Rep. Bob Good, R-Farmville and the chairman of the powerful House Freedom Caucus, on Wednesday formally requested a recount in the GOP primary in Virginia’s 5th Congressional District, which he lost last month to state Sen. John McGuire, R-Goochland County, by a mere 374 votes out of 62,792 cast.
Good said in an email to supporters Wednesday evening that his campaign had filed a petition with the circuit court in Goochland County, where McGuire lives. Virginia law requires that the challenged candidate must be served a copy of the petition within 10 days of certification by the State Board of Elections or the electoral board.
The deadline for Good to file was 5 p.m. Friday.
“This is the critical next step to ensuring that every legal vote from the June 18 primary is properly counted. Our campaign team has been working diligently to ensure that every primary election canvass was properly observed, public data from election night was reviewed, and that our legal team is ready for the upcoming recount,” Good said in the email.
A spokesperson for Good’s campaign did not respond to phone calls and text messages Wednesday evening.
Sean Brown, a consultant with McGuire’s campaign, said in a text message that “recounting the ballots and delaying the inevitable may make Bob feel better, but it won’t make him congressman again.”
“More people voted for John McGuire than voted for Bob Good, no matter how many times he counts it. It is hard to imagine there are donors out there willing to invest in what is certainly another losing effort by Bob,” Brown said.
Virginia does not have an automatic recount law, and while McGuire’s 0.6% lead puts Good within the 1% margin that allows him to request a recount at his campaign’s expense, it remains above the 0.5% threshold that would require localities to pay for it.
Good said in the email that his campaign’s recount efforts are expected to cost as much as $100,000.
“My opponent and his Washington D.C. operatives have said repeatedly that we couldn’t afford a recount, but you have called for this recount and you have made it possible with your generous donations. We are almost to the finish line, and we are running with endurance the race that is set before us.”
Recounts paid for by the candidate are rare in Virginia, because of the high cost and because they rarely change the outcome of elections.
Stephen Farnsworth, a political scientist at the University of Mary Washington, said that while there are sometimes tabulation errors on election night or during the days after that emerge and require corrections, by now “everything has been double-checked and triple-checked” by election authorities.
“In the past recounts the authorities might find a ballot miscounted or improperly rejected here and there during a recount, but I can’t think of a case in Virginia where a congressional primary recount has seen a shift comparable to the gap found in this primary,” Farnsworth said.
“Virginia election officials are quite good at counting votes, as we have seen in election after election. If the margin is measured in the hundreds of votes, and if the difference is more than one-tenth of a percent, it is probably not a good use of one’s time or money to undertake a recount.”
Good submitted his petition eight days after the State Board of Elections completed the certification of McGuire’s victory in the Republican-leaning 5th Congressional District that was home to one of the most watched and most expensive primary battles nationwide this year.
The recount court, which will preside over the entire process, consists of three judges: the chief judge of the circuit court where the recount petition is filed, and two judges appointed by the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia. Within seven days of the petition being filed, the court must hold a preliminary hearing, where it will handle motions and determine the rules of procedure. 
Attorneys representing both candidates will be allowed to examine the poll books and other election materials under the supervision of the electoral board. The general registrar and the locality’s legal representation must be present during the hearing.
The recount court also will determine other details, such as transportation and delivery of election materials and voting machines, and testing. In addition, the court will set the number of recount officials and approve the officials suggested by the parties, as well as confirm recount coordinators and security measures.
McGuire had made his campaign a referendum on which candidate is a more loyal supporter of former President Donald Trump, who formally endorsed McGuire in May at a time when the challenger’s internal polling showed him leading by 14 points. A different, independent survey commissioned by the Virginia Faith and Freedom Coalition later showed McGuire up by a margin of 10 points, indicating that the race would be closer than the challenger had expected.
And after the polls closed on June 18, the race remained too close to call, despite McGuire declaring victory by 11:30 p.m. He finished the night with a lead of just 327 votes — a margin of 0.52%.
For the next six days, the candidates remained locked in a tight nomination contest, with Good openly questioning the legitimacy of the election. In a fundraising email sent on the fifth day, he demanded “a full forensic audit of this election, including a hand-count and reconciliation of the actual paper ballots versus the voting machines.”
State law requires that the voting machines — which scan all valid ballots — must be programmed to reject or return ballots that have write-ins, undervotes, overvotes or ballots that cannot be read.
During the recount, these returned ballots will be hand-counted by recount officials, who may challenge ballots when they question the validity of the ballot or cannot agree to the voter’s intent presented on the ballots. The recount court will then make the determination on the challenged ballot and certify the final results of the recount.
Good, who has served in Congress since 2021, had drawn Trump’s ire after endorsing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for president in the spring of last year. 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, he failed to convince a majority of Republican voters that he deserved a third term on Capitol Hill, representing a district which Trump won with 53% in both 2016 and 2020.
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.
Good began building a national profile in early 2023, when he emerged as a leader of the Republican revolt against Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Ca., at the time the GOP leader and speaker-designee. After his reelection in 2022, Good was one among initially just five House Republicans openly lobbying against McCarthy’s claim to the speaker’s gavel.
Last October, Good joined the Virginia congressional delegation’s six Democrats in backing the “motion to vacate” the speaker’s chair after Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., had introduced the measure.
In January, Good was named chairman of the House Freedom Caucus — a powerful position that seemed to make him bulletproof from attacks that some fellow Republicans launched against him once McGuire’s campaign began picking up steam in January.
But after his primary loss was confirmed by the elections board, members of the caucus and their aides have begun private conversations about finding a successor, should Good’s recount fail to overturn the election, Politico reported last week.
Until that happens, Good’s grip on his caucus remains intact, as was proven Monday, when the group voted to remove Rep. Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, from its ranks. Davidson had supported McGuire’s primary bid earlier this year.
“I am disappointed that some HFC members (a very narrow majority of those present) viewed my opposition to Bob and support for John McGuire as an attack on them or the group. While that was not my intent, their opposition to me was intended,” Davidson wrote on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
In the same post, Davidson predicted that Good’s recount challenge will be unsuccessful. “I am not happy, but very content. Congress will soon be a better place without Bob Good, as will [the] Freedom Caucus.”
