On Wednesday morning, the dust had not settled in Virginia’s Republican congressional primary, which had become a proxy battle amidst deeper party differences.
Bob Good, the chair of the House Freedom Caucus, who enraged Trump and McCarthy supporters, was 342 votes behind state senator John McGuire in Virginia’s 5th congressional district on Wednesday morning. This is a narrow margin that would allow McGuire’s opponent to request a recount if it were to be valid. Ballots can be sent in until Friday.
As of Tuesday night, Good’s team was still awaiting the final election results, according to his social media posts.
We are still awaiting the results of provisional and mail-in ballots, but we did the greatest early voting operation the 5th District has ever witnessed. In the ensuing days, the congressman promised to do all in his power to guarantee that all votes were correctly tallied by assembling teams of observers and legal counsel.
Yet, McGuire was already planning for November, with Trump and McCarthy on his side.
Early Wednesday morning, the state senator posted to social media, “It’s clear that all paths end with a victory,” despite the fact that there are plenty of ballots yet to be counted. It is my hope that we can defeat Joe Biden in November and get Trump’s program passed in Congress by collaborating with him.
The most costly House Republican primary of the campaign sparked an intense drive to unseat Good from across the GOP. Good angered the former speaker’s supporters, who spent millions pursuing vengeance, because he was a key architect of the effort to remove McCarthy last November. After endorsing Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, in the Republican presidential primary of 2024, the congressman also lost Trump’s support.
Victorious in Democratic primary for vacant Virginia seat is a prominent Trump impeachment figure
In the Democratic primary for Virginia’s 7th Congressional District, AWN predicts that Eugene Vindman—a former Army colonel and pivotal figure in Trump’s first impeachment—will emerge victorious.
With the House GOP’s razor-thin majority hanging in the balance this fall, Vindman is vying to replace retiring Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger. It is widely believed that Derrick Anderson, a former Army Green Beret, will secure the Republican nomination to challenge Vindman in the 7th District, which encompasses the suburbs of Washington, DC.
Famous for their roles in the impeachment, Vindman and his twin brother, Alexander Vindman (retired Army Lt. Col.), brought attention to a phone conversation that took place in 2019 between Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, president of Ukraine. During the discussion, Trump allegedly demanded an inquiry into Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, who was running for president at the time.
The twins, who were both employed by the National Security Council, were heroes to anti-Trump Democratic activists after Alexander Vindman became a star witness in the 2020 impeachment hearing.
It is highly probable that Eugene Vindman’s candidacy was impacted by his involvement in Trump’s impeachment. Federal records show that the first-time candidate raised $5 million through May 29, despite the fact that most of his primary opponents were current or past elected officials. Compared to the sum of the other six Democrats running, that haul was nearly four times larger.
The departing lawmaker Spanberger will be leaving her position in 2019 to seek the office of governor. She narrowly earned a third term in 2022, after serving as a CIA officer.
Primary in Oklahoma is where Cole is found.
According to AWN’s projections, retiring Republican House Appropriations Committee chair Tom Cole of Oklahoma will have little trouble surviving a primary challenge in Oklahoma’s 4th Congressional District.
With the help of insurance broker Paul Bondar—who lent his campaign over $5 million until May 29 and bought out the airwaves with ads—and the other three contenders in the four-way primary, Cole is expected to emerge victorious.
Trump endorsed Cole, a longtime Republican operator. In contrast to the seasoned lawmaker, Bondar presented himself as a more traditionalist choice. He also produced advertisements that highlighted Cole’s donations to Trump’s GOP primary opponents in 2024 before they ran for president, in an effort to undermine the ties between Trump and Cole.
Cole has kept close ties to House conservatives since his 2002 election to Congress, voting down two attempts to impeach Trump and against the certification of certain 2020 election results.
When Trump endorsed Cole in early May, he remarked, “He has almost always voted with me, including on both Impeachment Hoaxes.”
The unique nature of Bondar’s connections to Oklahoma may have been the most peculiar feature of Tuesday’s race. Bondar voted in the Republican primary this past March after relocating from Illinois, where he had spent the majority of his career, to Texas in 2020. He now lives outside of Dallas. After that, he began running for Oklahoma Congress in April. According to the state’s voting records, Bondar had never voted in Oklahoma before casting his early in-person ballot for his primary race. Some of Cole’s supporters ran ads casting doubt on Bondar’s residency.
A 30-second ad by the pro-Cole Americans 4 Security super PAC drew parallels between the race and the infamously sour Red River rivalry between the University of Texas and the University of Oklahoma. Among its many Sooner State connections was Cole’s graduation from the University of Oklahoma. His opponent was characterized as “Texan Paul Bonder, straight from Dallas trying to buy an Oklahoma congressional seat.”
According to the advertisement, the mascots of the two schools—the Sooners and the Longhorns—shouldn’t be allowed to sit on the same seat.
An ad from Bondar’s campaign countered the challenger’s claim that he had bought 500 acres “to build his dream home” in Caddo and has a house in Oklahoma. The ad featured Cheyenne Stanley, the former owner, who claimed to have sold the Bondars the properties, with the initial sale occurring “about two years ago.”