Lynchburg Republican leadership that’s been party to prolonged conservative infighting will remain in power after a busy and at times tense election on Saturday.
Veronica Bratton clinched reelection as the Lynchburg Republican City Committee chair by a 203-112 vote held at New Covenant Schools. Attendees and officials at the mass meeting generally fell into two camps: the more populist right-wing camp Bratton hails from and the established business-as-usual camp that protested a lack of unity and favoritism coming out of the committee.
Bratton’s challenger, Dwight Williams, talked up the idea of a Reaganite “big tent” party and denounced “personal attacks, the name-calling, the outright childish behavior that only serves to divide and hurt rather than to unite and to love.”
“Republicans are attacking one another in public, in the city council meetings, on social media, at church, through censuring and resolutions,” he said during his introduction. “And this is only going to give ammunition for the Democrats to use against us in November. The politics here in Lynchburg have the optics of being absolutely chaotic, distasteful, hateful and downright evil — with the party only adding to the problem rather than solving it.”
Delegate Wendell Walker, R-Lynchburg, supported Williams, casting Bratton as “the most divisive unit chair I have ever seen in my 30-plus years out here in leadership positions.”
Bratton held that tensions between Lynchburg Republicans really just stem from city council — not naming names, but referring to Lynchburg Mayor Stephanie Reed and Vice Mayor Chris Faraldi.
“There have been, behind the scenes, countless hours to try to pull them together with our leadership team, but we can’t force adults to do anything,” she said in an interview.
Having campaigned alongside fellow at-large city council members Marty Misjuns and Larry Taylor in 2022, Reed helped create the first conservative majority in 20 years when the three Republicans swept the election. But cracks emerged out of the starting gate when council conservatives split in elevating Reed as mayor over veteran council member Jeff Helgeson.
And after swift passage of campaign-promised tax breaks — though their exact form prompted plenty of debate — the new majority seemed to disagree on more than it banded together for. Its first year was besieged by hours of bickering during council meeting time, volleys of name-calling and a censure of Misjuns. (Faraldi was also censured by the Lynchburg Republican executive committee but that was later overturned by a committee-wide vote. Update, March 26: Bratton says that later action was not a legitimate meeting, a point that remains in contention between the two factions. )
The rift extends up to the federal level. Rep. Bob Good, R-Campbell County, has had a stake in council drama since the beginning, when he asked an incoming Faraldi to support Helgeson for mayor in a tense exchange. Good backed Bratton.
Now that Good faces a primary challenge from state Sen. John McGuire, who’s positioned himself even further to the right and closer to former President Donald Trump, the web of rival Republican alliances runs all the way up with seemingly small differences in policy platforms.
“I think it’s more personality than policy,” Helgeson said about divisions on the city level, “even though some of the policy has been, quite frankly, terrible.”
He also pointed to actions of Faraldi and his surrogates on Saturday as an example of poor behavior that’s created division: After a confusing and contested vote for a temporary chair to run the meeting, several people around Faraldi yelled to contest the procedures used — first counting raised hands, then standing people with raised hands, then measuring desire for a roll-call vote by the volume of yeses versus nos. 
Rhetoric between the camps has been a veritable stampede of RINOs, or Republicans In Name Only — just about every elected official at Saturday’s meeting other than Misjuns has been lambasted as one by rival factions.
Speaking after her reelection, Bratton encouraged better relationships within the committee, pointing out that her opponents in the election two years ago are now her supporters and advisers.
“We’ve seen the worst of us, lately,” she said. “Can we try moving forward with the best of us?” 
