer.
The bill in question dealt with the creation of the Interstate 81 Corridor Improvement Fund. The bill created a regional gas tax and other fees to help fund improvements along I-81. Most Republicans opposed the bill because of the increased taxes but enough supported it for the measure to pass the GOP-controlled House by 58-39. Among those voting yes were several Republicans along the I-81 corridor, including Wilt. It went on to pass the Senate 22-14 (with three Republican votes) and was signed into law by then-Gov. Ralph Northam. If you travel along I-81 today and see construction underway, this bill is part of the reason why.
So how did Wilt allegedly benefit from this vote? Here’s what that Bond Buyer article referenced in the ad says:
Delegate Tony Wilt, R-Harrisonburg, whose family is in the trucking business, said funding I-81 improvements was a top priority for him. He voted against the bills when they proposed using
tolls, but later voted for them when the plan was changed to taxes and fees.
While Wilt said the bill will still pose additional costs on his family’s trucking business, “there is
absolutely a cost to all citizens and businesses along the corridor if we continue to do nothing.”
“This plan is a more equitable approach than some previously considered and will fund
improvements that result in more efficient traffic flow and a decrease in the terrible loss of life so many families have had to endure,” he said.
To believe that Wilt or his company benefited from this vote, you’d have to believe that he or they would have paid more in tolls than in taxes. That seems impossible to figure out, though, since no toll rate was ever set. The original bill set no toll rates, merely creating the authority to impose them. Tolls proved quite unpopular, though, which is why tolls were later stripped out of the bill and a regional gas tax was substituted. In the end, Wilt voted for a bill that Bond Buyer says “will still pose additional costs on his family’s trucking business.”
Feel free to see this differently, but that does not sound to me as if the bill benefited his company, except to the extent that the trucks could run on a better interstate with all the rest of us. In theory, Wilt and his trucks might have wound up paying more under the version of the bill he voted for than the one he opposed. He and his trucks could have avoided tolls by not driving on I-81; with a regional gas tax, he and his truckers can’t avoid paying more for gas no matter where they’re driving in the valley.
Wilt could more fairly take credit for some of the improvements underway on I-81 and claim a “profile in courage” vote for bucking the party line to side with Democrats on the funding plan.
The charge: ‘Wilt took $700,000 in taxpayer loans and kept them.‘
The reality: He paid them back when most other borrowers didn’t.
The source line here credits Pro Publica from April 8, 2020. This references a database of Paycheck Protection Program loans that were given out during the early days of the pandemic so that companies could keep paying employees even if they had no or reduced revenue. The goal was to avoid both mass unemployment and business bankruptcies. That database does show that Wilt’s concrete company, Superior Concrete, took out a Paycheck Protection Program loan for $702,000 on April 8, 2020.
To be fair to the Payton campaign, that database entry doesn’t show the rest of the story: Wilt says he paid the loan back in full, with interest, on Oct. 26, 2020. When I asked for documentation, Wilt’s campaign shared copies of the checks.
Pro Publica did not respond to my inquiry about why its entry for Superior Concrete is not updated when other loans are.
In paying back the loans, Wilt was something of a rarity. The Small Business Administration reported in 2022 that 92% of the PPP loans were forgiven. A report this year by the human resources website Homebase says the forgiveness rate was up to 98% but did not cite a source.
Payton’s ad would not be wrong — if this were five years ago. As things stand now, though, Wilt could claim that he made sure his employees got paid through the pandemic — and then did something that very few other business owners did: He paid back the loan.
For more on Payton and Wilt
You can see how the candidates answered our questionnaire on the Harrisonburg and Rockingham County pages of our Voter Guide. To find out who’s running in other localities, start on the main page of our Voter Guide. Early voting is now underway.
The rest of this particular ad stands on firm ground. If you disagree with Wilt’s votes on Medicaid expansion, the Prescription Drug Advisory Board or who should pay for development of small modular reactors in Appalachian Power’s service territory, then you have a viable alternative in Payton. Those are all standard policy differences that voters can and should make up their minds about. However, the allegations that Wilt voted for a bill to benefit his company and “took” taxpayer money seem misleading, at best.
Medicaid expansion happened before Cardinal was launched, but if you’re curious about the proposed Prescription Drug Affordability Board, you can read coverage by Cardinal health care reporter Emily Schabacker here and some of our early coverage about small modular nuclear reactors here.
People often ask me about various campaign ads that they see. I always tell them the same thing: You’re better off to ignore most of them, because they are not a reliable source of finding information about the candidates — no matter which side they’re on. If you do start paying attention to ads, I caution people to apply the same consumer skill to politics that they do to anything else. You wouldn’t take a commercial’s word that one particular car brand was better than another; you’d do some comparison shopping, you might even take it for a test drive. That’s obviously harder to do with politics; it’s taken me inquiries over several days to sort through the claims made here.
It’s been a long time since that part of the Shenandoah Valley has had a competitive General Assembly race. We have to go back 40 years to find a Democrat who won there: Paul Cline upset Phoebe Orebaugh when the Flood of ’85 kept many of her supporters from getting to the polls. Two years later, with more normal weather, Orebaugh returned to office with a wide margin and Republicans have been pretty secure since. A lot has changed demographically in the Shenandoah Valley since then to make this district competitive without a flood skewing the turnout. If voters today prefer the Democratic challenger over the Republican incumbent, it ought to be because they prefer his policies, not because they’ve fallen for two attack lines that don’t really hold up under scrutiny.
Where the candidates stand
You can see how the candidates for governor (as well as lieutenant governor, attorney general and many House of Delegates candidates) answered our questionnaire on our Voter Guide. We have individual pages for all 133 counties and cities in Virginia so no matter where you live, you can look on our Voter Guide to see who’s on the ballot in your community.
Want more political news and insights? You can sign up for our weekly political newsletter, West of the Capital. This week I’ll be taking another look at the latest early voting trends.