If politics were football (and there are some similarities, from cheering fans to fumbles), what we’ve just seen in this year’s campaigns was the opening drive for the team in blue.
We can’t predict the outcome of a game from an early series of downs, but we can learn some things — how the team on offense intends to attack the defense, and how well the defense can react.
In political terms, the team on offense this year is the Democrats; midterms almost always benefit the party out of power, which immediately puts Republicans this year on the defensive.
Just as a football coach doesn’t use his entire playbook on the first drive — gotta save trick plays for later in the game — there is a general pattern to most campaigns. Challengers start off defining themselves in favorable terms, then shift to defining the other side in unfavorable ones. While we don’t know exactly where things will go from here, we have seen enough that we can make some early analysis of the U.S. House races in Virginia this year. From here on out, imagine me showing game film and marking X’s and O’s on the screen, John Madden-style, as we break down the action before early voting begins on Friday.
Want to see where the candidates stand? We sent questionnaires to every candidate across the state. See who has answered, and who hasn’t, on our Voter Guide.
1. Some Democrats aren’t running against Republicans — yet. They’re running against “power” and “corruption.”
Virginia has five incumbent Republicans. The most vulnerable is Jen Kiggans in the 2nd District; that Hampton Roads seat has long been a swing district. The least vulnerable is Morgan Griffith in the 9th District, who in the past two elections has polled 73% and 72% of the vote. Plus, his Democratic challenger, Joy Powers, has very little money. In between are Rob Wittman in the 1st District, John McGuire in the 5th District and Ben Cline in the 6th District.
Four of the Democratic challengers — Shannon Taylor in the 1st, Elaine Luria in the 2nd, Tom Perriello in the 5th and Beth Macy in the 6th — all have very different ads up on the air but they all share a theme: They’ll stand up to power. Taylor has an ad about how she called for a special prosecutor to investigate a fellow Democrat, then-legislator Joe Morrissey. Perriello has an ad in which he stands before a “wall of corruption” and proceeds to smash it brick by brick. Macy’s ad plays up how she spent “25 years investigating the powerful at The Roanoke Times.” Luria’s ad takes a different tack but she also casts herself in the same vein, saying “politicians like Kiggans go with the current.” I’ll have more to say about Luria’s opening soon. In the 9th, Powers isn’t on TV but does have videos on social media that focus on how she’s fought to keep Stewartsville Elementary in Bedford County open.
The implication to all these is that, if elected, they’ll stand up to whatever you consider the “special interests” to be in Washington. This seems to indirectly play off the impression that House Republicans are unwilling to stand up to President Donald Trump, without mentioning Trump directly. (The exception is Luria, who does mention Trump; again, a point for later.) This seems a clever opening gambit — people almost always think Washington is corrupt. Moreover, there’s nothing inherently partisan in any of these ads, likely a wise choice for Democrats who are running in districts that historically have trended Republican. That brings us to what we’re not hearing.
2. There are two words the Democratic candidates don’t use. One of those is “Democrat.”
None of the opening ads I’ve seen for Luria, Taylor, Perriello, Macy or Powers say what party they belong to.
Democrats are in a bind. Historically, this ought to be a Democratic year — and maybe it will be, but that will be in spite of Democrats and not because of them. Polling consistently shows that voters have a negative view of Democrats; they just have a more negative view of Trump. The data site Fifty Plus One (a successor to the much-lamented Five Thirty Eight) shows that polls generally find 53.8% of voters have an unfavorable view of Democrats, only 41% have a favorable view. And that’s nationally.
The figures are likely more unfavorable in the Republican-voting districts that every Democratic challenger in Virginia other than Luria is running in. Even Taylor’s ad about how she called for a special prosecutor to take the Joe Morrissey case calls him a Democrat but doesn’t explicitly say that she is, too.
Taylor: Joe Morrissey was a powerful Democratic lawmaker.
He’d been a supporter, even a donor of mine. But then I got the call.
News anchor: Indicted for sex crimes with a minor.
Taylor: As Henrico’s top prosecutor I didn’t care that he was a Democrat or the pressure that I got to make it go away.
So I called for a special prosecutor.
Prediction: The Republicans in these districts will call their opponents Democrats before the candidates themselves openly embrace that party label.
3. The other word that Democrats don’t use: “Trump.”
Luria is the exception; just hang on for discussion about that. Macy did reference Trump in her Labor Day speech at Buena Vista — she said Cline has been “kissing the king’s ring” — but her ads don’t, at least not yet. This also speaks to the challenge Democrats face: Trump carried all these districts in 2024, by margins ranging from 0.2 percentage points in the 2nd District to 4.9 percentage points in the 1st to 12.3 percentage points in the 5th to 23.9 percentage points in the 6th District to 44.1 percentage points in the 9th District.
Rallying Democrats alone might work for Luria in the 2nd but the other Democratic candidates either need an awful lot of Republicans to stay home or they need to persuade Republican voters that they’ve been betrayed by Trump. These Democrats need to play on unease about Trump without actually saying his name.
4. Luria is the exception in naming Trump.
Her opening ad says, “Trump has made things more expensive for us while he’s cashed in.” Of all the things you can say about Trump, that’s pretty mild. Again, Luria has the advantage over the other Democratic challengers in that she’s running in a more competitive district.
5. Democrats with rural voters are going to focus on rural healthcare.
This hasn’t made its way into TV ads yet but Taylor, Perriello and Macy have all found ways to call attention to their opponents’ support of HR 1, aka the One Big Beautiful Bill, and the cuts it made to healthcare funding. This seems a smart move because it deals with a policy issue that many people can understand and approaches it from a nonpartisan point of view. (Note that my analysis here is simply on how the issue is presented; this is not the be-all to end-all analysis of healthcare policy, which Cardinal’s healthcare reporter, Emily Schabacker, has written about many times.)
Macy may have the easiest time of the three because Augusta Health did cite HR 1 as a factor in its decision to close clinics last year in Buena Vista, Churchville and Weyers Cave. The challenge is that there are other Augusta Health clinics nearby. Many voters may not see a trip from Buena Vista to Lexington as being that onerous.
6. Some Democrats are also running against data centers.
That shouldn’t be a surprise, given how unpopular the computer warehouses have become. Still, it’s notable that on the same day that Macy rolled out a new ad in which she warns that “they’re trying to pave over our land for data centers,” Perriello also opened an attack on how “McGuire voted for a $362 billion corporate tax break for data centers.” Perriello’s campaign says this is part of HR 1, which “made it possible for companies to frontload the deduction of the full cost of new equipment from their taxes, a huge benefit for technology companies known as ‘hyperscalers’ that are driving the data center boom across Virginia and the country.” According to the National Association of Manufacturers, this provision doesn’t deal expressly with data centers but applies to manufacturers more generally. The business group sees this as a way to support “investment and innovation.” Perriello is simply highlighting an unpopular industry that benefits from this provision, rather than a popular one. When Perriello says “McGuire voted for a $362 billion corporate tax break for data centers,” he’s not referring to a specific vote, rather to McGuire’s vote for the entire HR 1 bill.
That’s a pretty standard way campaign attacks work. The details aside, if a legislator votes for a bill, they do sort of “own” everything in it. In any case, what matters here is that Democrats clearly have a playbook that suggests they attack Republican incumbents for being supportive of data centers. Context demands I point out two inconvenient facts for both Perriello and Macy: The biggest jobs announcement in the Southside portion of the 5th District is the 2,500 jobs promised by Stack Infrastructure, a data center company that is coming to the Southern Virginia Megasite at Berry Hill in Pittsylvania County, and one of the biggest is the 800-plus jobs being created at the Hitachi transformer plant in Halifax County, which also is related to data center growth. Meanwhile, one of the largest private employers in Botetourt County, in the 6th District, is Munters, which makes HVAC equipment for data centers. It’s easy to run against data centers; it’s also easy to skip over the supply chain jobs in the district and it seems odd for candidates to run against something that’s creating jobs in their districts.
Warner has also opened his Senate reelection campaign with a technology-themed ad, focused on his support for regulations on artificial intelligence, a close cousin of the data center debate.
7. Republicans will hit back against the Democrats and portray them as radicals.
Yes, this is the textbook play, but it’s the textbook play because it often works. Cline has already telegraphed his punch against Macy. His opening ad shows him driving a pickup truck as he says: “I work with a lot of crazy politicians up in Washington. But now, the other side has some even crazier choices for Congress.” He hasn’t said — yet — that Macy is one of those crazier choices. He may not even need to. If the occasion demands, he can simply point to other Democratic candidates around the country and say, in effect, “This is who will be in charge if Democrats get a majority.” Cline won’t need to run against Macy; he’ll just run against whichever Democrat around the country polling shows is seen as “crazy.” (Democrats do the same when they have the chance.)
It’s possible that a Texas Democrat may have given Republicans a talking point, too. Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, has been pushing to impeach Trump a third time. Even many Democrats joined with Republicans in defeating it. There’s some feeling among Democrats that focusing on impeaching Trump — when we all know there is not a two-thirds majority in the Senate to convict him — is a waste of energy. Republicans would love to point to this impeachment resolution as a sign that Democrats aren’t focused on governing, they just want to focus on attacking Trump.
8. National Democrats are still discounting Macy.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has targeted the 1st, 2nd and 5th districts, but no other. Political parties are ruthlessly practical when it comes to spending money. If they don’t see a chance to win, they don’t invest in those districts. Still, this means Democrats are officially passing over a challenger (Macy) who has outraised the incumbent Republican. This week the DCCC announced a specific fundraising drive to benefit their candidates in the three targeted districts (Taylor, Luria and Perriello), but which obviously skips over Macy. Looking ahead: If Cline wins the 6th, as all the rating groups predict, will Democrats face any second-guessing for freezing out Macy?
9. Trump’s not helping Republicans.
It’s not simply that Trump is unpopular, with record-low approval ratings in the polls. It’s that he seems to actively be undermining his own party’s candidates. We don’t even need to talk about gas prices, a consequence of military action against Iran. He’s out there talking up data centers and how AI doesn’t need regulation at a time when the public mood — even among his own base — is running the other direction. Perhaps this is a “profile in courage” for pushing an unpopular policy position he believes in; still, this is unhelpful to Republican candidates. Every time he makes the news for something that doesn’t involve lowering prices — be it his ballroom, his victory arch, bad-mouthing Canada of all places — he’s hurting Republicans by giving Democrats material to use to make the case that Republicans don’t care about ordinary voters. The old saying is that when you’re in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging. Trump is reaching for a golden shovel.
10. We will see no debates.
At least not in the 5th, 6th and 9th House districts and likely elsewhere, too. In each of those districts, the Democratic challenger did the expected thing and challenged the incumbent to a debate. Incumbents rarely want to debate because they don’t want to raise the profile of the challenger. That’s just a basic rule of politics — one that Democrat Eugene Vindman is following in the 7th, so none of this is partisan. In the 5th, McGuire says he won’t debate Perriello until Perriello apologizes for some things he’s said about McGuire that McGuire says are untrue. No candidate is ever going to apologize, so this is a convenient way to avoid a debate. In the 6th, Cline surprised lots of us by agreeing to debate, but only on his terms. He picked three events; Macy said she couldn’t make two of the dates and said they weren’t “real” debates anyway, merely “forums.” Two of those passed without Macy showing; the Harrisonburg Rotary has now canceled the third. Each candidate now has a talking point: Cline can say Macy was a no-show; Macy can say Cline didn’t want a “real” debate. In the 9th, Griffith has done something I don’t ever recall seeing: He simply said he didn’t need to debate and wished his opponent “safe travels” across the district.
It’s unclear how much voters care about debates at the congressional level. These aren’t exactly presidential-level spectacles. Partisans get excited but many of the voters the candidates are trying to persuade have lots of other things to do during the fall. As a practical matter, all the “debate over debates” has done is take up time for an actual debate over the issues, which will now play out, however imperfectly, in the broadcast space.
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