Former Waynesboro vice mayor Jim Wood, mute and politically irrelevant since the Buttplug-gate scandal that emerged weeks into his term on Waynesboro City Council, is actually running for re-election.
Gotta say, I’m surprised.
Rest assured: we will remind you early and often about what this Jim Wood guy stands for.
Wood, the chair of the Waynesboro Republican Committee, was elected to the Ward D seat in the 2022 cycle, defeating the incumbent, independent Sam Hostetter, a local family medicine doctor, by 17 votes.
If you know, say, 18 people who live in Ward D, and would’ve voted for Sam Hostetter, and were just too lazy, and that’s why we have had Jim Wood for the past four years, you’re OK to yell at those friends, on all our behalf.
Hostetter has filed as a candidate to challenge Wood for the Ward D seat in the 2026 cycle.
ICYMI: Jim Wood/Buttplug-gate
- Waynesboro vice mayor hits Buttigieg with gay slur after asking for federal money
- Waynesboro vice mayor defends ‘Pete Buttplug’ slur of Pete Buttigieg
- Waynesboro Vice Mayor Jim Wood offers half-hearted apology for ‘Pete Buttplug’ slur
- Waynesboro mayor rebukes Jim Wood on ‘Pete Buttplug’ slur: ‘No place in our City’
- Pete Buttigieg is aware that Waynesboro’s vice mayor called him ‘Pete Buttplug’
- City Council members, city residents, urge Waynesboro Vice Mayor Jim Wood to resign
Before the 2022 election, we reported that Wood had posted messages to his socials supporting those behind the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
We also reported on a podcast that he hosted at the time on which he made several tasteless jokes about the hammer attack on the husband of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and tried to frame the attack as a “domestic incident” between Paul Pelosi and “a male prostitute.”
Basically, we told you who he was, but Ward D still gave Wood a bare majority to put him in office, and then his peers on the City Council elected him vice mayor at his first meeting as a member of the body.
A scant six weeks later, on another of his podcasts, Wood referred to Pete Buttigieg, then the Secretary of Transportation in the Biden administration, as “Pete Buttplug,” an obvious slur of Buttigieg, who is gay.
This is where all hell broke loose.
Wood faced repeated calls to step down as vice mayor and to resign from City Council from fellow City Council members and a wide swath of city residents, but he was able to ride out the controversy – though, notably, he discontinued his weekly podcast, and deleted the archives of past podcasts dating back years.
His approach since Buttplug-gate has been to lay low, which, whoever gave him that advice, it was good advice.
The conservative bloc that held the majority on the five-member City Council lost its power in the 2024 cycle, in which Wood, as the city GOP chair, ran a slate of three mid candidates, two of whom lost by double-digit margins.
What we saw in Waynesboro in the 2025 cycle – in which Virginia voters went to the polls to elect a new governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and House of Delegates – could give you hope regarding Wood being on his way out.
But.
OK, the give you hope part: the city, for the first time since 1985, went Democrat at the top of the ballot, giving Abigail Spanberger a five-point win in the governor’s race.
Now, to the but part: Ward D still went to the Republican, Winsome Earle-Sears, by three votes.
Not three points: three votes.
Though … the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor, Ghazala Hashmi, won her race by 2.5 points, and Jay Jones, the Dem nominee for attorney general, won his race by two points.
Unsolicited advice to Sam Hostetter: get yourself a team together, start knocking on doors, knock on every door once between now and Labor Day, rinse, repeat.
We cannot let Ward D make the same mistake a second time.
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Chris Graham
