The Virginia Republican Party held the nominating contest for the state's off-year elections over the weekend. While the nominees for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general may not be known for a few days, advocates for election changes can point to a handful of victories.
Unlike presidential primaries in Virginia, which are open to all voters, the nominating process for statewide office is closed to select party loyalists. This year, approximately 50,000 were expected to cast a ballot at the Republican convention — if it could even be called a "convention." Due to Covid-19 restrictions, the party did not hold a central gathering; instead, participants were directed to cast their votes, from their cars, at one of about 40 locations scattered around the state.
And when they voted, they ranked each of the candidates, with ballot-counters now working through the process of eliminating also-rans and redistributing votes.
In a ranked election, voters list their choices in order of preference. If no candidate gets a majority of first-place votes, the person with the fewest is eliminated and those ballots are redistributed based on the voters second choice. This process repeats until a candidate gets a majority of the top votes.
However, the Virginia GOP has added a twist to the process by weighting each vote based on individual counties' past support for Republican candidates, meaning not all voters are equal.
FairVote, one of the advocates for ranked-choice voting, is happy with the initial reports from Virginia.
"We're pleased with what we're seeing so far on just the RCV component of it," said the group's president, Rob Richie.
Now that all the votes have been cast, volunteers have begun the painstaking process of counting them all by hand. Because it's an instant runoff election, they will be going through ballots multiple times, meaning it will take days to complete the count. The counting is being broadcast via livestream.
David Levine of the Alliance for Securing Democracy laid out some of the issues facing the party's vote-counters.
Political observers in Virginia believe the party is hoping RCV will help a moderate win the gubernatorial nod. The Republicans have not won a statewide election since 2009 in Virginia, which has been moving from reliably red to regularly blue over the past 12 years.
State Sen. Amanda Chase, a loyal follower of former President Donald Trump, would likely have won a plurality in a standard election but might get sidelined when voters have the chance to rank multiple candidates.
But John March, a spokesman for the state party, noted that RCV simplifies a process used in the past.
"Traditional conventions always go multi round until someone gets to 50%," March wrote in an email. "Since COVID did not allow us to have a traditional convention, we resorted to using ranked choice so that we would not have to do an all day convention seven times just to get a nominee."
March also said it's too early to say whether any of these changes will be used again in the future.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.