Graham: Ken Mitchell Deserves Your Support in His Sixth District Race. Why Isn’t He Getting It?

By Chris Graham

I left the podcast interview that I did with Ken Mitchell back in April thinking that Mitchell is the kind of Democrat who can win in our part of Virginia.

Problem being: there’s no buzz about Ken Mitchell running for Congress in the Sixth District.

And more to the point, there’s no money going his way, money being an essential component of the ability to create buzz.

To that point, chances are, you’re just now being made aware that there is an election in the Sixth District in November, by clicking on this story.

Ben Cline, the incumbent Republican, has no problem with that.

Cline is using the playbook drawn up by his predecessor and political mentor, Bob Goodlatte, who won 13 elections in the Sixth District, which covers 190 miles of the I-81 corridor from Winchester to Salem, by laying low.

The Goodlatte-Cline strategy is a 180 of what you saw Bob Good do over in our neighboring district, the Fifth, which runs roughly parallel to the Sixth, running down the Route 29 corridor from Albemarle County to the North Carolina border.

When you’re all about making headlines like a Bob Good, that can get you into trouble, and you can headline yourself right out of office, as he did.

Flip side, you never hear a peep from Ben Cline, and that works for him, as it did for Goodlatte.

The strategy works because the Sixth District is drawn as a safe Republican district. The best that Democrats in the Sixth have been able to do in the past 32 years is the 40.2 percent that Jennifer Lewis got in the race against Cline in 2018, the first election after Goodlatte’s retirement, meaning the Sixth was technically an open seat that year.

Open-seat elections are when safe districts are most vulnerable.

The 2024 election is not only not an open-seat election, it’s an election on the undercard of a presidential race at the top of the ticket, and a U.S. Senate race with popular Democrat Tim Kaine seeking re-election against the barely-trying Republican nominee Hung Cao.

The presidential is the one that will influence turnout, and Donald Trump, who is back on the ticket at the top for the GOP, got a shade under 60 percent in the Sixth District in 2020.

Meaning, Mitchell, a 24-year military veteran-turned-Rockingham County organic farmer, will need to get a good share of Trump voters to split their ticket to have a chance.

From what I’ve seen of Mitchell, he’s the kind of Democrat who can do that, because he checks all the important boxes.

Military veteran: check. Mitchell served for 24 years in the U.S. Army.

Business acumen: check. Mitchell worked in the broadband sector in Northern Virginia, before launching a construction company specializing in historic renovation that was hired to oversee infrastructure improvements at Monticello in Albemarle County.

He then joined an engineering firm that worked with contractors and municipalities in Augusta County, Rockingham County, Shenandoah County and Roanoke on upgrades to water-management systems, before retiring and going into organic farming.

Another checkmark for Mitchell: he’s not swampy, like Cline, the career politician. Mitchell’s entry into the Sixth District congressional race is his first foray into elected politics.

He told me in our podcast interview he was motivated to run after taking stock of the attempted insurrection led by Trump loyalists on Jan. 6, 2021.

On the other side of Jan. 6, of course, is Cline, who, just hours after the Trump loyalists had been cleared from the U.S. Capitol, voted to decertify the 2020 presidential election, siding with Trump on the side of the Big Lie.

Cline is a reliable rubber stamp for Trump, and that’s not been good for the Sixth District. He’s voted against infrastructure and healthcare spending, he sided with Trump to help block a bipartisan bill addressing border security.

Basically, Trump tells Cline to jump, and Cline’s response is to ask, how high?

“When you start to look at the obstructionism, the chaos and all the divisiveness that is coming out of one of our parties, that, to me is not a strong democracy. We have men and women that have fought and died for democracy, and we cannot let it die, let it die a slow death, through being strangled by obstructionists,” Mitchell said.

“When you see the 118th Congress being the most unproductive Congress in modern history, that is simply unacceptable. People expect our elected officials to get in there, do their jobs and legislate, and not try to be up there grandstanding to get airtime and television time and things like that. We need to bear down and do the hard work for the people.”

On that point, it’s hard to point to anything substantive that either Cline or Goodlatte have done legislatively over the past three decades to benefit people living in the Sixth District.

The two have been, for all intents and purposes, empty suits.

“Where I think they have failed us is in the rural reaches of our district.” Mitchell said. “Our rural elements of the district have somewhat been left behind, for example, in broadband deployment. You know, you can’t do precision farming if you don’t have broadband, you can’t start a home business, our children in rural areas can’t do their homework as effectively, and often have to stay later just to have that connectivity. You know, rural hospitals, of 29 rural hospitals in Virginia, 20 of them no longer have maternity services.

“The rural parts of our district have been left behind, in my mind, and that’s what we need to strengthen,” Mitchell said.

It’s important to note that when you hear Mitchell talk about “leading from the middle,” as he did often in our interview, his idea of “from the middle” isn’t akin to both-sidesism that you see from some self-proclaimed moderates on issues like abortion, civil rights and healthcare.

“I’m fully, 100 percent, in support of a woman’s right to choose. But I think the issue is a little bit larger than that. This is, you know, where we have been bearing down on women’s rights in general,” Mitchell said.

There’s another distinction between Mitchell and Cline, who championed Trump’s push to pack the Supreme Court with far-right justices that later voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, sending reproductive-rights protections into a state of pure chaos for tens of millions of American women.

“You know, I have two daughters, Michelle (his fiancée) has two daughters, all educated in the public system, and we paid full freight to get them educated. But they get turned out in a world where they will make 21 percent less than a male does. And I will tell any father and mother out there that raised daughters, you know, we shouldn’t accept this,” Mitchell said.

“It’s bearing down on women’s rights, and it’s bearing down on voter rights. It’s bearing down on the rights of LGBTQs to, you know, let’s treat everyone with dignity and respect. And even down to school board levels, where they’re trying to get into the rights of children and their parents to choose what they want to read, I don’t think the right to read a book should be mandated by anyone’s religious or personal beliefs.

“I think it’s rights in general that are being stepped on. And I think, as Democrats, we stand for rights and inclusion and equity and those things for all people. So, that’s where I think the difference will be between Ben Cline and I. He stands with the few, I stand with the majority,” Mitchell said.

What you get with Ken Mitchell is a 24-year military veteran with business experience who stands firm on women’s reproductive rights, broad-based civil rights, the protection of democracy and, bottom line, is focused on getting things done.

I wrote, presciently, as it turns out, that the message that Mitchell is trying to deliver to voters in the Sixth isn’t going to get him notice from the Richmond and NoVa Democrats and political influencers, but my hope was it could get him some financial support that could help him get his message out, because if more voters in the Sixth can hear from Ken Mitchell, he’s got a chance to do the impossible.

This gets me back to the issue with buzz, or lack thereof.

I just looked his most recent campaign finance report on the Federal Election Commission website. It tells us that Mitchell had raised just $61,905 for his campaign through the end of the second quarter, so, as of June 30, less than a tenth of the $654,778 that Cline had been able to amass.

Having money problems in a long district like the Sixth impacts basic things like campaign staffing, certainly targeted spending on social media, and the ability to reach voters in three distinct and far-flung TV markets.

It’s tough enough for a Democrat to win out in our part of the state without those logistical issues.

We have seen it done before, over in the Fifth. Back in 2008, Tom Perriello was down 29 points in a late-summer poll to the Republican incumbent, Virgil Goode, and only was within striking distance of Goode in one poll, the one that mattered, as it turns out – pulling the massive upset on Election Night.

As much as I want to say that Perriello could be a blueprint for Mitchell, there is this reality: Perriello was able to raise more than $1.8 million for his campaign in the 2008 cycle.

The difference between that $1.8 million that Perriello was able to raise in 2008 and the $61,905 that Mitchell has raised so far this year is, doing some quick math, carry the one, about $1.8 million.

It’d be a shame if we end up getting another two years of a post-MAGA Ben Cline sitting meekly in the corner of committee meetings and floor discussions doing nothing to address our needs because we couldn’t put together enough support for a guy like Ken Mitchell, who, frankly, is overqualified for the job.

Get off your tuchuses, basically, is what I’m getting at here.

Chris Graham, editor of  The Augusta Free Press and an award-winning journalist and editor, is a 1994 graduate of the University of Virginia and has covered Virginia politics since 1997. An author of seven books, Chris co-wrote Team of Destiny: Inside Virginia Basketball’s Run to the 2019 National Championship, published in 2019.

Photo by Lynn R. Mitchell