Looking ahead to the fall in the Fifth

The good news on the surface for Fifth District Republicans – somebody won the seven-candidate GOP primary in resounding fashion.

The bad news – the winner was the moderate, State Sen. Robert Hurt, and his win, though resounding in one sense, didn’t get him to 50 percent of the votes cast overall.

Telling me, at first glance, that if the other six candidates representing the red-meat wing of the Republican Party had been able to do some dealmaking to get their number down to one, then maybe one of them wins.

And also then telling me, at second glance, that Hurt is going to have some work to do with some fences to mend with the base if he’s going to have a hope of knocking off Democrat Tom Perriello in the fall.

The conservative able to generate the most buzz, second-place primary finisher Jim McKelvey, did his part to assist in that respect by striking something of a conciliatory tone in his post-primary message to voters. “We, as conservatives, must be unified to defeat Tom Perriello this November. And we must do this now,” McKelvey said in a press statement issued Tuesday night.

Fifth-place finisher Feda Morton tried to do the same, though there was some backhand in what Morton had to say. “I wish to congratulate Sen. Robert Hurt on his win today for the Republican nomination for Congress in Virginia’s Fifth District. It was a hard-fought win in a race that was not always clean, but his campaign stayed true, and today he is our nominee. I look forward to working with Sen. Hurt in beating Tom Perriello this November,” Morton said.

Those are important first steps for Republicans hoping to unseat Perriello, a freshman congressman who knocked off longtime GOP incumbent Virgil Goode in a 2008 election surprise.

If I’m a Republican, I’d have wanted to see Hurt rack up 60-65 percent of the vote yesterday to demonstrate a sense of unity with the GOP base

That Hurt fell short of 50 percent in the primary is significant in that there is a third-party challenger in Tea Party sympatico Jeffrey Clark who will if nothing else continue into the fall the noise that we heard from Hurt’s GOP primary challengers in the spring. In the end Clark isn’t likely to do much more than siphon off a percent or two at the most from Hurt, but that percent or two could be huge in light of the close race that we saw between Perriello and Goode in 2008.