Seven of Virginia’s 11 congressional districts will see primary competitions in one party or another on Tuesday.
Virginia’s 5th Congressional District is the only federal race to have a primary contest for both Republicans and Democrats.
Three Republicans filed with the FEC to seek their party’s nomination for the seat. Two remain in the race and will appear on the ballot Tuesday.
The 5th District is considered a solidly Republican contest in Virginia by the Cook Political Report.
Regardless, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in February added the district to its list of races that are “in play” to potentially flip this year. A spokesperson for the DCCC did not mince words regarding the district’s incumbent Republican Rep. John McGuire on Wednesday.
“John McGuire has become part of the culture of corruption in Washington that people are sick and tired of, and he has voted to unleash skyrocketing prices and devastating health care cuts on his own community. Even his Republican primary opponent has called him ‘a huge disappointment,’” said DCCC spokesperson Eli Cousin. “McGuire is a weak, cash-strapped incumbent with a record of corruption and cost-spiking votes — that combination of factors puts this seat in play in November.”
Democrats have a steep uphill battle. McGuire, of Goochland, won the 5th District in 2024 with a 15-point margin, and President Donald Trump won the district with a 12-point margin that same year.
“I have beachfront property in Lynchburg to sell to anyone who believes Democrats can flip the Fifth District. They’re operating on our turf, and they’ll waste their time and money in an unwinnable district with a strong Republican incumbent,” said Reilly Richardson, National Republican Congressional Committee spokesperson, on Wednesday.
About $4 million has been raised across the district’s Republican and Democratic primary candidates. Former Congressman Tom Perriello, a Democrat, has led the field, claiming $2.1 million of the money raised. McGuire has raised $1.7 million so far, according to the Virginia Public Access Project.
Melanie Lucero, McGuire’s Republican primary opponent, raised $88,297. Rob Tracinski, a Democratic primary candidate, raised $54,102, and Suzanne Krzyzanowski, the third Democratic primary candidate, raised $16,897.
About the 2 Republicans
Neither the Lucero campaign nor the McGuire campaign made their candidate available for an interview, nor did they respond to repeated requests to fill out Cardinal News’ issue questionnaire on our Voter Guide.
Melanie Lucero is a veteran who served in the U.S. Marine Corps and later worked for the “U.S. Intelligence Community as an analyst,” according to her website. She and her husband launched a real estate investment business in the Lake Anna area.
In an interview earlier this summer with Cville Right Now, Lucero said she and McGuire agreed on many issues, such as support for President Donald Trump, but she called him a “puppet” and a “placeholder” who is “irrelevant” both in Congress and the district.
“That’s a huge difference between me and my opponent. He is a puppet. He’s there because he’s a placeholder,” Lucero told Cville Right Now. “Our current Congressman is just not influential enough to be a part of those conversations. He’s too irrelevant. The 5th district has an irrelevant Congressman sitting in that seat.”
McGuire’s campaign declined to make the candidate available to that news site.
Rep. John McGuire, a central Virginia native, is also a veteran who served in the U.S. Navy as a SEAL. He was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates in 2017 and to the state Senate in 2023. He challenged former 5th District Rep. Bob Good in a primary contest in 2024 and beat the incumbent by roughly 370 votes. McGuire has served one term in Congress. He has been endorsed by Trump as well as House Speaker Mike Johnson.
McGuire has introduced 22 bills. Two have passed the House. One would allow the Wintergreen resort in Nelson County to build an emergency exit to the Blue Ridge Parkway; the other is the “Make the District of Columbia Safe and Beautiful Act of 2025,” which would codify Trump’s executive orders dealing with public spaces and immigration enforcement in the nation’s capital. Both measures are pending in the U.S. Senate.
Meet the 3 Democrats vying for their party’s nomination
Dr. Suzanne Krzyzanowski is a Lynchburg-based family doctor — “womb to tomb,” she called her practice — and teaches in a residency program.
She decided to run for federal office because she saw firsthand the healthcare industry in crisis. The goal of her campaign, aside from winning the election, is to educate the electorate and lawmakers on hurdles in access to healthcare and to bring people together during a time of intense partisanship.
“I really felt like I can be a bridge because I don’t have an interest in anything except taking care of people,” she said.
She worked for years at the free clinic in Bedford and said that Medicaid expansion, through the Affordable Care Act, was a relief for Virginians — almost every single one of her patients qualified for the program, and she was able to offer them better care through her practice.
The Affordable Care Act was overall a “net positive,” she said, but changes are needed to make it more efficient for both patient and provider. She added that the U.S. needs a Universal Healthcare system, but it needs to be implemented in a bipartisan way, and that access to health insurance needs to be separated from employment status.
“I think there is a way to have the free market in play,” she said. “If we had some version of Medicare for all kick in after a certain level and the insurers only had to cover up to a certain amount, that would also bring down premiums.”
Krzyzanowski is a newcomer to politics, and she said that may appeal to voters.
“I’m not a politician, I do think that is some of my appeal to people,” she said. “I do have a perspective on healthcare, I have been doing this for 30 years, and I would be interested in trying to set policy in this domain.”
She added that if she is elected, she would be willing to work with the Trump administration to get bills enacted by presenting good ideas to the president that he can brand as his own.
“If we could get through a better plan than Obamacare and he wants to call it Trumpcare, then he can call it Trumpcare. My priority is to improve our healthcare system,” she said.
An optimist, Krzyzanowski said she believes the U.S. will get over its current hyperpartisan hump.
“Right wing and left wing, a bird needs two wings to fly,” she said. “Conservatives have some good ideas and liberals have some good ideas and when we get stuck just on one side or the other, we’re missing out on some possible good solutions.”
Former Democratic Congressman Tom Perriello beat incumbent Republican Rep. Virgil Goode in 2008 to flip the seat back to Democrats after Goode switched parties. Perriello, of Charlottesville, was one of the deciding votes to pass the Affordable Care Act in 2010. He served one term and lost to Republican Rep. Robert Hurt in 2010.
Perriello has focused his campaign on bringing down costs, bringing up wages for Virginians in the 5th District and “restoring common sense” to Washington, D.C.
“People are really hopeful that there’s someone back on the field that they can trust,” he said. “Unfortunately, the common thing I’m hearing from everyone is just the pain of these incredibly high costs and the anger that these were man-made crises, and John McGuire is one of those men that did it.”
He linked McGuire to the increase in day-to-day costs for Virginians through the incumbent’s support of Trump’s tariffs and the war in Iran.
After his term in Congress, Perriello worked in the U.S. Department of State and ran for Governor of Virginia in 2017; he was defeated by former Gov. Ralph Northam in the Democratic primary by a 11.8-point margin. He has also worked at a variety of political action committees and nonprofits.
If he wins the primary, Perriello expressed confidence in his campaign’s ability to win over the vast majority of Independent voters and a large chunk of conservative voters who, he said, are upset with McGuire.
“We’re talking about generational damage that McGuire and these guys have done that we really feel most in rural communities where people are either deciding they can’t have kids or deciding they have to move away to a city far away from their parents and grandparents to start a family and that’s not what we want in these areas,” he said. “Voters right, left and center are furious.”
Perriello’s “day one” priorities, if elected, would be to bring down day-to-day costs by ending tariffs established by the Trump administration and ending the war in Iran.
“Congress has a constitutional obligation to do that,” he said.
He added that before a potentially Democratic Congress can work with President Trump to get bills passed, the legislative branch must reassert its role as co-equal with the executive.
Beyond that, Congress urgently needs to restore healthcare infrastructure in rural communities.
“This is a moment where people want a fighter who is going to put the community first,” he said.
Rob Tracinski hadn’t expected to run for federal office as a Democrat. He had been an active member of the Tea Party Movement in Charlottesville during the Obama administration.
“There’s lots of things that have gone on in the last 10 years that I never expected to happen,” he said.
Going from the Tea Party movement to the No Kings movement is not a large jump, he added, and they have the same core concepts: That government should not be overbearing and oppressive.
“We have a nightmare 10 times worse than what we feared from Obama in terms of the concentration of executive power right now,” he said.
Tracinski, who lives in Louisa County, has been a freelance writer and political columnist for about 30 years. He worked on a project called Executive Watch in 2025, which he characterized as a catalog of abuses of executive power in the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said.
He was underwhelmed by Democratic lawmakers and political operatives’ efforts to counter what he saw as abuses of executive power, and he decided to run for Congress and focus his campaign on efforts to reestablish checks and balances in federal power. Actions taken by the administration during Trump’s second term motivated him to run for Congress. His main campaign platform is to restore the Constitutional balance in Washington, D.C., and rein in the power of “an out of control president.”
“I think there’s a big realignment going on in the national and even international political debate that the big alternative of our era is liberal democracy versus authoritarianism, and so we need to be standing up for liberal democracy and defending it,” he said.
He added that campaigning has given him hope, in an era of divisive politics, that the people he has met on campaign stops have been welcoming and interested in civil dialogue, regardless of their political affiliation.
“It’s been a lot more Norman Rockwell-esque than I had hoped for,” he said. “What you see online is not necessarily representative of the American people.”
His one-line summary of his campaign, he said, is that “The U.S. Congress is a good idea and it would be nice if we had one.”
Tracinski is optimistic that there will be a Democratic House and Senate after the midterm elections. He acknowledged that any Democratic lawmaker is going to have a hard time getting bills signed with an “extremely hostile” president in office.
“We’re going to have to remind the president very forcefully of the power that Congress has,” he said. “We have the power of the purse and we’re going to have to use that power.”
About the primary
Early voting ends Saturday.
Polls are open Tuesday from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Also on the ballot in the 5th District: Republicans are holding a statewide primary to pick a U.S. Senate candidate. See our previous story on that race.
We sent our issues questionnaire to all the candidates on the primary ballot. In the 5th District, only Democrat Rob Tracinski responded. To see those answers, or answers from candidates in other districts, go to our Voter Guide and look up your county or city to find the candidates on your ballot.
