Could Denver Riggleman's Loss Be the Democrats Gain?

Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-VA)

This weekend, Virginia Republicans held a nominating convention in their fifth district to decide who would be their standard-bearer come November.  Virginia is weird in that they do allow nominating conventions as well as primaries to decide whether a person can be the nominee, and it can vary by year (I'm firmly against this policy, and am very anti-caucus/convention & pro-primary).  The nominating committee pitted first-term Rep. Denver Riggleman (R), a party-line incumbent against former County Supervisor Bob Good.  Good ran hard to Riggleman's right on social issues, specifically focusing on Riggleman's officiating at a gay wedding in 2019.  Good used that issue at a sparsely-attended convention, even as prominent conservatives like President Trump and Liberty University President Jerry Falwell, Jr. endorsed the incumbent (Good even worked at Liberty University) to beat Riggleman, making him the third incumbent to lose a race for renomination (after Dan Lipinski in Illinois and Steve King in Iowa).

There's a lot to unpack here, and I don't want to short-shift some of the bigger issues before we get to the main reason I'm writing this article.  Obviously Riggleman losing is a big deal.  Though we do have a few vulnerable incumbents still to face their primary (Eliot Engel, in particular, seems like he's on thin ice), this year has been pretty uniformly kind to incumbents.  Riggleman is the exception (and the first Republican that President Trump has endorsed to lose this year), while other figures like Brian Fitzpatrick & Henry Cuellar have avoided losses in competitive primaries.  Of course, Riggleman didn't face a primary.  Conventions, by way of excluding people from the process who cannot attend at that specific time, are always undemocratic, but holding one in the middle of a pandemic when it'd be easier to have by-mail elections, compounds that.  It's hard for Good to say he has the backing of the people when this reeks of a "backroom deal" situation.

But what I want to talk about here is Good's chances in the general election.  Almost immediately after the election, Kyle Kondik with Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball moved this race from a "Likely R" to "Leans R," and with good reason.  While the Democratic nominee is not yet known (the fifth district Democrats decided to hold their nominating process via a traditional primary that will take place on June 23rd), Good adds a level of problem for the GOP here that, while they're still favored, could be upended in a wave.

Virginia's 5th congressional district is not friendly to Democrats.  The seat was not only won by Trump by ten-poins, Ed Gillespie won it in 2017 by 9-points and even Corey Stewart won it in 2018 by 2-points.  Thus, it's not what you'd consider a particularly competitive district under any circumstances.  However, it's hard not to think of South Carolina's first congressional district in relation to this, since the similarities are all there.

State Rep. Katie Arrington (R-SC)

SC-1 went for Donald Trump by 13-points in 2016; it is, by any definition, a red district.  It does have some potentially blue elements (specifically the metro area of Charleston and a higher-than-the-rest-of-the-state income and education level), but it's a district that the Republicans should be able to count on, and in 2018 it appeared they would.  Then-Rep. Mark Sanford has had his ups-and-downs in political life, but he wasn't on one of his rough years and seemed probable for a win in the general election...until he lost the primary.  Sanford was seen as insufficiently supportive of Donald Trump, and so State Rep. Katie Arrington, far to his right, took him out in the primary.  This shouldn't have left the district vulnerable, but it did.  Democratic candidate Joe Cunningham, cutting a moderate profile, was able to appeal to people who would've voted for Sanford in the general, but wouldn't cast a vote for Arrington, and thus the Republicans "shot themselves in the foot" by taking a seat they had in the bank and losing it because of their own hubris.

This is rare.  In the past decade it's only happened twice.  In 2012, after redistricting, Rep. Mark Critz beat his fellow incumbent Jason Altmire, but ultimately went on to lose the general election.  In 2010, scandal-plagued incumbent Rep. Alan Mollohan lost to State Sen. Mike Oliverio in the primary but went on to lose the general election in a district that had been trending away from the Democrats.  The difference here is it's probable that Altmire & Mollohan were both looking at losses themselves.  The Arrington situation is weird because there was no evidence that Sanford would lose the general (he could've, but history wasn't on the Democrats side there)-if someone is going to overplay their hand, it's going to happen in an open seat or at least against an appointed incumbent.

In order for Good to lose, a lot of things would need to happen.  For starters, he'd need to be seen as a Corey Stewart, not a Gillespie or even a Trump (someone totally unacceptable-Stewart is the only person who put in numbers that might convince me he was vulnerable to lose here).  He'd need Biden to be closer than Clinton in 2016 (basically picking up all of the third party votes that Clinton lost here), and to over-perform in Charlottesville, the Democratic base in the district, with record turnout.  And he'd likely need depressed turnout in Virginia for the GOP (hard-to-achieve unless it feels like Virginia statewide is a lost cause for Trump, and probably the national election as well).  But the fact that the Republicans have been willing to give up a safe-hold here, particularly in an election where they can't sacrifice any House seats if they want a path to a majority, is intriguing, and proves that social issues (which would be a dangerous path for Republicans to go as they try to reclaim the suburbs nationally) might feature more heavily in the fall campaign than we initially thought.