Incumbent Republican Delegate Carrie Coyner has once again found herself in the proverbial crosshairs of Virginia Democrats; only this time, she has been there from the start of the election cycle.

In 2023, Virginia Democrats neglected their nominee in House District 75, Stephen Miller-Pitts, who ran against Coyner in the House of Delegates district containing heavily African-American parts of Prince George County, all of Hopewell City, and working-class suburbs like Enon in southeastern Chesterfield County.

It wasn’t until leadership in the Virginia House Democratic Caucus saw Susanna Gibson as a liability in her highly competitive Delegate race that they began to scrounge for other flip opportunities, settling on Miller-Pitts’ race in mid-September 2023. By then, the damage had already been done: Coyner possessed a wide lead that Democrats barely narrowed in the last month and a half of the campaign. Coyner won by 5.8% despite being outspent by a quarter of a million dollars.

Hopewell City has been a reliably Democratic locality on the presidential level since Barack Obama won the city by 12 points in 2008. Every Democratic candidate for President since then has won the city between 12 and 16 points, except for Hillary Clinton in 2016 (who won the city by 9 points).

However, Hopewell City usually takes some of the hardest swings to the right in gubernatorial years, no matter the electoral environment. This is because Virginia Democrats notoriously struggle in turning out African American voters south of the Appomattox River in non-presidential years, and Hopewell, which touches the river’s easternmost end into the James, is of no exception.

“The Curse of Hopewell,” as we shall call it, is a trend dating back to the 2005 Virginia gubernatorial election, where the city usually trends in the low double-digit range toward the Republican candidate for Governor, compared to the preceding year’s presidential election result.

Years	Presidential	Gubernatorial	Swing	Trend
2004 & 2005	GOP +8.5	GOP +7.9	DEM +0.6	GOP +13.3
2008 & 2009	DEM +11.9	GOP +25.0	GOP +36.9	GOP +13.3
2012 & 2013	DEM +15.9	DEM +1.0	GOP +14.9	GOP +16.3
2016 & 2017	DEM +9.3	DEM +1.6	GOP +7.7	GOP +11.3
2020 & 2021	DEM +14.7	GOP +0.2	GOP +14.9	GOP +2.9

The one exception to this rule is the 2021 gubernatorial election: The city only trended to the right from the 2020 presidential result by 2.9%. While that may be an encouraging stat for Democrats, the n value is 1, so it’s not yet clear if the curse has been broken. 

Hopewell City is geographically divided by race along Winston Churchill Drive. The eastern half of the city is predominantly Black and Democratic, while the western half of the city is predominantly white and Republican. While the city’s four western precincts voted for Tim Kaine in 2024, they simultaneously voted for Donald Trump by a slim margin, and in 2023, they voted for Coyner by a country mile.

It’s not uncommon for localities, especially independent cities in Virginia, to have divides such as this: Roads and highways were used decades ago to draw a historical barrier between Black and white residents in the South and beyond. Similar divides can be found in the independent cities of Franklin and Emporia, which are also part of Southside Virginia. In our own capital city, Richmond, the Sixth Mount Zion Baptist Church still stands to this day as a reminder of the splitting of the vibrant Jackson Ward neighborhood to construct Interstate 95.

In the 2023 House of Delegates election, Coyner ran ahead of the following year’s presidential margins in Hopewell by almost the same margin as she did in her home of Chesterfield– 12 and a half points. Her strength came with massive overperformances with white voters in the localities and low Black turnout in Hopewell and Prince George.

We followed Delegate Coyner as she canvassed a key precinct in Hopewell City, Ward Four, on the westernmost side of the city. Ward Four, which has roughly an even amount of Black and white residents in the precinct, voted for Kamala Harris by 10.2% last year, but also voted for Coyner by 8.6% in 2023, a whopping 18.8% difference in her favor. It’s areas like these that make or break the winner of HD-75.

Coyner, like many state legislators with a record of overperforming electorally, is attentive to her constituents. While canvassing, she’ll note not only issues important to voters she speaks with, but also facts about them: nicknames, family members… You mention it, she writes it down. For readers familiar with Pennsylvania state politics, such meticulousness may be reminiscent of legislators like Democrat Chris Sainato, who from 1994 through 2022 represented the conservative western Pennsylvania town of New Castle, and would call every constituent on their birthday to wish them a happy one. Perhaps Coyner isn’t at Sainato’s level, but she still possesses an impressive attention to constituents’ details and concerns.

“If you need me, call me!” she would say as she finished up conversations with voters. “You know you’re gonna win this thing, huh?” one voter said to her on the doors. In the suburban neighborhood Coyner canvassed, voters displayed American flags for the Fourth of July on their property that Coyner had given them for last year’s Fourth of July, she noted. Voters would greet her with hugs and invite her in as we tailed the Delegate in sunny, 90-degree weather.

After Delegate Coyner wrapped up canvassing for the day, we spoke to her about the campaign, issues in the district, and more.

July 7th, 2025 | Interview with Delegate Carrie Coyner

Coyner will face a ghost of elections’ past in Lindsey Dougherty, who ran against Coyner in the open House of Delegates race in 2019 and lost by double digits. Under the current lines for HD-75, over ¾ of which is in Coyner’s old House of Delegates district, Republican candidates for the House of Delegates in 2019 won HD-75 by 10.3% while the estimated statewide House of Delegates generic ballot was D+4 that year. Doughtery, also a Chesterfield native, most recently ran and lost for a seat on the Chesterfield County Board of Supervisors, underperforming Kamala Harris’s presidential margin by 9.7%.

We reached out to the Lindsey Dougherty campaign to see her in action on the campaign trail as we did with Coyner, but her campaign did not respond to our request.

Coyner is the most moderate member of the Virginia General Assembly according to our upcoming W-NOMINATE features for Virginia, and likely owes her voting record to part of her strength with white, ticket-splitting voters, as well as being a woman. House District 75 has a very low college attainment rate: just 28% of white voters in the district have a Bachelor’s degree or higher. The less educated a voter is, the more likely they are to use what is known as ‘shortcuts’ (such as making assumptions from a candidate’s family, profession, race, gender) to choose who they’ll support at the ballot box. Because Coyner is a woman running under the Republican banner, she’s seen as more moderate, especially to lower-information voters who use candidates’ identities to estimate their ideological leanings. Inversely, Dougherty is seen as more liberal to these voters because she’s a woman running under the Democratic banner.

All available data points to Coyner being a tough opponent for Democrats this year, despite her district voting for Kamala Harris by 6.6% in the 2024 Presidential election. Democrats would need to overcome four main hurdles to pull off a victory, including the delta between the candidates’ electoral performance records, The Curse of Hopewell, the district’s low college attainment rate, and Coyner’s moderate voting record.

That’s not to say Coyner is unbeatable, though. With Donald Trump back in the White House, a Democratic-friendly environment could sweep out Coyner despite having a slew of advantages; just ask Jackson Miller of Manassas, Manoli Loupassi of Richmond, etc. All in all, Democrats need a tall enough ‘blue wave’ (and a bit of luck) to flip House District 75, one of the more crucial seats in the House of Delegates this year.