The Pete Barlow congressional campaign reported on Tuesday that it has raised more than $63,000 toward its 2026 primary run.
Not much, but it’s a start.
The MAGA incumbent in the Sixth District, Ben Cline, had more than $400,000 in cash on hand at the end of June, and we can presume that he has more than that now that we’re into October.
Barlow, though, just launched his campaign for the Democratic Party nomination in mid-August.
Ken Mitchell, who came up short in his run against Cline, in 2024, is also running for the nomination in the Sixth in the 2026 cycle.
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We don’t have updated campaign-finance numbers for Mitchell at the moment.
I’m also hearing that there will be a third candidate entering the Democratic primary in the Sixth District in the coming days.
Specific to Barlow: the Rockingham County native served a full deployment in the Peace Corps in the Philippines, where he taught high school biology, developed the region’s first aquaculture program, and led the planting of 3,500 mangrove trees for coastal protection.
Returning Stateside, Barlow worked for six years with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, negotiating and drafting federal policies in partnership with organizations ranging from state wildlife agencies to national advocacy groups.
He then went to work in 2020 with FEMA, where he was on the frontlines of some of America’s most challenging disasters: oil spills, California wildfires, Puerto Rico’s hurricane recovery, and humanitarian crises in Haiti.
FEMA, under Donald Trump, and with the help of Cline, is barely an afterthought.
Trump has signaled that he would prefer to kill the agency in favor of just giving block grants to states to do the jobs themselves, as his administration has also stiffed sending dollars to local disasters based on the partisan leanings of the states involved.
The block-grant thing won’t work, obviously, if the money doesn’t actually go where it’s needed.
But that’s par for the course for our golf-obsessed president and his administration, which is more focused on dividing us than actually running the country.
“Congress unleashed disastrous policies on our region. That’s not what folks voted for in 2024, and they’re right to be angry,” Barlow said. “Folks are fed up with being manipulated by elites who benefit from pitting neighbors against one another.”
The Sixth District is a toughie for Democrats – Cline defeated Mitchell in 2024 with 63.1 percent of the vote, and Trump got 61.0 percent of the vote at the top of the ticket.
Even Hung Cao, who lost in a landslide to U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine in last year’s Senate race, got 59.0 percent of the vote in the Sixth.
So, uphill battle.
But one worth fighting.
Cline is a rubber-stamp for Trump, among other things, voting for the Big Ugly Bill that gutted Medicaid and Medicare, which was cited by Augusta Health when the regional hospital announced last month that it was closing three primary-care centers.
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“This administration has really taken a bloody axe to rural healthcare. It’s incredible, and it’s going to have downstream effects for years to come,” Barlow said. “How is it making America great again for us to be cutting our rural healthcare?”