The year 2010 was not a good year for Democrats. The elections that year were the congressional midterms of President Barack Obama’s first term. Obama described the results as “a shellacking,” and no one could dispute him.
Democrats lost 63 seats in the House of Representatives, losing control of the chamber. One of the seats Democrats lost that year was in Virginia’s 5th Congressional District, where incumbent Tom Perriello was ousted after a single term.
This year was the polar opposite for Democrats: It was a good year, a very good year. The party has picked up more than 40 House seats — some races remain too close to call with ballots still being counted — and regained control of both chambers in Congress.
One of the seats they didn’t win, though, was in Virginia’s 5th District, where 16 years later the candidate was, once again, Perriello. He came close, pulling 48.04% of the vote, but is 7,686 votes shy of Republican incumbent John McGuire. Final counting of provisional ballots and post-election mail ballots will change those numbers but not enough to make a difference. Perriello has conceded.
Perriello’s defeat was a tough loss for Democrats in an election year during which Democrats were winning in other places they didn’t even expect to win. South Carolina! Kansas! Texas! Mississippi! “I know this is frustrating for Democrats because it’s a Trump +12 district and Democrats are casually winning Trump +15 districts in North Carolina,” said J. Miles Coleman, a political analyst with the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.
Why did Perriello fall short when Democrats elsewhere were posting wins?
Chaz Nuttycombe, who runs the Virginia-based State Navigate political forecasting site, said this is not a case of Democratic underperformance but rather a robust Republican response to a threat. “I think the reason why Perriello lost is because Republicans took the race seriously and put money in,” he said. “A lot of these upsets are because Republicans got caught off-guard. They didn’t get caught sleeping at the wheel here. They did get caught sleeping at the wheel in North Carolina and other states.”
There may be an additional answer to explain how McGuire pulled out a victory in the 5th while some of his colleagues elsewhere couldn’t. The political realignment we’ve seen over the past two decades has made it harder for Democrats to win in rural counties — and the 5th is predominantly rural.
That realignment has also stretched the 5th politically, making the blue areas bluer and the red areas redder. That’s a classic case of polarization, and Perriello was not able to bridge that divide.
Let’s look at the actual numbers.
For analysis of other districts, see my column on how Republicans held onto the 6th and 9th and how Democrats flipped the 1st and 2nd.
The 5th District today isn’t quite the same as the 5th District that Perriello represented for a single term during Obama’s presidency. It’s seen some Democratic-voting localities (Brunswick County to the 4th, Martinsville to the 9th) shaved off and some very solid Republican counties to the east added on (Amelia, Goochland, Louisa, Powhatan, part of Hanover). That much we knew already. Instead, let’s look at the parts of the 5th that have remained the same.
In 2010, Perriello could count on big wins in Albemarle County and Charlottesville and got them. He took 57.2% in Albemarle and 79.9% in Charlottesville. He counted on big wins there this year, too, and got them. This time, his vote share was even bigger: 71.14% in Albemarle, 88.59% in Charlottesville.
Albemarle and Charlottesville constitute the biggest population center in the district, but they still only account for one-fifth of the district’s voters. While those communities have grown more Democratic, most of the rest of the district has become more Republican.
Pittsylvania County is the third-biggest source of votes in the district. When Perriello won the district in 2008 — on Obama’s coattails — he still managed just 37.7% of the vote in Pittsylvania. When he ran for reelection in 2010 and lost, his share slipped to 36.5%. Not that much, although every vote counts. This year, Perriello won 31.74% of the vote in Pittsylvania.
Political analysts like to talk in terms of a vote swing. In 2010, Perriello lost Pittsylvania by a margin of 25.5 percentage points. This year he lost it by a margin of 35.5 percentage points. That’s a swing of 10 percentage points away from Democrats, and toward Republicans, over almost two decades.
In a great year for Democrats, Perriello still took a lower vote share in Pittsylvania than he once did in a terrible year for Democrats. This sums up the problem Democrats face in many rural areas — and which this year’s “bluenami” hasn’t changed: The hole in rural areas has gotten deeper.
Here’s how this works out in terms of actual votes.
Pittsylvania County
2010: Robert Hurt (R) 13,531, Perriello 8,032
2026: John McGuire (R) 17,552, Perriello 8,349
Perriello this year won more votes in Pittsylvania than he did in 2010, but the Republican candidate won even more. Instead of the Republican coming out of Pittsylvania with a 5,499-vote margin, the Republican this year came out of the county with a 8,349-vote margin. That’s a 2,850-vote shift toward Republicans.
Do that enough times and these rural areas more than make up the pro-Democratic shift in Albemarle and Charlottesville. And that’s exactly what happened.
Where Pittsylvania County has become 10 percentage points redder over the years, Appomattox County has become 14.2 points redder, Charlotte County 17.4, Buckingham County 17.7.
The vote numbers in rural counties may be comparatively small, but what you need to look at are the margins, and they add up. Perriello put a lot of work into Danville, one of the few blue areas in the district outside Charlottesville and Albemarle. He grew the Democratic margin there from 2,387 in 2010 to 4,378 this year.
However, McGuire did the same — and won — in other places. In Campbell County, the Republican candidate in 2010 had a 6,419-vote margin. This year, that margin grew to 9,727 votes. That more than wipes out the Democratic vote gain in Danville. “I think it just shows how red Southside is getting,” Coleman said. “Southside is a tough nut for Democrats to crack.”
We see a similar pattern in Campbell (and elsewhere) to Pittsylvania. Perriello got more votes this year than he did in 2010, but McGuire got a lot more than his Republican predecessor. Population growth in Campbell appears to be bringing in more Republican voters.
Perriello lost because he ran out of Democratic localities; McGuire won because rural counties have turned so bright red that they cancel out the bright blue ones (there’s your cancel culture!). Democrats will continue to run into these hard red walls in rural areas until they can find some way to win back rural voters. They don’t need to win rural areas, they just need to do better. If Perriello, in a good Democratic year, had been able to pull the same percentages in some of these rural counties that he did in 2010, a bad Democratic year, he’d have won, Coleman said. That just didn’t happen. That wasn’t a Perriello problem; that’s a larger problem for Democrats overall that they forget to take into account as they celebrate this year’s victories.
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