Charlottesville Overwhelmingly Rejects Donald Trump Candidate

WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 13: Republican presidential candidate, former U.S. President Donald Trump gives remarks to the press at the National Republican Senatorial Committee building on June 13, 2024 in Washington, DC. Trump is visiting Capitol Hill to meet with House and Senate Republicans. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images) Virginia state Sen. John McGuire, a candidate in the Republican primary for the state's 5th Congressional District, speaks to supporters in Lynchburg, Va., Tuesday, June 18, 2024. (AP Photo/Skip Rowland)

A Donald Trump-backed candidate is being overwhelming beaten in Charlottesville in Virginia's Republican congressional primary election.

State Senator John McGuire is mounting a strong challenge to incumbent Rep. Bob Good, who is seeking a third term representing Virginia's 5th Congressional District. With ballots still to be counted, the race remains too close to call.

But in Charlottesville, Good holds more than a 14 percentage point lead on 57 percent of the vote to McGuire's 42 percent, with an estimated 97.5 percent of votes counted.

Good, the chair of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, earned Trump's wrath after endorsing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for president. After DeSantis dropped out of the Republican presidential primary in January, Good immediately switched alliances to endorse Trump, calling him the "greatest President of my lifetime" but Trump said it came "too late."

And he continued to bash Good as he campaigned for McGuire in a telephone rally on Monday night. "Unlike Bob Good, John McGuire will not let you down," Trump said, according to The Associated Press.

Trump has long faced criticism for playing down a deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville in 2017. He claimed that both sides were at fault after a man plowed his car into a group of counterprotesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer.

"You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides," he told reporters days after the rally.

And earlier this year, Trump claimed the 2017 rally was "nothing" compared to the pro-Palestinian campus protests against Israel's war in Gaza.

President Joe Biden has often cited Trump's response to the Charlottesville rally as what inspired him to run for president.

"I had no intention of running for president or office again … and then Charlottesville happened," he said at a campaign event in October.

"People coming out of the woods, carrying torches—out of fields literally carrying torches down in Charlottesville. Nazi swastikas accompanied by the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacists, and singing the same vicious, antisemitic bile that was sung in Germany in the '30s. And a young woman was killed … And they asked my predecessor, the guy who may be my opponent this time, what he thought.

"Remember what he said? Not joking. He said, 'There are very fine people on both sides.' … That's when I decided I should run."

Update 6/19/24, 6 a.m. ET: This article has been updated with additional information.

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