GUEST TAKEOVER: The Closest Race in the Commonwealth
This week, Andrew Payton takes over the reins on By the Ballot.
This week on By the Ballot, we are featuring another guest for his take on the 2025 elections. November 4th was an amazing night for Democrats across the Commonwealth. But not all the most promising candidates won out, and we want to hear from them, too.
Andrew Payton was the Democratic nominee for HD-34 during the 2025 Cycle. He’s a dad of two, an education specialist, and a climate advocate. You may recall Andrew from an earlier piece I wrote at the beginning of the Fall on flipping districts around college towns like Harrisonburg, where he ran. Here he is to give us his 2 cents on the race:
257 votes. Less than 1%. That’s how close our campaign came here in Virginia’s 34th House of Delegates district to unseating an entrenched 15-year incumbent Republican in a Trump +7 district that hasn’t elected a Democrat to this office since 1985.
Virginia Democrats saw incredible wins this year, flipping all three statewide offices, electing our first female governor, and the first Muslim woman elected to any statewide office in the United States. We also gained 64 seats in the House, the most in nearly four decades, amid a substantial shift to the left across the Commonwealth, including in rural areas like mine. We may not have won our particular seat, but we built on decades of local political organizing and turned a race that no one was talking about earlier in 2025, in a deep red area of western Virginia, into the closest race in the Commonwealth.
My district, the 34th, is in the heart of the stunningly beautiful Shenandoah Valley and includes the eastern and western parts of Rockingham County and the small city of Harrisonburg, a refugee resettlement community with a large state university. The folks here are hard-working, resilient, loyal, and proud. We have families who have been farming this Valley for generations, and a diverse immigrant community that helps define who we have become. I decided to run for this seat–just a few days before the April filing deadline, when it appeared no one else was ready to step forward–because I love this land, I love my neighbors, and I am sick of seeing corporations bleed both land and people dry to increase their profits. I saw policies coming out of Washington and Richmond exacerbating systemic harms and pain–the inhumane kidnappings that were breaking apart families, the closure of rural health clinics that put lives at risk, the generational wealth and health disparities, the disregard for the economic and health risks of unchecked climate change, the cuts to programs and benefits that literally feed our children when wages are not enough–and I decided to step up for the place and the people I care about.
On the campaign trail, I knocked on thousands of doors. I heard stories about medications families could no longer afford and the multiple jobs needed to pay rent, fears of being racially profiled by ICE and of the dismal job market students would meet once they graduated, and about the tariffs and economic policies hurting our small businesses and making the kitchen table math harder and harder to do. Stories like this aren’t unique to this place, of course, because the system we are a part of is deeply unfair. That’s because this system is designed to favor a few rich and privileged folks who use the rest of us as disposable resources. Communities like mine deserve leaders willing to fight for us, the people powering our economy.
My opponent, now elected to his eighth term, has watched prices rise and wages stagnate, and continues to prioritize big businesses over the working folks that make up his constituency. He fashions himself a bipartisan negotiator with an open-door policy, but despite his nearly two decades in the state legislature, he has shockingly little to show for it beyond a history of party-line votes to defend the profit margins of his corporate donors.
While we came up short–only 257 votes short–we built on decades of work from Harrisonburg and Rockingham Democrats and proved that winning here, in rural places and small cities like this, is possible, and that we can have representation that prioritizes working people. We need representation that won’t abandon our immigrant neighbors, treating them as political inconveniences, and believes economic opportunity doesn’t have to come at the expense of our land and water. We deserve a leader who sees everyone’s value, no matter where they’ve come from and no matter whether they live at the end of a long gravel road or four stories up in a housing complex.
I got into this race late and with an unknown name, and with a hunch that folks would share my vision for an affordable, equitable, and sustainable community, from the campus of James Madison University, to the historically black Northeast Neighborhood, to the working-class town of Elkton, to the tree-lined drives in Massanetta Springs. It turned out I was right: we are ready for representation that represents us–all of us–and I can promise you that we will continue to grow our coalition and fight for a future that is more fair to the folks who call the Shenandoah Valley their home.
We deserve better, and we’re going to keep fighting for it.
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By the Ballot is an opinion series published on Substack. All views expressed are solely those of the author and should not be interpreted as reporting or objective journalism or attributed to any other individual or organization. I am not a journalist or reporter, nor do I claim to be one. This publication represents personal commentary, analysis, and opinion only.