With the canvassing process virtually complete in Virginia’s 5th district and attorney Tom Perriello (D) ahead of Rep. Virgil Goode (R) by nearly 750 votes, the Democratic challenger declared victory Friday afternoon.
“It looks like the outcome is now certain. We are going to win this race and pull off the upset,” Perriello said.
Perriello said his campaign would now be moving into a transition phase and in that effort he has enlisted the help of former Rep. L. F. Payne (D-Va.), who held the seat from 1998 until retiring in 1996. Goode, then a Democrat, won the open seat and succeeded Payne.
Payne “will be helping us to make sure that we can hit the ground running,” Perriello said. “We are eager to get to work to try to bring jobs back to the area.”
But in a statement released earlier Friday afternoon, Goode said he is not ready to concede the race.
Perriello is holding onto a 749-vote lead right now, or a margin of 0.24%. Goode is praying for some serious irregularities in Dem-friendly precincts, and he’ll likely ask for a recount (as is the right of any candidate down by less than 0.5%), but this one is looking very good for us.
I would call this win a pretty nice cherry on top of Tuesday’s electoral sundae.
who called this as being our upset surprise?
Word has it that with Goode and Barletta both losing and Tancredo retiring xenophobia in Congress is expected to drop by 78.4% over the next two years.
Unless time was working backwards 🙂
“held the seat from 1998 until retiring in 1996.”
Hahaha.
http://www.politico.com/news/s…
Interesting. Thank God Inouye is getting this in a post-Stevens senate.
He’ll be such a great congressman–it’s good to have a freshman rep with serious foreign policy and humanitarian experience to complement all the domestic policy wonks. Not to mention that he’s taken down one of the worst Republicans in Congress.
Congratulations, Tom.
Tom Perriello is an exceptional person who worked the heck out of a tough district. This is jaw-dropping and incredibly encouraging – Perriello is genuinely great, genuinely progressive.
Ditching Goode for Perriello raises the average decency of Congress substantially.
Since VA is nearly all electronic voting machines, which means that counting problems are not that common (non-software based ones, no hanging chads or mis-scanned ballots)….
First, Virginia led the way from blue to red in the ’70’s and early ’80’s. It was at the forefront of the conversion of Southern politics from D to R. Now it is almost back to blue again. Maybe history will repeat itself.
Mark Warner deserves a helluva lot of credit too.
Best donation I ever made.