Our local readers long since noticed that we didn’t give any coverage to the local elections for seats on the Augusta County Board of Supervisors and Augusta County School Board.
The strategic choice there: we weren’t going to be able to dissuade voters from electing one MAGA over the other, which was the choice in all but one of the races on the ballot.
Two of the BOS races had candidates running unopposed, and the third had the super PAC-backed Chris Kincheloe defeating Tracy Pyles, an occasional AFP contributor who, for some reason, kept us on the sidelines as he waged his campaign.
ICYMI
My guess – it’s only a guess; we didn’t discuss it – on why Pyles kept his distance from us: we’re the left-of-center local news outlet, and he didn’t see value to having AFP on his side.
He ended up losing by 18.5 points in the two-way race.
I’m not sure we would have moved the needle for Pyles, so, I’m not questioning him on this.
Elsewhere, Butch Wells, who is stepping down from his BOS seat, lost in his bid for a School Board seat.
Wells doesn’t like being called a MAGA, but he voted lockstep with the MAGA majority on the BOS, so, there’s that.
MAGA-lite John Ocheltree upset MAGA extremist-to-the-max Timothy Simmons in the other contested School Board race.
Meh.
We weren’t going to change any of that.
ICYMI
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It is worth observing that while Winsome Earle-Sears won the county at the top of the ticket with 72.9 percent of the vote, her percentage was five points behind the 77.9 percent that Glenn Youngkin got in the county in 2021.
That move was illustrative of a part of the problem that the MAGAs had in the 2025 cycle out here in the hinterlands.
Earle-Sears ran seven points behind Youngkin in Rockingham County, where she only got 68 percent – Youngkin got 75.3 percent in 2021.
She was at 68.8 percent up the road in Shenandoah County – Youngkin in 2021: 74.6 percent.
Next door to Shenandoah, Page County was 74.6 percent for Earle-Sears – Youngkin in 2021: 78.9 percent.
Down in Rockbridge County, Earle-Sears got 65 percent – Youngkin in 2021: 68.9 percent.
Botetourt County, which Sixth District Congressman Ben Cline calls home, had Earle-Sears at 70.4 percent – Youngkin in 2021: 76.3 percent.
Not seismic shifts, but shifts nonetheless.
The Democrats’ strategy to run a candidate in every House of Delegates race on the ballot, even the ones that were not going to bear fruit, had to have had an impact on the numbers here.
We’re sure to see more organizing out this way from the Ds next cycle, after the congressional redistricting that looks to carve a couple or three light-blue districts in the Shenandoah Valley and Roanoke Valley, by attaching our areas to localities east of the Blue Ridge that are more reliably D.
As that takes shape, maybe latent middle-of-the-roaders in my home county will have real choices when they go to the polls.
It’s not like we’ve gotten anything out of rubber-stamping the MAGAs the past 10 years.
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Chris Graham
