Primary season for the 2024 U.S. Senate and congressional elections in Virginia officially kicks off this weekend as the deadline for candidates to file to run in the June 18 statewide party primary elections expired Thursday afternoon.
Ground zero of one of the most viciously fought nomination contests this year is the 5th Congressional District, where Rep. Bob Good, R-Campbell County and the incumbent, is trying to fend off a challenge by state Sen. John McGuire, R-Goochland County. The contest made national news when former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, turned on Good because of his endorsement of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for president last year.
Chris LaCivita, a Trump campaign manager, told Cardinal News in January that “Bob Good won’t be electable when we get done with him.” Good later switched his support back to Trump after DeSantis dropped out of the race after losing the Iowa, but the damage was done. McGuire continues to collect endorsements from prominent figures in Trump’s Make America Great Again movement, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a key Trump ally.
Good first won his party’s nomination at a convention in 2020 at Tree of Life Ministries in Campbell County, which happened to be on his home turf. He ousted incumbent Rep. Denver Riggleman after the latter had officiated a same-sex wedding, which upset many Republicans in the district.
Two years later, Good was challenged by Dan Moy, a 27-year Air Force veteran and then the chairman of the Charlottesville GOP. Good prevailed once again and defeated Moy at a convention hosted by the district’s GOP committee on the campus of Hampden-Sydney College near Farmville.
But this year, the Good-McGuire face-off will be in the form of a state-run primary election after a new state law that took effect in January made it difficult for parties to nominate their candidates at party-run conventions or mass meetings.
The different nomination format, and the fact that both candidates are mostly ideologically aligned but are competing for the support of Trump voters in a district that the former president won by 53% in both 2016 and 2020, make it hard to predict who will keep the upper hand — Good, the chair of the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus who helped engineer former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s ouster, or McGuire, the ambitious state senator who mostly runs on a platform of unwavering loyalty to Trump and who continues to call his primary opponent a “Never-Trumper” and a “RINO,” a derogatory moniker for “Republican In Name Only,” who is working to help Democrats.
Good has an advantage at least in the money race, having raised more than $548,000 for his reelection bid as of Dec. 31, according to the Virginia Public Access Project, a nonprofit tracking money in politics. With a little over $212,000, McGuire has raised less than half of that.
And while Good’s initial endorsement of DeSantis might have caused some ripples in the primary, an upset remains unlikely, said David Richards, a political analyst and chair of the political science program at the University of Lynchburg.
“Good has spent freely, with plenty of mailers and campaign stops ahead of the primary … money he has to spend now to ensure a defeat of McGuire,” Richards said.
In the general election in November, most voters will not recall or care about Good’s endorsement of DeSantis, and “barring some strange twist, he should win easily” against Gloria Tinsely Witt, the sole Democrat who has filed to run against the Republican incumbent, Richards added.
“McGuire made noise when he announced, and here and there some interest has been whipped up. Good, seen as a far-right standard bearer, has to be annoyed that he is being challenged by someone claiming to be even further to the right,” Richards said. “But in the end, McGuire has not been able to make the narrative that Good is a RINO stick. Good seems on top of things and he should win easily in the primary.”
Fall match-ups set in the 6th and 9th districts
In the neighboring 6th District, no Republican has filed to challenge the incumbent, Rep. Ben Cline, R-Botetourt County, who has been in office since 2019. Democrat Ken Mitchell, who is unopposed in his party’s nomination, is hoping to unseat Cline on Nov. 5.
And farther to the west, Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Salem, by default becomes the GOP nominee in the 9th District after no other Republican has announced a challenge, allowing him to move on to the general election, where he will face Karen Baker, the only candidate seeking to become the Democratic nominee.
Both the 6th and 9th Districts lean heavily Republican, and Richards, the political analyst, said that Cline’s and Griffith’s grip on their districts show that locally popular, party-line-adhering Republicans do well in central and Southwest Virginia.
“Un-primaried incumbents usually emerge after the primaries in great shape, with cash on hand to spend on the general election,” Richard said. “This is why the nomination contest in the 5th District is worth watching. If McGuire does damage to Good and forces him to spend in the primary, this means Good will have to spend time in the general election repairing his base vote and raising more cash.”
In the long run this is not going to be fatal damage for Good’s campaign, Richards said, “but it will make him work harder than he would have if he was unchallenged.”
Wide-open primaries for open seats in the 7th and 10th districts
The most contentious primary races this year are playing out in two districts currently held by Democrats, where the incumbents are vacating their seats by the end of this year.
In the 7th District, which is competitive and stretches from the Richmond suburbs to the Washington Beltway, six Democrats are seeking their party’s nomination to succeed Rep. Abigail Spanberger, D-Henrico County, who was the first candidate to announce that she is running to become the 75th governor of Virginia. A total of eight candidates are running for the GOP nomination in the district.
And after Rep. Jennifer Wexton, D-Fairfax County, said in September that she won’t seek reelection in the 10th District following a new medical diagnosis, 13 Democrats have thrown their hat in the ring, making it Virginia’s most crowded primary election this year. The district, which stretches from the Washington suburbs in the east to the Shenandoah Valley, leans Democratic. Five local Republicans are running for the GOP nomination.
U.S. Senate: Kaine faces winner of June 18 Republican primary; 5 candidates involved
Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., is the only one of the two U.S. senators from Virginia up for reelection this year. The Democrat, who served as Virginia’s governor from 2006 to 2010, was first elected to the Senate in 2012, defeating Republican George Allen, also a former governor. A native of St. Paul, Minnesota, Kaine previously served as a member of the Richmond City Council, as the city’s mayor and as lieutenant governor.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, selected Kaine as her running mate. He returned to the Senate after Trump won the presidential election, and he faces no intraparty challenge this year as he is hoping that Virginia voters will send him back to Washington a third time.
A total of eight Republicans were originally seeking the GOP nomination to take on Kaine in a presidential election year, when President Joe Biden, the Democratic incumbent in the White House, is facing historically low approval ratings. However, only five filed by the deadline Thursday, according to the State Board of Elections. It won’t be known until Tuesday whether all seven actually qualified for the ballot. That’s the deadline for the state Republican Party chair to verify they met all the requirements.
“This will be, along with the 5th Congressional District, one of the two primaries with any sort of suspense in them in our part of Virginia,” Richards, the political analyst, said of the GOP Senate race. “Republicans smell blood in the water, but it may just be some chum and not a wounded senator.”
Kaine, Richards said, got 57% of the vote in 2018, on the heels of his unsuccessful run on the Democratic presidential ticket, but also at the height of the nationwide backlash against then-President Trump.
“Will the same voters show up now? After 2021, when Republicans flipped all three statewide races, I would not bet the rent money on Kaine,” Richards said. “Anything can happen this far out from November, but I don’t expect him to lose. There has been surprisingly little noise around the race, despite all those GOP challengers.”
At this point, most of the GOP candidates struggle with statewide name recognition even among Republicans, Richard said.
But a formidable challenger to Kaine could be Hung Cao, a retired U.S. Navy captain who came to the United States as a refugee from Vietnam in 1975.
As a special operations officer, Cao served in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia, and his noncombat assignments included balancing the Navy’s $140 billion budget at the Pentagon, according to his website. In 2022, he was the Republican nominee in the 10th Congressional District, but he lost to Democratic Rep. Jennifer Wexton.
Cao lives in Loudoun County with his wife and children. To date, he has raised more than $1.2 million for his campaign — the most of all Republicans running for Kaine’s seat. “Hung Cao has a fundraising advantage, but as an entrepreneur perhaps that is not unexpected,” Richards said.
Constitutional law and litigation expert Jonathan Emord served as an attorney in the Federal Communications Commission during the administration of former President Ronald Reagan.
According to his website, Emord has detailed knowledge of the federal bureaucracy, “the deep state,” and he has won more cases against the Food and Drug Administration in federal court than any other attorney in American history, earning him the nickname “FDA Dragon Slayer.”
He lives in southwestern Fairfax County with his wife, with whom he has two children.
A 22-year U.S. Army veteran, Eddie Garcia has completed six combat deployments, three in Iraq and three in Afghanistan. He was also a member of the special operations community for 14 years, after which he commanded paratroopers in the 82nd Airborne Division. Garcia is currently the owner and founder of the MIL-VETS Mobile Integration App, which services veterans, military spouses and veteran-business owners. He lives in Arlington with his wife and two children.
Scott Parkinson has collected valuable credentials during his tenure working for three U.S. senators and as the executive director of the Republican Study Committee. In 2018, Scott was then-Rep. Ron DeSantis’ chief of staff while DeSantis won the gubernatorial race in Florida. Following a stint on the transition team, Scott joined the Club for Growth, a leading conservative organization, as vice president of government affairs.
“Parkinson has done just fine with fundraising, but also has a huge number of key endorsements from national GOP figures,” Richard said, referring to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tx., Sen. Mike Lee, R-UT, Rep. Bob Good, R-Campbell County, and Citizens United. “There has been no polling yet, but it looks like Parkinson is a party and Freedom Caucus favorite,” Richards said.
North Carolina native Chuck Smith spent many of his formative years divided between law school and the U.S. Navy’s Judge Advocate General (JAG) student program. During this 20-year naval career, he served as a prosecutor, defense counsel, and as a special assistant to a U.S. attorney — including a stint in Roanoke. In 2012, Smith sought the Republican nomination in Virginia’s 3rd Congressional District but withdrew before the primary. In 2021, he was an unsuccessful candidate for the party’s nomination for attorney general.
Ron Vitiello, a former chief of the U.S. Border Patrol, ended his candidacy last month.