Brace yourself for brutal, expensive campaigns in Va. congressional swing districts this fall

If you live in or near the media markets serving Hampton Roads, the Peninsula up to the Northern Neck and Richmond and its suburbs, prepare for the most acrid, expensive and desperate congressional campaigns you’ve ever endured.

Depending on how rancid the winds of current events blowing in from across the Potomac become, you could also see a comparable tooth-and-nail cage match in a wide swath of Southside from Charlottesville to the North Carolina border.

Expect it to be way over the top — candidates trying to make you believe that there’s no tomorrow if they lose — because that’s the dire mindset both parties take into this federal midterm, with control of the U.S. House of Representatives at stake.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and its counterpart, the National Republican Congressional Committee will flood those districts with media dollars. And opaque Super PACs that don’t disclose their donors will inundate voters with  ads rife with hideously stretched truths and outright lies. Big-name proxies will be coming soon to a campaign event near you.

In some states, Democrats tired of the status quo nominated progressive, even socialist newcomers for House races. Virginia Democrats hued closer to the political center on Tuesday and went with more established names.

Virginia primary voters pick Mizusawa to face Warner, finalize key US House races

Two Virginia races in particular stand out as marquee contests that both parties consider critical to November’s existential battle for a ruling majority. By the time polls close at 7 p.m. on Nov. 3, campaign spending records will be obliterated in Virginia’s 1st and 2nd Congressional Districts and perhaps the 5th.

Virginia’s Senate race is not considered competitive. Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, our senior statewide elected official and the voluble ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is a prohibitive favorite to win his fourth term over little-known GOP challenger Bert Mizusawa.

Democrats are pinning their hopes for pickups on the 1st and 2nd. That’s not as ambitious as the gain of up to four of the five GOP seats in Virginia’s 11-seat delegation that Democrats envisioned in a mid-decade reapportionment scheme the courts voided in May.

The defunct gerrymander — a response to Trump-inspired purges of Democratic-held House seats in Texas and other MAGA-loyal states last year — would have left only southwestern Virginia’s indelibly “Fightin’ 9th” as the state’s lone GOP district.

In the 1st, Henrico County Commonwealth’s Attorney Shannon Taylor — runner-up to Jay Jones in last year’s Democratic attorney general primary — takes on Republican Rob Wittman, who first won the seat in a 2007 special election.

Taylor, a moderate, took 53% of the vote Tuesday over six other Democrats, including a Medicare-for-all progressive. Her district is split between rural, Republican-voting areas and Richmond’s Henrico and Chesterfield County suburbs that supported Kamala Harris over President Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential race.

In the Tidewater-based 2nd, former Congresswoman Elaine Luria wants to get her old job back from Rep. Jen Kiggans, the Republican who defeated her in the 2022 midterms when Democrats were burdened with a floundering President Joe Biden.

Now, shoes are on the other feet. 

This midterm, with Trump’s popularity cratering, his submissive Republican Congress is forced to answer for its complicity in a botched Middle Eastern war of choice and the stratospheric fuel prices it triggered. It’s time for Democrats to take their best shot and for Kiggans and Wittman to play defense.

“The effect of midterm elections, historically under circumstances, suggests that the party out of the White House will pick up a significant number of seats,” said George Mason University political scientist Mark Rozell.

“When you add to that a distinctly unpopular president, people anxious about the economy, anxious about the war in Iran, it could be a far more difficult environment running as a Republican in a competitive district,” he added. 

We’ve seen tectonic shifts in congressional control in much more settled times, Rozell noted, citing the midterm election midway through Bill Clinton’s first presidential term when the GOP flipped 54 seats and took House control for the first time in 40 years.

“In 1994 — the Republican Revolution — it took a mere 2% change in voting behavior between 1992 and 1994 to flip such a large number of House districts,” he said.

Like Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s wildly successful campaign fueled by affordability last fall, those issues are there for Democrats challenging GOP House incumbents this fall.

With rare, principled exceptions such as U.S. Sens. John Cornyn of Texas, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, and U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, congressional Republicans have bent like willows to Trump’s whims.

Cornyn, Cassidy and Massie felt Trump’s wrath for their impudence and lost their primaries to Trump acolytes. Tillis got a belly full and eschewed reelection. None of Virginia’s House Republicans — mindful of former 5th District Rep. Bob Good’s fate for his fleeting disloyalty to Trump — can be accused of standing up to Trump.

The 5th District has been firmly in GOP hands ever since Perriello lost his reelection after one term, won during the 2008 blue wave election that made Barack Obama the nation’s first Black president. Flipping it is a tall order for Periello, Rozell said, but if Democratic momentum is great enough, it’s possible.

The 5th’s current U.S. Rep. John McGuire — the Trump devotee who ousted Good in an acidic 2024 GOP primary after Good briefly endorsed Trump’s nomination rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — is the fifth Republican to hold that seat since Perriello last did.

This fall, McGuire tests whether the GOP brand has worn thin since Trump carried the district by about 12 percentage points in 2024, underperforming McGuire who had a 15-point cushion, according to the Virginia Public Access Project.

While Democrats have a better statistical shot in the 1st and 2nd, they’re not guaranteed any gains at all in Virginia.

Aggregate polling on a generic partisan ballot shows Democrats hold an edge of about 7 percentage points nationally. But generalized voter feelings don’t account for the strengths of candidates, the issues they raise and the resources they bring to individual races.

Nor do those generic polls consider how well self-identified Democratic-Socialist nominees in states such as New York, Michigan and Colorado will fare with a broader electorate in November. 

They also can’t anticipate how much enthusiasm voters on the left will have to be part of a coalition that backs Democratic moderates in Virginia this fall.

Republicans are quite aware of the internal Democratic schism between moderates and their left flank, and they won’t hesitate to leverage it. Also, never underestimate the Democrats’ uncanny ability to squander a strategic advantage.

Whatever the next 84 days bring, boredom won’t be part of it.