Senate candidate Cao says that anything south of Loudoun and Fairfax is ‘Southern Virginia’

When I was growing up on a farm in the Shenandoah Valley, my father once had to deliver a truckload of something to Northern Virginia. What I remember most was that on the way back we stopped at a McDonald’s in Manassas and in the restroom I overheard two teenage boys marveling that they’d never been so far out in the country before.

I was both amused and aghast — here I thought I was in the big city!

That memory came to mind when I heard what Senate Republican candidate Hung Cao said this week on “The Brian Kilmeade Show” on Fox. Cao explained that he intended to upset the incumbent, Democrat Tim Kaine, by holding tight to Donald Trump’s coattails:

“Well, President Trump is loved in Southern Virginia. When I say Southern Virginia, I’m talking about Rappahannock, Prince William and Fauquier counties down. That’s not very deep. That’s an hour out of D.C. And everybody loves him down there. And that’s why he’s gonna carry the day in Virginia. I’m gonna be there with him.”

I don’t dispute Cao’s strategy. Multiple polls have shown the presidential race in Virginia to be neck-and-neck; a Virginia Commonwealth University poll recently put Trump up by 3 percentage points, which is within the margin of error but still wide enough to pop some eyes open. An Emerson College poll released Thursday showed Trump up by 5 percentage points in Virginia. (I go into more detail about how bad these polls are for Democrats in this week’s edition of West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter; sign up here .) I’m also old enough to remember 1972, when Sen. Bill Spong, D-Va., was expected to cruise to reelection but instead was upset by Republican Bill Scott, who rode in on Richard Nixon’s landslide. The polls may show Kaine with a double-digit lead (VCU has Kaine up 49% to 38%, Emerson College at 49% to 39%) but I have a vivid enough imagination — and a long enough memory — to picture that changing if Biden continues to slide.

What clanks in my ear instead — and perhaps some of yours — is Cao’s description of anything south of Fairfax and Loudoun counties as “Southern Virginia.”

Dude, no.

Keep in mind that Cao now has a history of saying unfortunate things about places outside of Northern Virginia. During the primary, he blasted a story about himself in the Staunton News Leader by calling it a “podunk local newspaper.” He may have thought his fire was trained simply on the newspaper, but to call anything in a small city “podunk” spreads that insult around. In some ways the more offensive word there was “local” as if something “local” is somehow not as important as something bigger. Cao followed that up with a clearer offense, when he said Abingdon was too far to drive for a campaign forum, that such a trip would be, in his memorable word, “ridonkulous.”

I’m reminded of the old story about how you stop someone who’s in a hole from getting in deeper: Stop digging. Will someone please take the shovel away from Cao?

This reference to how Rappahannock, Prince William and Fauquier counties are “Southern Virginia” is on the same order of magnitude as when Maurice Dawkins, the sacrificial Republican candidate for U.S. Senate against Charles Robb in 1988, said he’d been to Southwest Virginia because he’d recently been in Charlottesville.

This geographical stretch will come as quite a shock to those in the real Southern Virginia, which is nowhere close to any of those counties. Helpful hint: If you’re in Danville and other localities along the North Carolina line, you can refer to “Southern Virginia.” That’s a moniker some people there prefer. Former state Sen. Frank Ruff, R-Mecklenburg County, recently wrote an opinion piece for Cardinal to explain why. But most people south of the James, east of the Blue Ridge and west of Hampton Roads seem to still prefer Southside — with the exception of Lynchburg, which insists that it’s Central Virginia, not Richmond. This may seem a small thing, but it’s indicative of a bigger thing: Cao isn’t calling places by their right name, which suggests he doesn’t really understand anything south of, well, his home in Loudoun County.

I’m sure Cao thinks I’m criticizing him, but I’m actually trying to help him. He is repeatedly showing himself to be astonishingly out of touch with the cultural and geographic realities of the state he wants to represent.

If Cao goes on to lose, none of this matters. Someday we can all sit around and tell tales — remember that time some candidate said that Fauquier and Prince William counties were in “Southern Virginia”? Har har har. What was that guy’s name anyway?

However, I’m going to assume that Cao has a decent shot at winning but if he does, he’s got a lot to learn, so he better start learning it now before he embarrasses himself further.

Let’s start here: Cao lives in Northern Virginia. Not just Northern Virginia, but Loudoun County. He may like to say he lives in the “small town” — his words — of Purcellville. It’s a lovely place, and Purcellville in the less developed northwestern part of the county certainly isn’t Dulles. However, it’s still in Loudoun County, the most affluent county in the country. As a resident of Loudoun County, Cao rightly sees those distinctions, but down here in my part of the state, people don’t. Just as we’re all “Southern Virginia” to him, what’s up there somewhere is all “Northern Virginia” to us.

Here’s why this matters, and I’ll try to be gentle: People in Southwest and Southside Virginia don’t particularly like Northern Virginia. Or trust politicians from there.

That may be completely unfair — Some of my best friends are Northern Virginians! — but that’s just the political reality. Never mind that Northern Virginia supplies the tax dollars that fund our schools. That’s not how people down here see things up there. They see Northern Virginia as — well, let’s not even get into that. The point is that bashing Northern Virginia is a guaranteed applause line for any politician in Southwest and Southside. It’s like bashing California or New York. There are plenty of conservatives in all those places, but they’re still regarded as bastions of people who don’t know much about rural communities and think they’re better than we are. I refer you to what now-state Sen. Tammy Mulchi, R-Mecklenburg County, said the night she won her party’s nomination: “I am ready to stand up to the Northern Virginia liberals and give them a good dose of common sense.” Not just the liberals — of which there are aplenty from Richmond and Hampton Roads and elsewhere — but the Northern Virginia liberals.

Cao may think that’s not him — he’s certainly not liberal — but he’s got to be wary of its cultural context, nonetheless. If some Northern Virginia Democrat had disparaged the Staunton paper as a “podunk local newspaper,” said Abingdon was too far to drive and then called everything south of Loudoun and Fairfax “Southern Virginia,” Republicans would have crucified the candidate — except they’d have to fight me off, because I’d have wanted to do the job first. (When I was editorial page editor for The Roanoke Times, I singed one Democratic legislator from Northern Virginia for some comments he made about Lee County).

The basic assumption in rural Virginia is to be distrustful of politicians from Northern Virginia on the theory that they don’t really understand us and probably look down on us. A few years ago, a visiting Democratic politician from Northern Virginia asked if there was a Metro system connecting the Roanoke and New River valleys. That struck some as just par for the course — see how little those Northern Virginians really know about us? At least Democrats aren’t counting on many votes from the western part of the state. Somehow, though, we now have the amazing spectacle of a Republican candidate from Northern Virginia coming across culturally tone-deaf about his own party’s political base.

Cao may be politically in touch with all those rural Republican voters. He seems to have the “right” positions, in terms of being properly conservative enough for all the deep red localities of rural Virginia, but he seems culturally unaware, as if anything south of Loudoun and Fairfax is as foreign to him as, well, as foreign as Northern Virginia is to me. This opens him up to the same type of attacks from Democrats that Republicans usually level at Democrats — elitism.

State Sen. Louise Lucas, D-Portsmouth, who always has a quick trigger finger when it comes to the social media site formally known as Twitter, has already posted this :

I’m trying to spare Cao more such ridicule — and more such self-inflicted wounds.

This is by no means a comprehensive list, but here are some places that Cao needs to get to if he really wants to understand what apparently is to him this strange part of the state that all comes under the very inaccurate heading of “Southern Virginia.”

He needs to stand in line at Kline’s Dairy Bar in Harrisonburg on a hot summer evening and marvel that the place only serves three flavors. He needs to go to Wright’s Dairy-Rite in Staunton and order a hot dog from the red telephone in each booth. He needs to go to the Texas Tavern in Roanoke and learn the proper lingo and what it means to order “a bowl with” or “a hot walking.” He needs to go to the Burger Bar in Bristol, said to be the last place where Hank Williams Sr. was seen alive. Cao needs to go to … well, lots of other places. And that’s really just a superficial list of photo ops.

For goodness’ sake, don’t stop there and think we’re just a land of coal mines and bluegrass jams. Go visit the nuclear companies in Lynchburg. Drive down Climax Road in Pittsylvania County and look out on miles and miles of solar farms where once there were tobacco farms. Visit the biotech startups in Roanoke and the electric vehicle makers in the New River Valley. Take a tour of the mine in Tazewell County that’s deploying methane capture technology — or the welding company that has developed an entirely new customer base to replace the one it lost when coal declined. Walk down State Street in Bristol and see how that city is becoming an outpost of the music industry. We’re a complicated place where the past and future all run together. If Cao’s elected, he’ll need to know all these things because I can assure him that the reality of governance — good governance, anyway — is more complicated than a set of political talking points from either party.

Nobody expects Cao to act as if grew up in Southwest or Southside. Other politicians from Northern Virginia who have been successful in Southwest Virginia — from Mark Warner to Glenn Youngkin — sure haven’t. But they’ve all taken the time to learn the regional sensibilities. And they sure haven’t treated Southwest and Southside as some kind of strange “other” that’s interchangeable with the outer rings of Northern Virginia.

VCU poll shows Trump up by 3% in Virginia. Heres’s what else that poll shows.

I write a free weekly political newsletter, West of the Capital, that goes out Fridays at 3 p.m. This week I’ll take a deep dive into both the Virginia Commonwealth University and Emerson College polls this week that gave Donald Trump a slight edge in Virginia. Also this week:

• More on the book “JD Vance is a Fake Hillbilly,” by Russell County lawyer Frank Kilgore, who passed away this week.
• An update on the election challenge to the Republican primary results in one Lynchburg city council ward.

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