After six days of being locked in one of the most watched and expensive primary battles nationwide this year, state Sen. John McGuire, R-Goochland County, on Monday evening claimed victory over Rep. Bob Good, R-Farmville and the chairman of the powerful House Freedom Caucus, after the final votes had been tallied.
McGuire, 55, led Good with a margin of 373 out of a total of 62,741 votes cast — or 0.6%, which puts the incumbent within the 1% margin that would allow him to request a recount at his campaign’s expense, but above the 0.5% threshold that would require localities to pay for it.
McGuire’s victory will become official once all localities in Virginia’s heavily Republican 5th Congressional District have certified the results, followed by certification from the State Board of Elections at its July 2 meeting in Richmond.
Good made clear days ago that he would not concede and would push for a delay of the certification. In a fundraising email on Saturday, he demanded “a full forensic audit of this election, including a hand-count and reconciliation of the actual paper ballots versus the voting machines.”
[How do election recounts work in Virginia? Here’s what you need to know.]
Unless Good’s attempt is successful, McGuire’s narrow victory marks the end of a viciously fought nomination contest that began last November, when the former Navy SEAL announced his challenge just days after winning a state Senate seat. After running a primary campaign that made a referendum on which candidate is a more loyal supporter of former President Donald Trump — who endorsed him last month — McGuire will face Gloria Witt, the Democratic nominee, in the Nov. 5 general election.
“The final tally of votes are in, and the outcome of the 5th District election has been confirmed. I am looking forward to November and becoming part of the America First victory not only in Virginia, but across the country,” McGuire said in a statement Monday, in which he also struck a conciliatory tone by thanking Good for his service as a congressman.
“It’s time for us to come together as a party and focus on the bigger goal — winning in November,” McGuire said. “We need to unite and ensure a Republican victory to keep our conservative values strong. While I understand the desire to continue the fight, the outcome of this election will not change. The fight is over, and it’s time to move on and work together as a team.”
Good spokeswoman Diana Shores said Monday that many people in the 5th District have reached out to the congressman’s campaign demanding that he pursue a recount.
“Our donors, our volunteers, and our supporters expect it. This isn’t about Bob Good, this is about the people of the district,” Shores said. “Already thousands of dollars in donations have come in for our recount efforts. We will pursue the recount to settle any questions about the fairness or transparency of the election process. This way, voters can confidently move forward to the general election.”
The GOP primary in the 5th is Virginia’s closest congressional race since the 11th District congressional race in the 2010 general election, when Democrat Gerry Connolly defeated Republican Keith Fimian with 49.2% to 48.8%.
Despite the close result, McGuire’s strategy to make this primary election about his unwavering loyalty towards the presumptive Republican presidential nominee paid off, even surviving Trump’s recent conviction in New York City on 34 counts of falsifying business records to influence the outcome of the 2016 election.
Good, 58, had drawn Trump’s ire after endorsing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for president a year ago. But despite his return to the Make America Great Again fold after DeSantis ended his campaign in January, and the continued support from most elected party officials in the district, the incumbent failed to convince a majority of Republican voters that he deserved a third term on Capitol Hill.
“Even a month ago I would not have predicted this, but as it got closer to election day the odds seemed to stack up,” said David Richards, a professor of political science at the University of Lynchburg. “Good appeared pretty desperate in the past few weeks and the ads being run against McGuire verged on parody, they were so over the top.”
The “hail Mary attempt” by Good’s supporters in the local GOP to try to get Trump to change his mind also fell flat, Richards said, referring to a move by Republican officials in the 5th District to ask the former president in an open letter to rethink his endorsement of McGuire and to instead consider backing the incumbent.
“It is a significant victory for Trump and his power over the GOP in general. Republicans who dare step against Trump will have to think twice, if they do not already. But the 5th District is a heavily Republican district, so Trump will have success here regardless,” Richards said.
Trump won the district with 53% in both 2016 and 2020.
While McGuire had already declared victory late on Election Day last week — which he finished with a narrow lead of 327 votes that had shrunk to 309 votes early the next morning — Good didn’t waste any time making it known that he would not give up easily.
He began openly questioning the legitimacy of last week’s election on Thursday, when he turned to X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, claiming that fires at three different polling locations in Lynchburg and in Albemarle and Hanover counties on primary day had caused temporary evacuations of the precincts.
“What is the probability? Does anyone recall even 1 fire at a precinct on election day? AI [artificial intelligence] estimates the probability being 0.0000000318%,” Good wrote.
On Friday, Lynchburg’s WSET-TV reported that there were no actual fires, but that fire alarms had been triggered at each location.
In Lynchburg, the culprit was cleaning equipment, while the Hanover County registrar told the station they believe their fire alarm went off because of steam from a water heater. Lastly, Albemarle County said a fire alarm at the precinct was triggered by a ceiling tile hitting the device and setting it off. None of the evacuations lasted longer than 30 minutes.
Shores, Good’s spokeswoman, said in a phone interview on Monday that the campaign had requested reports about the incidents from the fire departments of all three localities that satisfied their concerns.
“It’s still bizarre. It’s just a strange coincidence, what else can you really say?” Shores said. “There is no proof that there was anything nefarious, nobody is trying to imply that. We were just looking into it. It doesn’t normally happen that three precincts are evacuated for any reason on Election Day.”
But the campaign is also looking into problems that occurred in several precincts on Friday, Shores added.
In Lynchburg, election officials temporarily paused counting post-election ballots after they discovered some ballots in a drop box on Friday that should have been collected before the voting deadline on June 18.
Election officials verified that the ballots all came from voters who had properly requested absentee ballots but could not confirm whether they had arrived on time.
On Saturday, Good said on “Bannon’s War Room,” a podcast hosted by his ally and former White House strategist Steve Bannon, that because of the mishap in Lynchburg, there was “no accountability” to how these ballots were protected and how many were allowed to be dropped off.
While Good won in the district’s largest city, he said that “we didn’t win it as strongly as we anticipated” based on internal polling, door knocking, phone banking and result tracking on the day of the primary. “Thankfully we have evidence and documentation to show who is at fault here, and we are pursuing that with all vigor,” he said, without offering the former.
Good also told Bannon that his campaign would pursue “a hand-count recount” and a contesting of the election. “This should not be certified until these concerns are obviously investigated and adjudicated accordingly. So we are pursuing that with legal counsel and we will be filing some things next week.”
Good implied that McGuire and the allies of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, whom Good helped oust last year and who he claims are funding his opponent’s campaign, were behind a series of errors and mishaps during the canvassing process that have plagued several localities in the district since last week.
“They will do anything to try and win an election,” Good said. “Those who act like Democrats also run and campaign like Democrats and use Democrat-type tactics. The more we peel back the onion, the worse it stinks.”
In a fundraising email, Good on Saturday lashed out against local election officials across the district, accusing some of “blatantly” supporting his opponent and others of giving his team misinformation about when the canvassing process — the review of the ballot tabulation results — would begin. He offered no proof of any of the allegations.
Shores on Monday tried to defuse some of Good’s comments in which he implied that McGuire’s campaign benefited from a larger conspiracy against the incumbent.
“I think there is some human error that is common, because of course these are citizens in a community that are recruited to work,” she said. “But in a close election, procedural mistakes can matter.”
With the local certification of the votes a mere hours away, Shores underscored the campaign’s determination to push for a recount.
For U.S. House of Representatives races, the deadline for a recount petition to be filed with the court is 10 days from the date of certification by the State Board of Elections, which meets July 2. The localities involved cover the cost of the recount when the margin of victory is 0.5% or less or the candidate who petitioned for the recount is declared the winner.
But recounts paid for by the candidate are rare in Virginia, due to the high cost and because they rarely change the outcome, and Shores said she didn’t know what the cost would be for a district as large as the 5th.
“We are prepared for a recount, we are raising money for that, because we feel like that’s going to be what we are doing.” 
For McGuire, his victory is a major leap on a path to political power that was winding and full of obstacles. As a small child, he was abandoned by his parents, who were dealing with substance abuse issues, and he grew up in foster homes around Central Virginia and went to nine different elementary schools, McGuire said in an interview in January.
Influenced by the “Top Gun” movie starring Tom Cruise, McGuire initially sought a career as a military pilot, but then decided to join the Navy SEALS. During his 10-year stint with the elite force, McGuire served all over the world, but he was mostly assigned counter-drug missions in south Central America.
In October 2006, McGuire’s life changed when he suffered an accident while bouncing on a trampoline with his daughter. When he attempted a backflip, he broke the C4 vertebra in his neck and was told that he would remain paralyzed. But he was able to learn how to walk again within a year.
A staunch conservative and an early supporter of Trump, McGuire began his political career in 2017, when he was first elected to the Virginia House of Delegates, representing what was then the 56th District, comprising areas to the north and west of Richmond.
His ambitions for a higher political office in Washington first emerged in October 2019. While campaigning for reelection to the House of Delegates, McGuire declined to commit to completing his second term, responding to widespread speculation that he was considering a congressional campaign.
Just after winning reelection in November that year, McGuire announced his candidacy for the U.S. Congress for Virginia’s 7th Congressional District, but he lost a closely contested convention to Del. Nick Freitas, R-Culpeper, who went on to lose to Abigail Spanberger in the 2020 election.
McGuire attended the “Stop the Steal” rally outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
In his bid last year for the Republican nomination in the newly created state Senate District 10, which includes Amelia, Appomattox, Buckingham, Cumberland, Fluvanna, Goochland and Powhatan counties, and parts of Hanover, Henrico, Louisa and Prince Edward counties, McGuire won his party’s nomination at a convention at Buckingham County High School.
He defeated three other contenders after vowing publicly that he would support Good’s reelection bid and would not seek the Republican nomination himself this year — a promise that he broke before his election for the state Senate was even certified.
On the campaign trail, McGuire has accused Good of “hating Trump” and being a “Never-Trumper” and a “RINO” — a derogatory moniker for “Republican In Name Only” — who is working to help Democrats. He has also alleged that the incumbent has been a divisive politician whose positions in Congress, including his key role in McCarthy’s ouster last year, have damaged the Republican brand.
In January, just days after he had taken his oath of office as a state senator, McGuire made national headlines when Cardinal News first reported that Chris LaCivita, the former president’s senior adviser and campaign manager, put Good on notice as payback for his endorsement of DeSantis.
“Bob Good won’t be electable when we get done with him,” LaCivita said in a text message at the time. McGuire has since campaigned with Trump in Iowa and met with the former president at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s estate in Palm Beach, Florida.
Last month, Trump formally endorsed McGuire, and he held a tele-rally for the candidate a week ago.
“Bob Good is BAD FOR VIRGINIA, AND BAD FOR THE USA,” the former president wrote in a post on his social media platform Truth Social. “He turned his back on our incredible movement, and was constantly attacking and fighting me until recently, when he gave a warm and ‘loving’ Endorsement — But really, it was too late. The damage had been done.”
McGuire also collected endorsements from other MAGA celebrities, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the controversial congresswoman and conspiracy theorist from Georgia who joined him on the campaign trail in the 5th District earlier this month; Rep. Ryan Zinke, R-Mont., who served as the secretary of interior in the previous administration; and former Trump attorney and New York City Mayor Rudy Guliani.
But Good’s list of prominent supporters was much longer, boasting prominent names such as Reps. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla.; Lauren Boebert, R-Colo.; Byron Donalds, R-Fla.; and Scott Perry, R-Pa.; as well as former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and retired Gen. Michael Flynn, a former national security adviser in the Trump administration.
Both candidates benefited from record-breaking campaign contributions from outside Virginia, making the primary the second-most expensive race nationwide, with a total of more than $10 million spent, according to data collected by ProPublica, a nonprofit organization from New York dedicated to investigative journalism.
With his primary victory behind him, McGuire will now have to get past the November election and then go to Washington and actually govern, said Richards, the political scientist.
“That might prove to be more difficult than defeating Bob Good, but Central Virginia should not expect wild changes. Despite Good’s manic ad campaign, McGuire is no liberal and should push many of the same policies that Good did,” Richards said.
Good’s ascent to national politics began in the spring of 2020, when the former member of the Campbell County Board of Supervisors secured his party’s nomination at a convention at Tree of Life Ministries in his home county, knocking off incumbent Denver Riggleman, who had been criticized by his party’s religious flank for officiating a same-sex wedding.
Good won the nomination after 10 hours of voting with 58%. He won the general election in November that year, defeating Democrat Cameron Webb by 52.6% to 47.4%.
Even before taking his oath of office, Good made news in December 2020 when he appeared at a pro-Trump rally at Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., where he claimed that the election — which Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden by more than seven million votes — had been stolen by Democrats. The Washington Post reported at the time that Good also told a mostly maskless crowd that the COVID-19 precautions were a “hoax,” and that the pandemic was “phony.”
Just hours after assuming office on Jan. 6, 2021, Good was among a group of Republicans who voted against certifying the election of President-elect Joe Biden. He also voted against legislation awarding Congressional Gold Medals to members of the U.S. Capitol Police and the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department for protecting lawmakers during the storming of the Capitol.
As a freshman in Congress, Good was appointed to the Budget and the Education and Labor committees. He also quickly joined the Freedom Caucus, which is generally considered the most conservative bloc within the House Republican Conference.
In early 2022, Good kicked off his reelection campaign for a second term. At his district’s GOP convention at Hampden-Sydney College near Farmville in May, he seized his party’s nomination for the second time, defeating Republican challenger Dan Moy, a 27-year Air Force veteran and the chairman of the Charlottesville GOP, receiving 1,488 of 1,759 votes.
In November that year, Good fended off a challenge by Democrat Josh Throneburg, comfortably winning reelection with 57.6% to 42.2% of the vote.
Good began building a national profile in early 2023, when he emerged as a leader of the Republican revolt against McCarthy, at the time the GOP leader and speaker-designee.
Good had been an open critic of McCarthy since early 2021. And after his reelection in 2022, the congressman was one among initially just five House Republicans openly lobbying against McCarthy’s claim to the speaker’s gavel.
But while he eventually helped allow McCarthy to win the speakership by voting “present,” Good in October joined the Virginia congressional delegation’s six Democrats in backing the “motion to vacate” the speaker’s chair.
Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., had introduced the measure to remove McCarthy two days after the speaker brought a proposal to the House floor to avert a shutdown and keep the government open for 45 additional days. The House then voted 216 to 210 to remove McCarthy, with Good and a handful of other Republicans joining the Democratic majority.
McGuire, Good’s successful primary challengers, was recruited by McCarthy allies as part of what Politico described as a “vengeance operation” against those who voted to oust him. But an adviser to McGuire said that McCarthy and his allies were not involved in the decision to challenge Good.
