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.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.