There’s an old saying in Virginia Republican politics: “Southside comes home.”
Brief, confident, and seemingly traditional, the phrase refers to southside Virginia’s voting behavior. Southside Virginia is composed of racially polarized rural swaths and small towns with a shrinking black population. In this part of the commonwealth, it seems no matter how bad things get for Republicans across the rest of Virginia, they always find a way to break ground.
The Appomattox River typically is the delineation of where “southside Virginia” begins, ending at the North Carolina border. It’s up for debate where the easternmost and westernmost ends of the region are, potentially reaching as far west as Martinsville and as far east as Suffolk. It’s similar to southwest Virginia in that it’s economically struggling, losing population, and is quite poor compared to the rest of Virginia.
The region is composed of working-class white and black voters without a college degree, which Democrats have been struggling to win over in the Trump era. While Barack Obama put up impressive performances in Southside during the 2008 and 2012 elections, Democrats haven’t been able to recapture the magic— especially the magic of getting their black voting base out to the polls—since Trump came on to the scene.
Abigail Spanberger, the Democratic nominee for Governor, is perhaps the personification of what class of voters Democrats have sought after since 2016: affluent, white, female, suburban, and college-educated. Her brand may do well in the Richmond suburbs, but it’s struggling down here, giving an opening for Delegate Kim Taylor (R) to pull off perhaps the biggest upset of the cycle.
Our House of Delegates forecast has Kim Taylor as a heavy underdog, though: she’s 5.8% behind her opponent, Kimberly Pope Adams (D), who is seeking a rematch against Taylor after losing in 2023. Still, Taylor faced similar odds before in 2021, and if Spanberger’s campaign operation does poorly with working-class voters (especially black working-class voters), and the electoral tradition of Southside moving rightward in gubernatorial years continues, she could win by the skin of her teeth once more.
The 82nd district in the Virginia House of Delegates was the closest seat of the 2023 election cycle: Taylor won by just 78 votes, or 0.3% against Pope Adams. It’s a uniquely drawn district that contains the most Democratic-leaning locality in the commonwealth, Petersburg City, the heart of the Democratic voting base in the district. The 82nd also contains one of the few localities in Virginia that flipped from Biden to Trump in 2024, Surry County: a small, rural county that is evenly divided between white and black Virginians. In the red corner, we have white, conservative rural areas and Petersburg exurbs in Dinwiddie and Prince George counties.
This district is no exception to the makeup of what southside Virginia’s demographics generally show despite its proximity to Richmond, the capital of the commonwealth, which has seen rapid population growth in the last decade. The 82nd has a roughly equal number of white and black voters: in any part of the urban crescent, such demographics would make it a slam dunk for Democrats. However, southside Virginia has an incredibly racially polarized electorate: nearly every black voter is a Democrat, and nearly every white voter is a Republican. For students of Virginia history, this comes as no surprise. Southside was the heart of “Massive Resistance,” which was the Byrd machine’s efforts to defy desegregation legislation and Supreme Court decisions, especially Brown v. Board of Education. In 1968, the 82nd may have voted for George Wallace in the presidential election that year, the segregationist in the race.
According to an incredibly useful tool from VoteHub and DecisionDeskHQ’s Zachary Donnini, roughly 87.6% of black voters in the 82nd voted for Harris in 2024, while 75.3% of white voters voted for Trump.
In education, just 24% of voters have a bachelor’s degree or higher in the 82nd, making it one of the least-educated districts in the Virginia House. While Richmond continues to see transplants flood the region, this district is Virginian through-and-through: 69% of residents were born in Virginia, one of the highest districts with a Virginian-born population. Despite such unfriendly demographics to Democrats, it still voted for Kamala Harris by 4.2% in the 2024 presidential election thanks to black voter turnout.
Taylor is running for her third term in the House. In 2021, she was elected in the old HD-63, which contained Petersburg City, Dinwiddie County, and rural areas and suburbs in Chesterfield County. In a major upset, she flipped the district while Glenn Youngkin carried it in the gubernatorial race due to low black turnout in Petersburg and a lackluster campaign from incumbent Delegate Lachrese Aird, who had never run in a competitive race until that year.
Her campaign’s logo and website indicates she knows which way the wind is blowing this year, though: if there’s anyone hoping for coattails to ride, it’s her opponent. Coincidentally, the blue hues in Taylor’s campaign logo this year are incredibly similar to that of Abigail Spanberger’s. It’s small things like these rooted in voter psychology that show the slickness of her campaign. Taylor knows that, with Trump in the White House, Democrats are going to show up this year unlike in 2021 when she was first elected, and that she’ll likely need some of their support to pull off an upset.
Adams is showing similar efforts to try and win over the opposition. Adams, an auditor, touts her profession in her first TV ad: “As an Auditor, I know how to cut waste and make government work… I’ll stand up for farmers,” she promises in the ad. It’s an improvement from 2023, when Adams aired a cringeworthy ad in an attempt to appeal to white voters in the district. Should black turnout fall in the 82nd as it typically does in off-year elections, she’ll need to break racial barriers and win over some conservative white voters.
Among the top district-specific issues in the 82nd include crime and economic insecurity, particularly in the city of Petersburg. Petersburg has an incredibly high homicide rate compared to other localities in Virginia, though the city has shown progress in recent years. Approximately 1 in 5 residents in the city live in poverty according to the US Census Bureau.
In an area struggling as much as Petersburg, populism has previously shown to be an effective tool in voter engagement. In 2019, former Delegate Joe Morrissey (D) completed his political comeback in a Democratic primary victory against a longtime incumbent by campaigning on issues like potholes, water bills, and more. His critics at the time tried attacking him for campaigning on issues that fall under the jurisdiction of a mayor and not a State Senator, and yet he trounced to victory anyway.
On her issues page, Pope Adams addresses her positions on community safety, education, abortion, governmental transparency, food insecurity, labor, rural broadband, and economic development. On Taylor’s page, she discusses her positions on building the economy, supporting law enforcement and fighting crime, rural broadband, and education.
We reached out to both Kim Taylor and Kimberly Pope Adams with multiple interview requests for this article to ask them about themselves and the top issues amongst voters in the 82nd, but neither responded.
Will the closest race in the House of Delegates flip to Democrats in a blue wave, or will the Republican slogan, “Southside comes home,” prevail and further Democrats’ woes with black voters south of the Appomattox River? We’ll see by election day.
