Virginia’s remaining Republican congressional delegation and the chair of the Republican Party are sticking with President Donald Trump, regardless of the significant losses experienced by the GOP in the midterm elections.
The Republican congressmen from the 5th, 6th and 9th districts stopped short of laying the blame at the feet of the president. Instead, they attributed the trouncing their party experienced to historic precedent: the White House often sees losses in midterm elections.
Voters nationwide handed Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress a strong repudiation in midterm elections that saw the GOP lose seven seats in the U.S. Senate and 44 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives as of Wednesday, with races still to be called.
Economic issues driven by high fuel prices, attributed to the conflict in Iran and tariffs levied against trade partners, led some Republican lawmakers to break with Trump over what some characterized as an apocalyptic midterm election for their party.
According to the Associated Press, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis described the midterms as an “extinction-level event” for the GOP. He was not alone. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz referred to the outcome as a “Watergate-level repudiation,” and former Vice President Mike Pence called it a “reckoning.” Tucker Carlson, a conservative commentator, said the midterms marked “the end of the Trump era,” and Republican Senate candidate John Sununu blamed Trump for his lost bid in New Hampshire.
Virginia was not immune to the casualties.
The commonwealth’s Republican congressional delegation will shrink from five members to three in the coming year after Democrats Shannon Taylor and former Congresswoman Elaine Luria ousted incumbent Reps. Rob Wittman and Jen Kiggans in the 1st and 2nd districts, respectively.
Rep. John McGuire in the 5th District saw his margin of victory shrink from 15 percentage points in 2024 to 2 points in 2026, as he narrowly wrested his second term in office from the hands of his Democratic challenger, former Congressman Tom Perriello.
Incumbent Republican Rep. Ben Cline in the 6th District saw his margin shrink from 28 percentage points in 2024 to just under 11 points in 2026 as he faced a challenge from Democratic candidate Beth Macy. And in the 9th District, Virginia’s most conservative, incumbent Rep. Morgan Griffith saw his comfortable margin of 45 percentage points in 2024 decrease to just under 32 points as he faced a challenge from Democratic candidate Joy Powers.
In conversations in the days after the election, they compared the results to the 2010 midterm elections, when a red wave attributable to the passage of the Affordable Care Act swept across the nation. Then-President Barack Obama characterized his first midterm as a “shellacking.” In 2010, Republicans picked up six seats in the U.S. Senate and 63 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Virginia’s remaining members of Congress and the commonwealth’s party chair acknowledged high fuel prices caused by the conflict in Iran as a deciding factor in the midterms, but they did not outright blame the losses on the president.
“I think people are upset, still, about the price of gas and the cost of things in general,” Jeff Ryer, chairman of the Republican Party of Virginia, said in a phone interview Monday.
But, Ryer argued, members of the Republican Party who have split with the president following the midterms were those who were not reelected or those who were seeking media attention.
“These are not people who are going to jump up and cheer but let me hear what their change in policy prescription is, because I haven’t heard it,” he said. “It’s easy to shoot arrows in circumstances such as this. Regrettably, when Republicans shoot them, they make front page news.”
It was a problem with messaging, they say
Griffith, of Salem, blamed Republican losses on messaging rather than on Trump’s decisions.
“I don’t think that the vast majority of Americans understand — that was our fault for not getting it out there — that this is a short-lived phenomenon. When I say short-lived, we’ve already been through about six months, I think there’s probably another three, four months, maybe six before that’s resolved,” he said regarding the high cost of fuel, during a phone interview Thursday. “It does have to do with the conflict in the Middle East and in Ukraine. Both of those have impacts on the worldwide oil supply.”
Cline, of Botetourt County, agreed that there is a lot of frustration among voters regarding the price of gas and goods.
“The fact that we are going through rough economic times right now means we have to focus like a laser beam on making America competitive,” he said in a phone interview Monday.
That effort would mean bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. and making the country more energy independent by increasing the country’s refining capacity.
Cline said he could only speak for the 6th District when asked if he thought Trump’s actions influenced Republican losses across the country.
“[Voters] are very concerned about the price of things, whether it’s at the pump or on the shelves, and they want their member of Congress to focus on those issues for them, and so that’s what I’m doing,” he said.
McGuire, of Goochland, said that a desire among voters to end the conflict in Iran and reduce fuel costs led to the blue wave experienced nationwide and the closer-than-normal race in his district as well.
“I think the affordability thing is a legit thing, but I think we inherited a pretty bad situation and we’re making progress,” he said in a phone interview Friday.
He did not directly answer when asked if he thought Trump’s decisions led to the nationwide blue wave.
“I think it’s a whole lot of different things; I guess we could Monday-morning-quarterback everything,” he said. “The gas prices are real, and we’ve got to get them down. … We could always do things differently or message things differently.”
Redistricting was also a factor, Griffith says
Republicans’ mid-decade redistricting effort in conservative states also backfired.
Voters in states that successfully redrew their congressional maps to favor the GOP saw unknown new names on the ballot, Griffith said.
“You had seats where, (a) people may have resented the redistricting, and (b) incumbents who were actually campaigning in areas where they were not known. So it was a year where people were frustrated with gas prices and there was somebody on their ballot that they did not know and did not have a relationship with,” he said.
He pointed to North Carolina, where incumbents were running in entirely new districts. The state saw one of its two U.S. Senate seats flip from Republican control to Democratic after Republican Sen. Thom Tillis announced he would not seek reelection in June 2025.
The Democratic candidate, Roy Cooper, soundly defeated Michael Whatley, the former Republican National Committee chair, by a margin of nearly 20 percentage points. Democrats also flipped four U.S. House of Representatives seats in the state.
In Virginia, however, the unsuccessful effort by Democrats to redraw congressional maps may have led to less robust wins for the Democratic Party, Griffith said.
McGuire faced a strong challenge from Perriello, a former congressman, in the 5th District, which he overcame by a 2.2 percentage point margin with 98% of the votes counted. McGuire had won his 2024 election by a 15-point margin.
Griffith attributed the Democrat’s inability to flip that district to frustration surrounding the redistricting effort.
“[McGuire] was outspent by a lot, he was facing headwinds, but what you had is you had that same dynamic where some people were irritated by redistricting,” he said, and added that Republicans were united in their campaign message against the effort.
Virginia Democrats had called the redistricting effort necessary, after Trump called on conservative-led states to change their congressional maps in favor of GOP candidates ahead of the midterms. A number of Republican-led states, including Texas, North Carolina and Missouri, redrew their maps. Democratic states, including California, did the same for their party in response.
A series of Republican-led lawsuits made their way to the Supreme Court of Virginia, which ultimately struck down the effort in May after it had been narrowly approved by voters in April.
That effort gave Republicans in Virginia a new campaign platform when the tide appeared to be out for the GOP nationwide.
“It created a lot of angst,” Griffith said.
Republican lawmakers prepare for life in the minority
Griffith was first elected to Congress in 2010. He has been in the legislative body’s minority party before.
“You try to work on things that can get done and things that are bipartisan in nature,” he said. “There will still be some partisan issues, and our job will be to point out the flaws in the Democratic bills and move forward, but there will be lots of things that we can work on together.”
He pointed out the Coalfields Expressway as an example of bipartisan lawmaking. He and Virginia’s two Democratic senators, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, have advocated together for funding to support the highway project, which he said he was traveling to at the time of the interview.
“I reached out Monday just to make sure we were still on the same wavelength,” he said. “I’m coming down here to carry a message from the Congress, not just from me, that we’re going to continue to try to work on that project.”
He added that he has “always” been able to work on those types of projects with the two senators, even if they disagree on other issues.
Cline said that he is “not excited” to be in the minority come January but that he has experience being in the party without control in Congress.
He said that the majority of the legislation he has sponsored includes a Democratic lawmaker as a lead co-sponsor. As an example, he pointed to a bill that is currently on Trump’s desk, the Bankruptcy Threshold Adjustment Act, which includes two Democratic members of Congress as original co-sponsors. Cline said that bill would help small businesses recover from economic downturns, and he anticipates Trump will sign it soon.
“I reach out with just about every bill that I introduce and every issue to see if there are Democrats that want to work with me on those issues,” he said.
The Judiciary Committee, on which Cline sits, handles many bipartisan issues, he said, including bankruptcy, intellectual property, antitrust and the court system.
“It’s not just Second Amendment, abortion and freedom of First Amendment issues that can be controversial. It’s also bipartisan issues,” he said.
He also sits on the Appropriations Committee, which tackles bipartisan issues like widening Interstate 81, he said, and the Select Intelligence Committee, where bipartisanship is seen in how to handle adversaries like China.
McGuire will enter his second term in Congress in the minority party. He pointed out that he had been a lawmaker when the government was divided when he was a member of Virginia’s General Assembly.
“I was still able to pass bills and get things done for my district,” he said.
He said, based on his experience in the General Assembly, that he believes he’ll be able to continue to work in a bipartisan fashion in Congress to “get things done.”
He pointed out a cybersecurity bill that he said he has been working on with a Democratic lawmaker and pointed to an effort to lower the cost of homes for first-time homebuyers. In January, he introduced his American Dream Act, which would remove capital gains tax from the sale of a home with a price up to $500,000 if the seller is age 65 or older and selling to a first-time home buyer.
The bill was referred to the House Ways and Means Committee in January and has not seen any movement since. The bill has 12 Republican co-sponsors, but no Democrats. Regardless, McGuire said he has heard from Democratic staffers on the Hill who have said it’s “their favorite bill.”
