Virginia Democrats Field Candidates in All 100 State House Districts

Unfortunately, for many rural voters, a significant number races go uncontested and as a result there’s only one choice on the ticket: Republican. But this year, Democrats have a chance to throw some roadblocks in front of the Trump-and-GOP train.

Elections are currently underway in four states: New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia. Of these states, Virginia Democrats have crossed a milestone—they are running candidates in all 100 districts for the state’s House of Delegates. Twenty-seven of these candidates are running in the reddest parts of Virginia.

This is thanks to an organized effort led by William Ferguson Reid and his son William Ferguson Reid, Jr., to recruit and run rural Democratic candidates in districts thought unwinnable by an urban-centric Democratic Party establishment. Both Reid and his son represent progressive Virginia organizers who prioritize the importance of giving Virginians an alternative to the Republican establishment, not just in strategic districts but in every race.

Overcoming stumbling blocks

In southwestern Virginia, where I live, a full slate of Democrats are talking about removing barriers to public education, skills-training, affordable housing, good paying jobs, intervention for substance use disorder and good medical care.

Will a region that voted for Trump in 2024 set aside ideology and identity politics in favor of candidates who want to protect liberties for individuals instead of policies that favor the area’s industries and a few privileged rich? That question will be answered on November 4.

A common stumbling block for Democrats in conservative districts is how to translate a progressive agenda so it will be heard by the area’s Independent or conservative voters. In some circumstances, Democratic committees at the state, and local levels are out of touch with the needs of the wider population in districts where they live. And when Democrats are fewer in number, they cannot win elections unless they garner votes from Independent and Republican neighbors.

Too many Democrats resist crossing the political aisle to connect with these voters. This resistance can be attributed to priorities stemming from the highest levels of the DNC. Instead of building a custom platform that responds to the urgent needs in rural districts, county committees—and the congressional district committees that encompass them—often imitate the language, priorities and culture of urban-centric state and national-level party organizations. As a result, they can miss opportunities to reach voters who might otherwise align with them.

Democratic candidates depend on local party infrastructure, where it exists, and local Democratic voters to amplify their campaigns and reach voters. Candidates in southwest Virginia are no different.

Among the freshmen Democratic candidates coordinating with their congressional districts’ committees are Cindy Green a businesswoman whose expertise is rural economic development and Biko Agozino, a Virginia Tech professor whose research in sociology centers on human rights.

If elected, these Democrats will challenge a Republican agenda that has pressed many rural and small town residents to work multiple jobs at a time when well-paying jobs are vanishing along with the coal and lumber extracted from the region. Every truck or train car hauling raw materials and agricultural products out of rural America supports an urban-centric hegemony with very little return or reinvestment coming back to rural economies. In an era of right-wing representation, the people of southwestern Virginia—and rural America—could benefit from something new.

Affordable housing and economic growth

Cindy Green works for a financial nonprofit that helps area developers and residents create more affordable housing. She’s the first Democrat to challenge Virginia House District 44’s Republican incumbent, Israel O’Quinn, since 2011. Green’s work in affordable housing gives her a distinct perspective in a region where the average cost of housing far outpaces the average income. Green sees the cycle of inflated housing costs, job losses, and slow economic growth as something that her Republican opponent has allowed to happen.

Green describes 15 years of job losses in Virginia’s coal fields. From 2011 to 2020, mine closures and layoffs dropped the number of jobs in the region from 92,000 to 44,100. There’s been some attempts to transition mining families to new industries, but it hasn’t been enough to compensate for the job losses in the region. On top of this economic decline, Green points to a hospital monopoly that limits the quality of care and the choices in health care for area residents. She is adamant that competition in medical care will spur lower costs and better health outcomes.

I ask Green to describe the relationship between affordable housing and economic growth. She says:

You’re not going to be able to recruit businesses to come to your area and create quality jobs if you do not have places for people to live. … You’ve got to get developers brought to the region that know how to … take an abandoned, closed school building and turn that into affordable housing.

Green sees a viable way for her district to qualify for grants to do just that through Virginia’s Workforce Housing Investment Program, which launched in 2024 with a plan to invest $75 million over a five-year span in affordable housing. “If you’re going to make housing affordable, it still has to be able … to cover the debt that the developer has taken on to create it.”

According to Green, creating affordable housing for workers will spur a cycle of economic development and help in “recruiting businesses to provide the area with quality jobs.”

“I’m not talking about minimum wage jobs,” she says. “We need to get quality jobs, especially for the United Mine Workers Union. Those people know how to work hard. They know how to show up every day. They just need quality jobs.”

Fighting for human rights and health freedoms

Biko Agozino is a sociology professor at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, a city of 45,000 near the West Virginia border and is intersected by District 42, where Agozino is running for State House. Agozino’s work in sociology, and his experience growing up under a series of military dictatorships in Nigeria, informs his decision to run a campaign platform to protect human rights. He is deeply concerned about the liberties of his constituents whose freedoms in education and health care have been eroded under Republican leadership—including the district’s Republican incumbent Rep. Jason Ballard.

Critiquing the Republican platform within the context of human rights violations, Agozino is challenging voters in District 42 to consider more carefully what’s important to them as Americans. How do they envision the balance between individual liberties and the decision-making power of the state?

Among Agozino’s priorities is securing the freedom of health care choice for all of his constituents. He is concerned that women in his district increasingly do not have access to reproductive health care including their human right—their freedom—to make decisions about her own body.

Agozino is also concerned about the health of residents in his district who struggle with substance use disorder. Aware of limited resources in rural districts with steep overdose rates, Agozino wants to restore science-informed approaches in treatment and to remove barriers to access for addiction treatment. He references the 2017 legalization of medical cannabis in West Virginia, where physicians have been able to reduce overdose rates by helping people living with substance use disorder transition to using marijuana. In 2024, West Virginia reduced overdoses by 40% compared to the year prior, Agozino says, while his district in Virginia has only reduced their overdose rate by 1%. Agozino sees multiple failures and missed opportunities in Virginia’s current laws which forbids a marijuana economy.

Another priority for Agozino is to protect and restore public school education, including access to the sciences and history. He points to racism coming from politicians and officials who want to limit and omit access to knowledge. Agozino places access to truthful, evidence-based education within the context of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its Title VI provision that prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin.

I asked Agozino about how Trump and the GOP’s cuts to Medicaid, as passed in the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” would impact his district.

“The big, bad, ugly bill would cut about a trillion dollars from Medicaid,” he says. “And it is known that people in rural parts of America, rural parts of Virginia, tend to have more crises; many illnesses; tend to have a lower life expectancy. They tend to rely more on Medicaid, and therefore they’re going to be hit hard.”

Agozino points specifically to the impact of Medicaid cuts on rural hospitals, which will threaten even more with closures. “All these [cuts] were put in place to save a trillion dollars that the Trump administration wants to give to billionaires like himself,” he says. “The billionaires, they [have] enough money to live for thousands of years if they can, but they’re going to take it from the poor and hand it over to the rich? So that’s the major campaign issue for me: that a lot of our constituents are going to struggle.”

“And they claim to be Christians,” he adds. “How could you [Christians] do that to the least of those who are already struggling and who will struggle even more with the impact of the tariff wars?”

Deep red competition

To get a picture for what these candidates are up against, I talked to an organizer (and Barn Raiser contributor) in Big Stone Gap who has produced 11 Democratic wins in deeply Republican districts. John Peace II is a lifelong resident of Wise County and the co-founder of urTOPIX, a service that helps rural Democrats translate their message effectively in districts that lean red. His organization is sponsored by a rural-headquartered and local-staffed PAC called Rural America Rising. Since its founding a few months ago, urTOPIX has already coached 35 Democrats across six states. 

I asked Peace about the Republican incumbents Green and Agozino are trying to unseat.

Referring to Green’s opponent in House District 44, Peace says, “Israel O’Quinn has held his seat unopposed since 2012. He’s a career politician who votes party line with a platform that supports and aids corporate interests.” 

As for Agozino’s opponent, Jason Ballard, in House District 42,“Ballard is the same as O’Quinn, only he’s a freshmen politician. Like O’Quinn, he’s a party-line Republican. Both are lined up with Trump on all the issues.”

When I ask Peace why voters keep electing candidates like O’Quinn and Ballard, he points to the fact that O’Quinn hasn’t had a challenger since 2012.“ Voters keep electing O’Quinn because there’s no option on the ballot. Cindy Green is the first Democrat to challenge O’Quinn and she launched her campaign not because a regional committee asked her to run. She decided to run because Dr. Fergie Reid, Jr. encouraged her to fight for what she believes in by becoming a legislator.” 

Peace continues, speaking of Agozino’s campaign to unseat Ballard:

For a freshman like Ballard, he’s not running on real issues. He’s running on a soft topic like “family values.” Something anyone can get behind. So he’s out talking about “family values” while voting against the people in his district by supporting Trump’s cuts to Medicaid, for example. But Agozino is working closely with his district’s committees to do two things: talk about his priorities for his district and helping him make long-term friendships among the constituents. Agozino is out there visiting with his constituents and finding the common ground.

I asked Peace what he thinks is going on for rural and small town voters who support Republicans who cut safety nets for their constituents. Peace doesn’t hesitate:

Folks vote for who they know more than they do the issues. If you’re living in the district where you’re running and you’ve spent time making friends and connecting with all the communities of a place, people know you and they want to support you. A lot of times, Democrats stay in their own social bubbles out here and they don’t integrate with the wider population. But Democrats who do build lasting friendships across our diverse communities, they have a winning chance at representing the people in office.

A change in strategy?

Rural Democratic candidates, from Deborah “Renie” Gates in 2023 to Biko Agozino in 2025, need support to do the work they’re doing. These days, when national media puts a spotlight on liberals marching in the streets, they ignore the rural candidates who are putting their livelihoods on the line to run against a well-funded Republican machine. When Democrats show up to shake hands at events or to speak in front of local organizations, they face a rural audience who has been swamped by conspiracy-driven, right-wing media for a generation.

And in any community—from the most affluent metropolitan neighborhoods to the most remote districts—Democratic candidates face blow back from family and neighbors who’ve been emboldened by a Republican tolerance for racism, misogyny and class-supremacy.

When I asked the candidates interviewed for this article if their campaigns need more money and volunteers, the answer is: “Yes and yes.” Candidates are frustrated that money has a place in campaigning but when their resources are hundreds of dollars, compared with opponents who have hundreds of thousands, these campaigns face a steep climb to obtain simple campaigning materials like postcards or a few yard signs.

As far as support from the Democratic Party of Virginia, they said that both technical and social media help create continuity between website social media and print materials. A centralized tech and social media service, the candidates say, could help them organize and boost their campaigns.

This year, the DNC unveiled their “Organize Everywhere, Win Anywhere” strategy, which promises to spur state committees to invest and run candidates in every district by increasing DNC contributions to state parties from 8% of the DNC budget to over 20%. It’s a good year to try out a new approach with only four states holding elections. 

But the funding won’t change party infrastructure overnight and so far “Organize Everywhere” hasn’t seemed to make much of an impact for rural candidates in Virginia. In July, the state received a $1.5 million donation from the DNC to help candidates in this November’s election. Peace notes that according to data from the Virginia Public Access Project, a substantial portion of the state Democratic party’s funds appear to be channeled toward Democrats like Lily Franklin, who is running for State House in District 41, which includes a large portion of Blacksburg. According to State Navigate, Democrats are favored to win the district. Meanwhile, the 27 Democrats running in Virginia’s reddest State House districts continue to raise funds from small donations and local Democratic party organizations. At press time, the Democratic Party of Virginia did not respond for comment about how it has funded the local candidates.

Candidates like Agozino and Green need the boots-on-the-ground engagement from their local committees who are willing to do the hard work of knocking on doors and making phone calls. They need state-level investment to fuel their campaigns on social media and to buy a few yard signs. They need the muscle of the DNC to broadcast candidacies like theirs beyond the circle of their home districts. A little national attention goes a long way in rural and small town places.

In this overlooked region in a mighty Commonwealth, Democratic candidates have assumed the isolated, uphill fight to rebuild common wealth for our people in southwest Virginia. It doesn’t have to be such a lonely job.

Sara June Jo-SæboMore by this author →

Sara June Jo-Sæbo has served on a rural Democratic committee. She is an author and freelance writer living in Southwest Virginia. Jo-Sæbo publishes her history work on her website: Midwest History Project.