In his first campaign, way back in 1989, Bobby Orrock was a reassuring voice in a legislative district south of Fredericksburg that had begun the unsettling transition to suburbanization. Orrock’s rural background resonated with the district’s voters — rescue squad volunteer, high school agriculture teacher and Baptist church deacon. He was the youngest of eight children who grew up on farmland that his family had worked for three generations.
Orrock defeated a lawyer who had represented the area for 10 years by promising to bring a common-sense approach to the House of Delegates.
He went to Richmond with a copy of the Holy Bible and a can of B.S. Repellant, which had a piece of tape covering up the four-letter word.
During the first week of his first legislative session in 1990, Orrock vowed he would never let Richmond change him. “When I stop being Bobby,” he told a local reporter, “that’s when I’ll get out.”
More than three decades later, after he had become one of the most senior members of the Virginia House of Delegates, Orrock understood that politicians don’t always get to leave on their own terms.
Still, when his time was up last month, Orrock wasn’t prepared. His internal polls showed he likely would win by 1 or 2 percentage points, but he lost by more than 4.
“It still hasn’t sunk in,” he said, three weeks after his defeat.
The simple explanation for his loss was a statewide backlash to President Donald Trump that swept him and 12 other House Republicans out of office.
“Absent Trump,” Orrock said, “I think we might have lost three to five seats.”
The more complicated explanation is the influx of new residents, many of them suburbanites migrating south from the Washington area down the Interstate 95 corridor in search of more affordable housing. In the last 30 years, Spotsylvania County’s population nearly tripled from 57,000 to 140,000. The newcomers are now extending farther south to Caroline County, which has added nearly 2,900 residents since 2020, making it Virginia’s fourth fastest-growing county this decade.
Bobby is still Bobby, but many of the newcomers don’t know him. And his rural values like frugality, Christian devotion and moderation don’t resonate with the district’s voters like they used to.
Orrock acknowledged a shift in his district’s culture. “And even more so we have seen politics in general become far more abrasive and confrontational,” he said.
Orrock has hardly been a passive bystander to the forces reshaping the I-95 corridor between Fredericksburg and Richmond. Two years ago, he and his seven siblings sold the 1,100-acre family farm to Amazon. Last month, three weeks after Election Day, local officials announced plans for three “hyperscale” data centers on the former Orrock property, which straddles the Caroline-Spotsylvania county line.
Though data centers were a central issue in the recent Spotylvania elections (two outspoken critics of the industry won seats, one of whom beat an incumbent), the issue never surfaced in the news coverage or online ads in the House District 66 race.
His Democratic opponent, Nicole Cole, said some voters she met while going door to door mentioned Orrock cashing in on the data center project. “But it was too complicated to fit in a 30-second ad,” she said.
Since his defeat, Orrock, 70, has sought comfort in deeply fixed routines. He pulls shifts as an EMT for the Ladysmith Volunteer Rescue Squad, which he joined in high school after learning he could get out of class to run calls. He attends services at Bethany Baptist Church, where he is a fixture as a deacon. Before Sunday services, he gets up before dawn to travel to the studios of WFLS-FM, where for the last 24 years he has had a country gospel radio show from 6 to 10 a.m. (This has been updated to correct the nature of hi service with the rescue squad.)
A farewell to shoe-leather campaigning
On his Sunday-morning drive, traffic is mercifully light, but signs of change abound. The radio studio is located in a new development near the Massaponax exit on I-95, up a hillside that has been sheared away to accommodate a Walmart Superstore, a Lowe’s Home Center and an expansive Carmax lot.
The route takes him past several five-story apartment complexes that soar above massive retaining walls. What makes these apartments so forbidding, however, is a no-solicitation policy that rendered residents — many of whom migrated from Northern Virginia — off-limits to Orrock and his considerable personal charm.
In his first campaign, Orrock wore out a pair of shoes walking door to door. But he found that the time-tested way to connect to voters was far less effective in 2025. Not only do high-density apartment complexes not allow solicitation, but the advent of doorbell cameras means that residents can now screen visitors. In 1989, Orrock said people would answer his knock at about two-thirds of the houses he visited. Now, he’s lucky if 1 in 10 come to the door.
“We don’t know our neighbors,” Orrock said between songs on his radio show. “There is so much more of an isolationism in society.”
On the off-chance that any of the newcomers in those high-density apartments tuned into his country gospel show in the five months leading to the November election, they would not have heard Orrock’s good-natured voice forecasting the weather, announcing upcoming praise services at area churches and fielding requests from longtime listeners.
The radio station, fearful that it would be accused of giving Orrock unfair airtime, instructed him to remain silent throughout his four-hour show.
“They almost lost me there,” said Orrock, who has been a weekend DJ on WFLS longer than he has served in the House of Delegates.
He decided not to quit, drawn to his love of the music and his desire to be there each Sunday morning for his longtime fans, who are used to his signature signoff. “Have a good week, be kind to one another, take care, and God bless.”
Fighting for his political life
As it became apparent this fall that Orrock was in a fight for his political life, campaign advisors told him the nice-guy routine would not cut it. Backed by $1.5 million from the House Democratic Caucus, Cole bashed Orrock for any number of conservative votes he had taken over the years, particularly his opposition to abortion. The Cole campaign took out a Facebook ad with a video showing Orrock’s face spinning on a turntable. “Bobby Orrock’s record on abortion keeps repeating itself,” the voiceover said. “Thirty-five years of attacking women’s rights. … Don’t let Bobby Orrock’s record keep repeating.”
His advisors urged Orrock to go after Cole, a member of the Spotsylvania County School Board, which has spent several years locked in a dysfunctional squabble between conservative and liberal members. Cole went as far as filing a $1 million defamation lawsuit against two of her colleagues.
Orrock refused to go negative; he even refused to pay for opposition research.
But in the final weeks, Orrock relented. His campaign produced a Facebook ad that blasted Cole as just “another left-wing politician” who once accused cops of “inflicting terror on our communities.”
But the modest $2,500 ad buy was lost in the tsunami of social media and TV ads from Cole. Campaign ad spending tracked by the nonpartisan Virginia Public Access Project shows Cole spent $1.2 million, more than 10 times the $95,000 spent by Orrock.
Orrock said he is at peace with his decision to (mostly) steer clear of negative ads. “That was as far as I would let my consultant take it,” he said.
In politics, negative campaigning can be in the eye of the beholder. In his first campaign, Orrock attacked the 10-year voting record of his opponent, accusing Democrat Robert Ackerman of raising taxes and being soft on child pornographers. Ackerman accused Orrock of spreading “half-truths and distortions.” Orrock denied running a negative campaign, saying he was simply citing facts.
Fast forward 36 years, and the shoe was on the other foot.
Cole accused Orrock of supporting a “total ban” on abortion. Orrock says Cole is distorting his vote in favor of a 2012 “personhood” bill that would have given unborn children “at any stage of development” the same rights of any individual. Orrock says the proposal “never was intended to ban abortion.”
Cole defended the attacks, saying she was just presenting the facts. Opponents of the 2012 legislation said that if the U.S. Supreme Court were ever to overturn Roe v. Wade (which has since occurred), the law could have been used to outlaw all abortions in Virginia.
Cole said one key reason for her victory is that Orrock overstayed his welcome in a district undergoing rapid transformation. She vowed to term-limit herself to no more than eight years. “To have someone in there so long, there’s no way you can keep pace with the changes,” she said.
Amazon arrives
Anyone who has driven up I-95 can witness that a big transformation is afoot at the Thornburg exit, where construction cranes dominate the skyline on what had been fields. Kalahari Resorts is nearing completion of a 900-room hotel, Virginia’s largest indoor waterpark and a massive convention center.
The big change coming to the other side of I-95 is not yet visible, but nonetheless sent tremors through Caroline elections last month. Two county supervisors lost their seats over their support for a massive data center planned for the Orrock family land.
Early in the race, the Cole campaign conducted a poll testing the effectiveness of questions about Orrock profiting from the data center. She said it moved voters, but not nearly as much as the issues that became the focus of her campaign: abortion and school funding.
But Cole heard about the data center while campaigning door to door. She said some suspected that Orrock had used his position to sell the land and then pull strings to get the property zoned.
When it was first announced in 2023, the data center project was called the Orrock Tech Campus. But Bobby Orrock said he later requested his family name be taken off the project to quell rumors that he had used his influence to enrich his family.
Orrock said the truth is the property had been on the market for 30 years, ever since his mother died and two of his older brothers closed down their dairy operation. They set what they considered a high price, which Orrock said they adjusted upwards about four years ago.
Orrock said the family received a couple of lowball offers from residential developers who were looking to carve the land into 10-acre lots. But the Orrocks held out until 2022, when they were told that an unnamed buyer was willing to meet the full asking price.
“This was the first time anyone had come along and right out of the chute would pay what we had it listed for,” Orrock said.
The buyer demanded that Orrock and two other trustees of a family trust sign nondisclosure agreements. “We didn’t know who was behind the contract,” Orrock said. “We didn’t know it was for a data center, contingent on rezoning.”
But Orrock said he was later tipped off by a lobbyist in Richmond that he might consider abstaining on any legislation dealing with tax incentives for data centers. In February 2023, Orrock abstained on two such bills that came to the House floor.
Amazon filed a rezoning application with Caroline and Spotsylvania counties in May 2023, but Orrock said that he played no role behind the scenes. “The rumor mill out there was that I had influenced the rezoning,” he said. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
After the zoning was approved, Amazon bought five parcels that made up the Orrock farm in December 2023 for $31.5 million, according to property records in Caroline and Spotsylvania counties.
The price worked out to $31,000 an acre, which was a huge premium over the tax assessment value of $2,088 an acre. But the deal also now looks like a bargain for the developers, considering that data center land in Northern Virginia has sold for $3 million to $4 million an acres.
“I had planned my life for retirement,” Orrock said. “I ended up with more money out of the deal than I could have ever imagined.”
Orrock believes his family’s property is large enough that the data center campus can coexist with the rural feel of the area. With a high-voltage line running across the property, there is no need to build new power lines.
A return to the farm
In Richmond, it’s hard to find anyone who has something bad to say about Orrock. Richard Cranwell, the Democrats’ feisty floor leader who made sport of putting Republicans in their place in the 1990s, recalled Orrock as a “straight-up” guy.
“You could count on him when he gave you his word — it was good as gold,” Cranwell said.
In a legislature that was dominated by lawyers, Orrock made it his business to write laws in plain-spoken language that any of his constituents could understand. When he rose in seniority, he became known for his penchant for wringing legalese from bills that came before his Health and Human Services Committee.
“I hope I don’t flatter myself too much, but I became known as the ‘great amender,’” Orrock said. “The more words you put in, the more potential for misinterpretation.”
Orrock says he will miss many aspects of serving in the legislature, including the “1” House of Delegates license plate that he earned through seniority. But he says he will not long for the increasingly poisonous atmosphere in the General Assembly, where he said collegiality is largely a thing of the past.
Orrock doesn’t sugarcoat the good old days. He recalls when most legislative committees had a designated “killing” subcommittee where bills offered by the minority party went to die. Heck, Orrock says, he even set up such a panel on the committee he chaired.
The difference now, he said, is that the Democrats in control don’t even allow some bills to be heard. Last year, he said three bills were never docketed.
“The last two years there have been a number of violations of rules of the House and parliamentary procedure — the bedrock of the institution,” he said.
When asked if he is worried about the institution’s future, the normally loquacious Orrock replied, “Yep.”
For Orrock, one upside of his loss is that he and his wife will get to move back full-time to their 100-acre farm in Caroline. His political career has twice necessitated that he set up a temporary residence in the Spotsylvania suburbs. In 1991, Democrats drew Orrock’s farm out of his district. A decade later, Republicans gained control and moved the farm back into the district.
But in 2023, the state Supreme Court drew maps that once again forced Orrock to decamp to Spotsylvania.
He expects to live full-time on the farm once his term ends in early January. “We’ll have everything in one refrigerator, not two,” Orrock said.
As for a possible rematch with Cole in 2027, Orrock appears to have moved on. “I probably will not be my opponent’s constituent,” he said.
_________________
Correction 9:30 a.m. Dec. 4: Data centers were an issue in this year’s elections in Spotsylvania County. The locality was incorrect in an earlier version of this story.