When Virginia Rep. Bob Goodlatte announced in November that he wouldn't seek a 14th term in his very red Shenandoah Valley seat, local Republican leaders had a choice. They could have decided to pick their nominee through a traditional state-run primary, where the date would have been set far in advance, where as many interested voters could participate as possible, and where the rules would be clear. Instead, they’ve chosen to hold a party convention, where absolutely none of these things are true, and one major candidate is now accusing the GOP of trying to “rig” the process against him.
We'll start with that last bit first, which feels like it should be a passage of a Robert Caro book. Del. Ben Cline arguably is the frontrunner in the eight-person field to succeed Goodlatte, but he got some bad news this month. It wasn’t the announcement that the 6th District Republican Party Committee had voted to conduct a convention instead of a primary, since that move was both widely expected and Cline was happy with it. However, party leaders also decided that there would only be one round of voting, meaning that the candidate earning a bare plurality of delegate support would win the GOP nomination outright.
Usually, party conventions (in Virginia and elsewhere) require a candidate to earn a majority of the delegates' support to win, which typically requires multiple rounds of balloting where the lowest vote-getters drop off and their supporters pick again from the remaining field. Cline was not happy with this unorthodox change. In fact, he went ballistic.
Cline charged that party leaders were attempting "to rig the convention to help their chosen candidate because they do not believe their candidate of choice is strong enough to win a majority of delegates under the standard Convention rules." Cline also argued that the convention delegates themselves needed to be the ones to set the convention rules, and the former state party's general counsel even agreed with him. But right now, it's entirely unclear as to when this very important rules decision will be made, or who will be the one to make it.
Cline suspects the rival that local GOP poobahs are trying boost is Republican National Committee Member Cynthia Dunbar, who attracted national attention in 2015 when her right-wing textbook company published a volume called Mexican American Heritage that was replete with racist passages. And Cline seems to be correct. As the Roanoke Times’ Carmen Forman reports, it was a 6th District Committee vice chair and Dunbar ally, Matt Tederick, who was the one that pushed for the rules change, arguing, "There’s a lot of gamesmanship that takes place within the establishment career politicians and what the vote by plurality has done is eliminate this.”
And Tederick didn't stop there:
Presenting his case for the rules change, Tederick cited an anecdote in which the Dunbar campaign received a phone call from a lawyer in Washington, D.C. The lawyer said he had been encouraged to run in the 6th District by a group called Anybody But Dunbar. The group instructed the lawyer to campaign as normal, but throw his support behind fellow candidate Del. Ben Cline upon losing at the convention, Tederick said.
Tederick's tale of scary calls from D.C. swamp creatures was enough to get the GOP committee to vote 18-10 to require one ballot. Dunbar was very happy with how things turned out, and she tweeted, "Plurality = no backroom deals. Our campaign is proud to see that the committee is fighting back against the tricks of the swamp."
However, some would-be swamp-drainers are going to need to miss the May 19 convention no matter how much they might want to attend. Liberty University, which is a major bastion of the religious right in the district, is holding its commencement that day, as is Mary Baldwin University (home of the Fighting Squirrels), which will likely keep several would-be delegates from showing up to the convention.
Unlike the attempted majority rules change, there's no indication that the convention was scheduled so as to help or hurt any particular candidate, though it's worth noting that Liberty President Jerry Falwell Jr. is supporting Cline. Still, this is a problem that would have been avoided with regular primary, where voters can vote absentee if they can't make it to the polls on Election Day.
The good news for the GOP (such as it is) is that all of these machinations probably won't hurt them in the fall regardless of who emerges from the convention or how ugly their victory is. This district supported Mitt Romney by a 60-40 margin and Trump by an even wider 60-35 spread. Even in a wave year, it's going to be an incredibly stubborn target. While Democrat Ralph Northam won last year's governor's race 54-45 statewide, he lost the 6th District 60-39.
However, both parties in Virginia often elect to pick their nominees through conventions in other, more competitive, seats. We've always opposed this system for the simple fact that it takes power away from regular voters and puts it into the hands of party insiders. And as this twisted saga demonstrates, the losing candidates at conventions can often make a case that the process was, in fact, tilted against them, whether unintentionally or by design.
In this very red seat, the GOP can probably afford for hurt feelings to linger, but this kind of division could be damaging for a party's chances in a competitive general election. Most voters in America get to pick their nominees through a primary, and Virginians should have that chance, too, instead of having to deal with this kind of backroom chaos.