Over the last few weeks, it’s felt like I couldn’t turn on the TV, scroll through social media, or go to the mailbox without seeing some sort of ad for at least one of the 10 candidates running in the Democratic primary for the special election in Virginia’s 11th Congressional District. But that should at least come to a pause now that James Walkinshaw easily won the nomination this Saturday.

After receiving the endorsement of over 50 local elected officials and community leaders, including Gerry Connolly before he passed away, James entered the primary as the clear front runner and the polling I saw suggested he’d likely receive 45-50 percent of the vote … which is a sizable number considering there were 10 candidates running. But he ended up winning just under 60%, which means that he would have won on the first round ballot even if we’d been using ranked choice voting (a concept many people think we should be using for all primaries).

The numbers in the primary are indeed worth look at. Considering how this was a primary for a special election that was put together quickly and held shortly after a regularly scheduled primary for statewide offices, after all, there were at least some questions about how many people would actually be engaged in the process. Some of the candidates even tried to make this an issue during the campaign. But Walkinshaw’s team definitely got the word out very well and had a very strong field campaign, which helped turnout eventually grow to over 37,000 voters. And as Lowell highlighted over at Blue Virginia, the CD-11 Democratic Committee recruited a great team of volunteers who helped ensure the primary ran as smoothly as possible.

What surprised some people was how despite getting into the race extremely early (before Gerry even passed away), raising a decent amount of money, and having a campaign consultant who’s known for getting a lot of attention, Stella Pekarsky couldn’t even manage a second place finish in the primary. Based on what I saw on the campaign trail and heard from my fellow CD-11 voters, this is largely because she ran an extremely negative campaign that turned off a lot of initially undecided voters.

At the forum that was held last week, for instance, it was very noticeable that most of the campaigns were engaging in positive conversations about why their candidate should be elected in conversations before the official event started. Stella’s campaign, on the other hand, was going extremely negative against her opponents during that time and she used her opening statement to bash people who supported George Barker over her in the state senate primary back in 2023. Her team then started talking conspiracy theories and all sorts of other nonsense when it became even clearer that their negative tactics weren’t working.

“The Pekarsky campaign complained constantly about the process, even making accusations of potential fraud with early votes,” Brandon Jarvis said in his Virginia Scope newsletter. “Democrats were in my DMs comparing her campaign to Trump of 2020. Have to wonder if that is why she ended up finishing third.”

Another resident of the 11th District also commented on my Facebook profile about her campaign saying “it is odd that this candidate is choosing to focus her Congressional campaign on bitterness, personal grievance, and ridiculous conspiracy theories attacking the process. While such nonsense might work for Trump with his base, it’s not a particularly effective strategy in a Democratic primary.”

“It is perplexing that she is having her surrogates attack not just her opponents but the entire Democratic supermajority on the Board of Supervisors,” Peter added. “Many of us in Fairfax County actually respect what so many of our Supervisors are doing to make Fairfax County one of the best-managed jurisdictions in the country, even in a challenging budget environment.”

All of this opened the door to a relatively young and newer elected official, Irene Shin, to enter the race and have an extremely strong second place showing. While I imagine Irene would have preferred winning the primary, there’s absolutely no doubt that she significantly raised her profile. I know several people who attended the forum had a whole lot of positive things to say about her after the forum and that will hopefully help garner her even more support as her seat in the House of Delegates will be on the ballot this November.

While the seat is largely viewed as a safely Democratic heading into the September 9th general election with Gerry Connolly winning over 66% of the vote just over six months ago, special elections can sometimes be tricky if they have low voter turnout. But based on how the Walkinshaw campaign has already hit the ground running and even had a very well attended event yesterday to kick off the general election effort, it looks like James is well on his way to becoming Congressman Walkinshaw.