Republicans in Virginia’s Fifth Congressional District elected Bill Stanley of Franklin County as their chairman at a convention at Hampden-Sydney College in May. Weeks later, the party nominated Robert Hurt to run against incumbent Congressman Tom Perriello in the November 2 election. Hurt took 48 percent of the vote against a field of six other candidates for the party nod.

When the Fifth District Republican Committee met on August 22 in Nellysford, about 40 miles southwest of Charlottesville, Stanley spoke with the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner about the challenges and issues local GOP activists are addressing in the road to the election this November.

Party Unity
“After the primary the first challenge that we faced as a committee was making sure that everybody within the Republican party was unified,” said Stanley, an attorney in private practice when he is not doing volunteer political work. “We had seven candidates -- seven very good people -- but we only had one winner.”

That means that about half of Republican primary voters “did not vote for the eventual winner,” so Stanley’s task “was making sure that everybody came back on board and that we were all unified in defeating Tom Perriello, and that we all got behind Robert Hurt.”

A specific challenge the party faces is “making sure that we’ve put together the ground game for the Hurt campaign.”

Fundraising Challenge
The Fifth District has 21 units (county and city committees). “For the first time,” Stanley said, “we’re all working together, exchanging ideas, seeing what works, because we can see just from the newspapers that we’re behind in fundraising. Tom Perriello has a lot more money than we have at this time. He has paid consultants, 30 or 40 (I’ve heard) throughout the Fifth District.”

Nonetheless, Stanley added, “what Tom Perriello doesn’t have that we have here in the Fifth District Republican Committee is us,” the party’s volunteers.

“We don’t do it because we’re paid, we don’t work hard because we’re paid. We do it because we love our country and we believe in our conservative principles and we love the Fifth District.”

Stanley stated that “when we come to the November election, you’re going to find that that grassroots effort, that volunteer effort that we’re organizing here right now at these meetings is going to pay off in November in a victory for Robert Hurt.”

Redistricting 'urgency'
Because post-census redistricting is coming up in 2011, Stanley noted, “there’s a sense of urgency within the Fifth District.” This is because “we know that if Tom Perriello wins, the Fifth District will not look like the Fifth District as it does now. He will take the more liberal parts of other districts that surround us to make up a new Fifth District and we’ll have Tom Perriello for at least ten years.”

That is why, he said, “there’s that sense of urgency of keeping the Fifth the Fifth, and we know that will happen with Robert Hurt when he’s elected.”

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