The 30th House District, covering a territory located between Winchester and the inner DC suburbs, seems ripe for the picking for Democrats in the 2025 cycle.
The incumbent Republican, Geary Higgins, is coming off his freshman term, which is when incumbents are most vulnerable.
Voters in the 30th went for Donald Trump in 2024, but by less than a percentage point – and Trump isn’t exactly polling well, in general, and when you consider how he’s doing in Northern Virginia, with the layoffs of hundreds of thousands of government employees and contractors, yeah.
This is the setting for John McAuliff, the former chief of staff for Del. David Reid, a Loudoun County Democrat, and Warrenton B&B owner who worked in the Biden administration on rural development and clean energy.
Good resume, and as you’d guess, from his background, he’s showing viability as a candidate.
McAuliff is besting Higgins in the fundraising race, by nearly $50,000, as of June 30, the most recent reporting deadline.
The McAuliff campaign launched its first TV ad on Wednesday, highlighting Higgins’ fundraising haul from data center advocates, lobbyists or power providers.
The ad points out that the nearly 200 data centers that are operational in Loudoun County and Fauquier County “guzzle power at a rate up to the equivalent to 1 million homes.”
“The cost of this enormous power usage is a tax on Virginians through their energy bills, which will likely go up another 15 percent this year, thanks to data centers,” McAuliff noted in a Facebook post announcing the TV ad.
This sets up to be a winning issue in the 30th, which is being overrun with the data center madness – in addition to the 200 already operational in Loudoun and Fauquier, another 100 are approved and on the way.
“While added tax revenue is great, taxes aren’t going down for most Loudouners, in part because these data centers are getting tax breaks. And the permanent jobs they create? Sometimes just a dozen per facility,” McAuliff points out.
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Chris Graham
