In Virginia, Goodbye Denver Riggleman, Hello Democrats

Virginia's 5th District Congressman, Republican Denver Riggleman, did a nice thing, officiating at the same-sex marriage for a couple of his campaign aids, and for that piece of outrageous tolerance he was ousted by some 2,400 unamused delegates to the Republican 5th District Convention on Saturday. Bob Good, a former athletics official at Jerry Falwell Jr.’s Liberty University who describes himself as a “biblical conservative,” beat Riggleman, who was said to have a libertarian streak but who promptly joined the Freedom Caucus in the House when he took office back in January 2019. But Bob Good captured 58 percent of the anti-gay marriage vote in a "drive by" Republican convention (no clue how a drive-by convention works, except that it would be good for throwing stones).

I followed that 2018 election in the 5th District of Virginia because I was fascinated by the Democratic candidate Leslie Cockburn. She had had a primary opponent in Roger Dean Huffstetler, a clean-cut ex-Marine who has a personal grudge against the opioid epidemic (his father died of an oxycontin overdose) and who talked the language of land and family while operating as an ambitious, well-connected entrepreneur -- Harvard Business School, Silicon Valley. He started running for Congress less than two years after moving to Charlottesville, and he spent big in 2018. Huffstetler, reading the room and understanding that Leslie Cockburn was going to win it, dropped out of the running just prior to the May 2018 nominating caucus. At the time I called that a "class act" on Huffstetler's part, giving him every benefit of the doubt. Leslie Cockburn went on to lose the general election to the now disgraced Riggleman, getting 46.8% to Riggleman's 53.2% of the vote.

Huffstetler's back this year, running again in a crowded primary next Tuesday, June 23 (this time an open voting primary -- Virginia has weird options), and the field he's up against once again is mighty interesting. Huffstetler has put health care at the top of his agenda, and there's real competition for that issue among his primary opponents. The only consideration, though: Can one of these Democrats beat a Bible-spoutin' Republican for an open seat in this "likely Republican" district (Cook) which nevertheless contains Charlottesville and the University of Virginia, but in the year when rural folk are stirred up for Trump's triumph? Which one of these could overcome all odds?

Cameron Webb

Let's go straight to the website: "After graduating from UVA and getting [both] his medical and law degrees, Cameron was tapped by President Obama for the White House Fellowship. He served on the White House Health Care Team and also worked on President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper Initiative, where he helped tackle issues in education, workforce development and criminal justice reform."

Impressed yet? "A practicing physician, Cameron returned to Charlottesville where he treats patients as a general internist, teaches students and serves as the Director of Health Policy and Equity at UVA’s School of Medicine. His wife, Dr. Leigh-Ann Webb, is an ER doctor who grew up in Appomattox County. They reside in Albemarle County where they raise their two children, Avery and Lennox."

Expanding health care to everyone is his prime driver, and he has fairly moderate views based on experience and knowledge.

I like his political savvy: “...it is a mistake to say that the 5th District is heavily Republican.” Instead, he explained, Democratic candidates should focus on outreach to district residents who usually do not vote at all, especially African Americans. “Field a full team,” he said. “Expand the electorate.” There's clearly an electorate in that swath of Virginia ripe for expansion.

But will rural white Virginians elect a black man, even one as accomplished as Cameron Webb? I think it's wholly feasible, maybe even for a district that still contains moonshine capital Franklin County.

John Lesinski

Lesinski, like Huffstetler, is a retired Marine. His major distinction: He's alone among all the candidates for his actually having been elected to office, as both a school board member and a county supervisor in Rappanhannock County.

He's running as the moderate and seems to believe fervently in the Chuck Todd Theory that there are just oodles of Republican and Independent voters out there in a conservative district like the Virginia Fifth just waiting for a decent and moderate Democrat to vote for as a relief from the indecencies of the Trump presidency. “I feel that now there are moderates and independents who would consider voting across the aisle, who feel left behind by their party,” he said. Dr. Rachel Bitecofer demolishes the Chuck Todd Theory of the great swing vote, but there are always Democratic candidates who hitch their fortunes to being agreeable to the opposition.

Lesinski expressed support for moving toward a single-payer health care system eventually, although he argued that building on the Affordable Care Act would be more politically feasible in the short term. Regardless of the mechanism, he said, “I believe health care is a right, not a privilege.”


Claire Russo

More wealth of ex-Marine Corps experience. Claire Russo "served as an Intelligence Officer in the First Marine Expeditionary Force and the First Marine Air Wing. She deployed to Fallujah, Iraq where she led a team of Marines targeting insurgent networks. Claire continued her service after the Marines, working as a civilian with the Army. In this capacity, she deployed to Afghanistan and served as a counter insurgency adviser to the infantry. Following her work with the Army, Claire served on General Petraeus’s counter insurgency advisory team where she evaluated the training and employment of female engagement teams and their support of special operations forces in Afghanistan." [website]

Good Lord, the talent running for Congress in the Virginia 5th this year! She's making gun control a central issue, a risky proposition for rural Virginia, but look at this: "She likened her stance on gun policy to the laws surrounding driving a car. When speaking to gun-owning rural voters, she said, she emphasizes that 'I absolutely respect his right to own a gun, but it has to be safe and not hurt other people.'

"She would support legislation requiring background checks on every firearm transfer and the creation of so-called 'red flag' laws, a mechanism by which police or individuals can petition a court to remove temporarily an individual’s firearms if that individual is deemed to represent a threat to public safety. She elaborated later, 'It is unacceptable that people convicted of domestic violence can continue to possess guns.' ”

Will that fly? Dunno, but we'll soon know which of these Democrats will get to take on Bob Good for this now open House seat.

R D Huffstetler in the 5th District of Virginia

We first took note of the young ex-Marine running as the Democratic insurgent in the 5th Congressional District of Virginia back in January of 2018 ... Roger Dean ("R.D.") Huffstetler. I wrote about him at that time and included a map of that heavily Republican district.

Huffstetler was challenged for the Democratic nomination by an equally impressive Democratic woman, Leslie Cockburn, who had plenty of money backing her, and in a district-wide nominating convention, Cockburn had sewn up enough support to win. Huffstetler bowed to the inevitable, dropped out of the race on the eve of the convention, and endorsed Cockburn. Cockburn went on to lose in November to Republican first-time candidate Denver Riggleman.

R. D. Huffstetler is back for 2020. He announced a week ago. He was an impressive fundraiser in 2018, and the news on Twitter last night was that he's already raised $100,000 in that first week.

I like that he's strongly working class in background, born in Gaston County, NC, to a blue-collar, textile-mill-working family. His father drove an 18-wheeler. He talked frankly in his 2018 introductory video about his parents' struggle with addiction to painkillers, and about his own sense of calling to defend his country after 9/11. He joined the Marines, served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and after his service got a leg up with the G.I. Bill for higher education at the Harvard Business School. He and his OB/GYN wife and daughter live in Charlottesville.

He might be the one to flip that district in 2020.

The Rise of Leslie Cockburn in Virginia's 5th Congressional District

Republican Congressman Tom Garrett's surprise announcement on Monday that he would not seek a second term because he's an alcoholic has certainly boosted the candidacy of Democrat Leslie Cockburn, a first-time candidate for office who was already looking like a winner.

Leslie Cockburn

Cockburn had cleared the field of her Democratic rivals. The Democrats of the Virginia 5th District opted for a nominating caucus of counties rather than a primary (they can do that in Virginia), and Cockburn had most of those counties behind her. The sprawling 5th District takes in all or part of 21 counties, from the North Carolina border almost up to Maryland. Her leading Democratic opponent, Roger Dean Huffstetler, who'd raised over a million $$ himself, dropped out of the race a couple of days before the May 5th caucus and endorsed Cockburn:

“Democrats in the Fifth District have made it loud and clear through local caucuses that they want Leslie Cockburn to be our nominee to take on Tom Garrett this fall,” Huffstetler said in a statement. “Leslie worked extremely hard to earn that distinction, achieving viability in all 23 localities and winning an outright majority of delegates. She and her team are to be congratulated on executing on their strategy with precision and enthusiasm.”

Roger Dean Huffstetler is a class act, and he himself, an ex-Marine, looked like a winner back in January when he announced. Leslie Cockburn didn't get into the race until July, and she swept everyone away, including Huffstetler. Sic transit semper fi.

So what is it about Leslie Cockburn? She's something of a celebrity, married to Irish journalist and filmmaker Andrew Cockburn (who is also, incidentally, an old Russian expert; he wrote The Threat – Inside the Soviet Military Machine in 1982). Leslie and Andrew's daughter Olivia Wilde is a successful actress. Leslie has been a top investigative journalist, an award-winning producer for CBS's 60 Minutes. She has won two Emmys, two George Polk Awards, two Columbia Dupont journalism awards, and the Robert F. Kennedy Award. John Lewis, civil rights leader and dean of Georgia’s congressional delegation, has offered to come and campaign for her.

"In 2009, Leslie Cockburn directed and co-produced (with husband Andrew Cockburn) her first feature documentary for theatrical release. American Casino relates the story of the origins, progress and consequences of the subprime mortgage disaster that led to the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression. Beginning filming in January 2008, Cockburn laid bare both the financial machinations and miscalculations on Wall Street that produced the disaster as well as its effects on an array of Baltimore homeowners struggling to stay afloat. The film premiered at New York's Tribeca Film Festival in April 2009." (Thank you, Wikipedia)

So there's some talent there. And smarts. And connections.

She's gonna need all of that. Last I saw, the 5th District of Virginia (sorta like the 5th District of NC) was rated "safely Republican," and it could be a natural dam against any blue wave. But Cockburn is campaigning on kitchen table issues, like health care and education, and she's unapologetic about her environmentalism. She's come out in opposition to the Atlantic Coast pipeline, which would cut through productive farms and small businesses (like the Four Corners Farm in Franklin County) to transit fracked-gas to North Carolina.

Meanwhile, the Republican executives of the 5th District have to choose a replacement on the ballot for Tom Garrett, somebody who will probably be nowhere as prominent as Leslie Cockburn.

Another Marine Running as a Democratic Insurgent

Roger Dean Huffstetler is running for the US House from the 5th District of Virginia. He inspires confidence.





The 5th District of Virginia was gerrymandered to benefit a Republican. It includes the city of Danville but skirts Roanoke and Lynchburg and stretches on up the largely rural eastern slope of the Blue Ridge to Warrenton. Charlottesville and the University of Virginia is very much in the district.

Most observers consider it reliably Republican, but it was represented by blue dog Democrat Virgil Goode for years, who switched parties to Republican and promptly lost to Democratic progressive Tom Perriello in 2008, who in turn lost the seat to a Republican tea partier in 2010. It's been Republican ever since but with a lingering tendency to "swing." We have relatives and friends in the Virginia 5th, in Amherst and Nelson counties (where there's still some very fine moonshine produced).

Who is the current Republican incumbent?
Tom Garrett, a legislator without much of a profile other than being an enthusiastic member of the hard-conservative "freedom caucus," chose to raise his profile in 2017 by meeting with the organizer of the Charlottesville white supremacy rally shortly before that event led to the death of a young woman.

Tom Garrett
Photo Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call

Garrett was soon claiming that he didn't know the political identity of the man he met with, but the cat was already out of the bag: Garrett is a coddler of white supremacists, much like the president he wants to be close to.

As a freedom caucus member, Garrett is currently joining in on the trashing of the FBI -- the real enemy of the people! -- and helping lay the groundwork that any indictment of the president by the Mueller investigation must be bogus because of a "secret society" of Comey allies (who nevertheless managed to throw the election to Trump by reopening an investigation into Clinton emails just days before the 2016 election. That's one inept secret society!).

In other words, Garrett is a conservative tool and an idiot, while Roger Dean Huffstetler is not.