Va. Candidate Dodges Photos With DSA Members

Empathy is being able to understand someone’s troubles because you have experienced something similar.

I have to confess that though we used to be able to just debate our disagreements over approaches to solving problems, once Virginia congressional candidate Tom Perriello became an agent of his party, the times that we spoke, he sadly only seemed interested in reciting the party talking points, especially after Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016.

Tom is in a pickle politically, and I feel for him because I went through a similar thing back in 2017. Ironically, the last time the two of us spoke.

As July turned to August and the end of the race for the 5th Congressional District’s Democrat nomination drew near, Perriello was attending an event with postal workers in Charlottesville to promote mail-in voting (a very ironic thing that I will return to later) hosted by Emily Yen, a previous co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America.

There was speechifying and cheering, and then it was time for the representatives of the two local TV stations to interview the candidate for the 6 p.m. news. That’s when it got—awkward.

Perriello’s campaign staff insisted that they move to where the candidate would not be seen with any DSA images behind him and restricted the area to keep any DSA members from being seen in the shots.

An unconventional strategy, for sure: alienating the Democratic Socialists of America, whose candidates are winning all over the country.

To be fair, Virginia’s 5th District is a red district. The Cook Partisan Voting Index lists it as “R+6,” meaning that the population has 6% more Republican voters. Trump carried it by 12 percentage points in 2024, and the last two congressional races went to the Republican candidate (John McGuire in 2024 and Bob Good in 2022) by 15 points.

So, being seen with Zohran Mamdani isn’t going to help a Democrat south of Amherst.

However, Perriello did win this district in 2008 by a slim margin over incumbent Virgil Goode. Here’s the irony I mentioned earlier: He won by getting a judge to block the counting of—wait for it—mail-in ballots. How times have changed.

I feel for you, Tom, because I was there once. Maybe he recalls that the last time we spoke was on Aug. 12, 2017, on Market Street in Charlottesville while I was covering a riot that exploded around another group of socialists, nationalist ones, that insisted that because they called themselves “Unite the Right,” they would blindly get conservative radio hosts to support their self-aggrandizing agenda.

I didn’t, and we fought about it publicly, and I was threatened by them on more than one occasion.

When I saw Tom that day, all he could say to me was, “What do you think of your conservative buddies, now?”

I guess his actions last week tell us what he thinks of his “socialist buddies” now.

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