Virginia’s 5th Congressional District is officially in play.
We’ve seen this coming for several weeks now, but Tuesday brought the most official kind of confirmation possible: Both the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee announced they’re buying TV time to reach voters in the district.
For Democrats, this is an opportunity to stretch the map and look for opportunities for upsets in red areas. For Republicans, this is a case of playing defense.
In addition, Sabato’s Crystal Ball, the political forecasting site run by the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics (and named after political analyst Larry Sabato), shifted the 5th to a “toss-up” race.
The 5th District has been a reliably, although not overwhelmingly, Republican district. In the two elections in the district’s current form, Republican congressional candidates have won 57% of the vote — Bob Good in 2022 and John McGuire in 2024.
This year, McGuire is being challenged by Democrat Tom Perriello, who represented the 5th in a different shape in the 2009-2010 congressional session. Perriello has outraised McGuire and entered the final month of the campaign with a 2-to-1 cash advantage, according to Federal Election Commission reports.
There has only been one public poll in the district, and that was several weeks ago. It showed McGuire with a slight lead over Perriello. The parties likely have internal polling that we’re not privy to, but the most telling signs in the 5th are the early voting trends, the arrival of big-name surrogates and, now, those television buys by the national campaign committees on both sites.
The State Navigate site, which has been analyzing early voting trends, continues to show that the 5th has the strongest pro-Democratic shift of any district in Virginia, about 2.8 percentage points more Democratic than last year, when Democrats won the early voting in the 5th but then lost the district overall by the Republican turnout on Election Day. Whether that shift is enough to overcome the district’s fundamental conservative tendencies will depend on the size — and shape — of that turnout.
At the moment, that early vote is bigger than last year — about 15.2% bigger, according to State Navigate. And so far — through Tuesday — the early voting is up the most in the district’s most Democratic localities, while down in some key Republican ones.
Through Tuesday, early voting in heavily blue Charlottesville was up 39.8%, while up 34.7% in Danville and up 24.3% in Albemarle County. Meanwhile, the early vote is down -0.8% in Goochland County, McGuire’s home county, while in Powhatan County next door, it’s down -0.9%. Early voting is up in most Republican-voting counties, but not at the levels we’re seeing in those Democratic strongholds.
Over the weekend, McGuire held four rallies across the district with former Gov. Glenn Youngkin to boost Republican turnout. On Tuesday, U.S. Sen. Ralph Warnock, D-Georgia, sometimes mentioned as a potential presidential candidate, was in the district on Perriello’s behalf, with stops in Charlottesville and Lynchburg.
I’ll have more early voting numbers in Friday’s edition of West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter, but if there are important developments before then, I’ll go ahead and post a short update here.
