Recent polls have Donald Trump down double-digits in Virginia, foretelling an upcoming move by the Trump campaign to reassign resources from Virginia to more competitive states that should have impacts down-ticket.
The most obvious negative impact would be on Trump-backed Republican Senate nominee Hung Cao, who has consistently found himself trailing Democratic incumbent Tim Kaine in the 10- to 12-point range in polling, with no momentum signaling any kind of change in the state of the race that would portend any kind of tightening.
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Cao already had an uphill battle in terms of the money race – Kaine has raised $10.3 million in the 2024 cycle, on top of the $5.4 million that he had already banked going in, while Cao has reported $1.8 million in contributions, probably a key reason why you don’t see much of him on the airwaves.
Cao has also not made it a priority to get out and campaign all that much, coasting on his Trump endorsement dating back to the Republican primary cycle, and seeming to prefer to focus his efforts, such as he is making efforts, in vote-rich Northern Virginia, an interesting strategy, to say the least, given the political reality of Northern Virginia.
A recent Washington Post poll, which has Kaine up on Cao 53 percent to 41 percent statewide, gives Kaine a 62 percent-to-28 percent lead in the D.C. suburbs and a 58 percent-to-42 percent lead in the NoVa exurbs.
The story about this race already seems to have been written into stone.
Basically, Trump got his guy, and his guy is going to lose, bigly.
Further down ticket, I don’t know that the Fifth District flips, but the split among Republicans after the divisive primary that saw Trump-endorsed State Sen. John McGuire upset sitting Congressman Bob Good could make the general-election race a little more interesting.
Fifth District Republican leaders are publicly feuding with the McGuire camp, and things are at a point where Gov. Glenn Youngkin had to get involved, leading a five-stop “Unity Tour” last week to try to mend fences.
The Fifth has been reliably red, save for a single two-year period, from 2009-2011, in which Democrat Tom Perriello represented the largely rural district, which extends from Albemarle County on the northern end down the Route 29 corridor to the North Carolina border.
Good won re-election in 2022 with 57.6 percent of the vote in his race with Democrat Josh Throneburg, after winning the seat for the first time in 2020 by a closer five-point margin in a race with Dr. Cameron Webb.
Incidentally, the Republican that Good unseated in the Fifth District in 2020, Denver Riggleman, who served one term in the House, has endorsed Kamala Harris for president.
These aren’t the best of times for Fifth District Republicans.
I’m not thinking the Fifth is necessarily totally up for grabs, but the Democratic nominee, Gloria Witt, has an opening, if she can manage to get any kind of support from the Democratic establishment.
As of her most recent filing with the Federal Election Commission, for campaign activity through June 30, Witt had raised just $56,328, which doesn’t look like much, and isn’t, but then, while McGuire had reported $1.2 million in campaign receipts, he spent the great bulk of that in the primary.
As of June 30, McGuire had $115,823 in cash on hand.
The next campaign-finance report is due on Oct. 15.
We will keep an eye on both campaigns there to see if any new trends are emerging.
The one thing that is certain is that Trump’s intervention in the Fifth District, propping up and then endorsing McGuire to get back at Good for Good’s endorsement of Ron DeSantis in the 2024 presidential race, has made what would have been a squash match for the Republican side into something that we still need to keep an eye on.
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Chris Graham
