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Bobby Orrock had served in the House of Delegates for 36 years, longer than anyone else currently in that body. For many of those, the Caroline County Republican never faced opposition. When he did, the campaigns weren’t particularly close ones. 

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Orrock, though, had never run against a candidate like Nicole Cole — or in a year like 2025. 

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Changing demographics in his district along Interstate 95 south of Fredericksburg had made him vulnerable enough that House Democrats made him one of their 14 official “targets.” Running against him was Nicole Cole, a member of the Spotsylvania County School Board. To prepare for this challenge, Orrock raised more money than he had ever raised before — in the end, 63.5% more.

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Here’s how things wound up: Starting in early October, Orrock started buying $16,499 worth of television ads every week — something he’d never had to do on that scale before. Some years, his campaign finance reports show no money spent on broadcast ads. However, Cole had already beat him to the airwaves. She’d already spent $53,064 in September while Orrock wasn’t on the air at all. Then in October, while Orrock was spending that $16,499 a week on TV ads, Cole was spending more — and then more and more. The first two weeks of October she spent just over $28,000 a week. Then the third week, while Orrock was still buying $16,499 worth of ads, Cole ramped up her spending to $123,545 — for a single week. 

 

Two weeks before Election Day, Orrock’s campaign bumped his buy up to $20,000 a week. Cole dialed her spending up to $391,898 that week. The final week of the campaign, Orrock bought $21,074 worth of television ads — but Cole blanketed television with $619,082 of commercials. 

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By the time it was all over, Orrock had spent $90,571 on television ads, more than twice what he’d spent on his entire campaign two years ago. Cole spent $1,243,991 — almost 14 times as much. Note that this is just for TV, not social media ads.

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For those following the spending in this race, it did not come as a surprise that on election night Cole came out ahead, with 52.14% of the vote.

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While much of the attention this fall naturally fell on the governor’s race, campaigns were playing out in 85 contested House of Delegates races (out of 100) across the state. Not every candidate gets money from the state party; California doctor Fergie Reid Jr. (the son of former Del. Ferguson Reid of Richmond, who in 1967 became the first Black member of the House since the 19th century) had to take it upon himself to organize a fundraising campaign for some Democratic candidates in what the party considered no-win districts, mostly rural districts in the western part of the state. However, the Democrats in those 14 targeted districts saw an almost open spigot of money that spewed out cash at full force toward the end of the campaign.

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Democrats won 13 of those 14 targeted races to achieve their biggest majority in the House since the 1988-89 session — before some of the current or soon-to-be legislators were even born. 

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There was undoubtedly a “blue wave” this fall of some dimension (I earlier wrote that it wasn’t as big as Democrats think because while they saw their vote for governor increase by 20% over four years ago, Republicans saw their drop by 13.7%, which magnified the size of the Democratic victory). The Republicans who lost those 13 seats were caught up not just in a blue wave and a red riptide, but also a green wave of Democratic money that they simply couldn’t compete with. Or, as Del. Dan Helmer, D-Fairfax County, who served as campaign chair for the House Democrats puts it, “We could out-communicate Republicans massively.”

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What played out in the Cole-Orrock race in House District 66 was mirrored in other campaigns around the state and is documented in the “public file” that broadcast outlets must maintain of campaign ad buys, which is where all these numbers come from.

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One of the closest legislative races in the state was in House District 30, which covers parts of Fauquier and Loudoun counties. The incumbent was Republican Geary Higgins, the Democratic challenger was John McAuliff. Those campaigns went up on television in September, in the pricey Northern Virginia market. McAuliff consistently outspent Higgins. At first, the gap wasn’t that wide; the first week of October, McAuliff booked $37,409 worth of ads while Higgins bought $20,000. Then McAuliff cranked it up and Higgins either didn’t or couldn’t. Three weeks out, McAuliff bought $499,193 worth of ads while Higgins bought just $25,000. By the final week, McAuliff was spending $608,734 on television ads, while Higgins had to make do with $78,574.

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The campaign-long tally: McAuliff had more than $1.8 million worth of TV buys, Higgins $250,000. That’s a ratio of 13.8 to 1.

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There may be lots of reasons why McAuliff won that race with 50.89% of the vote, but being able to blast his message so loudly during the last weeks of the campaign was surely one of them. “It was really important — in the last three weeks of the campaign, the Democrats in the Virginia House were outspending the entire Republican ticket combined on messaging,” Helmer says. “That helped drive victory.”

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Television money isn’t the only means of communication that matters; it’s just the one we see most easily. Behind the scenes of campaigns there are telephone and texting campaigns underway to identify likely voters and make sure they get to the polls. Those are more surgical operations than television, which is something of a blunt-force instrument. Whenever I write about campaign finance reports, I always caution that money isn’t the only thing that matters — and it’s not. It sure does help, though, because all these things are expensive, particularly television time in bigger markets.

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All the winning Democrats in these targeted races this year outspent their Republican rivals on television — and by a lot. Besides the two races above, another one with an especially big imbalance was House District 64 in Stafford County. Democrat Stacey Carroll started buying TV in September with $32,656 worth of airtime; Republican incumbent Paul Milde bought just $200. By the final week, Milde bought $77,422 worth of television ads but Carroll bought $556,943 — for a campaign total of $1.27 million for her and just $122,174 for him.

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Some losing Democrats outspent Republicans, too, including in that one targeted race Democrats couldn’t deliver. Democrat Andrew Payton outspent Del. Tony Wilt, R-Rockingham County, just not by very much — $168,117 worth of television to $155,350 for Wilt. Wilt barely squeaked by 50.38% of the vote, which raises the question of whether Democrats could have picked up a 14th seat if they’d spent just a little more money on television in the Shenandoah Valley.

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I could go on and on but you get the idea. The real question, of course, isn’t about the math of how much Republicans were outspent by, but why. Was this a case of a spectacular Democratic success fundraising-wise or a catastrophic Republican failure, or some of both? Mostly the former.

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Data compiled by the Virginia Public Access Project shows that from 2005 to 2009 the two parties raised roughly equal amounts of money for House of Delegates elections. From 2011 to 2015, Republicans raised more. Democrats pulled back almost even in 2017. Since then, Democrats have outraised Republicans in every House cycle — and the margins are widening. 

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In 2017, Republicans raised just over $25 million while Democrats raised almost $24.6 million. This year, Republicans raised $26,240,565 while Democrats raised — are you ready for this? — $66,154,571. (And keep in mind these figures are based on the campaign finance reports filed just before the election; it’s likely these numbers will wind up higher.) “Shocking numbers,” says state Sen. Mark Peake, R-Lynchburg, and the Republicans’ state party chair. That’s almost as much money as Spanberger raised in three years (about $68 million) for her gubernatorial bid. If you look just at the past two years, House Democrats raised slightly more than their party’s gubernatorial candidate did.

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Big picture: Republicans haven’t seen their fundraising increase that much while Democrats have nearly tripled theirs. Even if you just look at the past four years, Republican fundraising went up 2.6% while Democratic fundraising increased by 15%. 

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This was no accident, Helmer says. It’s part of a three-year plan that has seen Virginia Democrats change their approach to campaigns. 

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We need to go back to 2021, when Republicans led by Glenn Youngkin swept the three statewide races and won control of the House of Delegates — even though Democrats outraised them. “There were people who thought we lost the majority because of the governor’s race but we lost the majority by 200 votes with a lot of money not deployed,” Helmer says. The “200 votes” refers to two close House elections that Democratic incumbents lost in Hampton Roads — one by 115 votes, one by 94 votes. The feeling that those Democrats could have won if then-Speaker Eileen Filler-Corn had approved spending some of the $900,000 she had in various campaign accounts led to a rebellion in the ranks of House Democrats in 2022; Filler-Corn was ousted as their leader and Don Scott of Portsmouth was installed in her place. Democrats then started plotting a comeback. In 2023, they regained a narrow majority of 51-49, which elevated Scott to the speakership. '

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“I think a piece of the story is how extraordinary it was when we won the majority in 2023,” Helmer says, because never before has the governor’s party lost control of the House in Virginia’s midterms. The victory, he says, set in motion “a two-year effort to build that dragon’s trove of resources.”

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Helmer says that 2025 was the first time every Democratic House member contributed to the party’s campaign fund — in the past, some Democrats in safe seats had seen no reason to. The House caucus also took more control over campaigns than it had in the past, laying down strict rules for how candidates should run their campaigns if they expected party support. While fundraising targets varied from district to district, one rule was universal: Each candidate was expected to knock on 5,000 doors. “Each of them had to pull their weight,” he says.

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The party also helped candidates formulate their messaging. “We had to separate our candidates from a national Democratic brand that isn’t resonating and put in place a specific Democratic brand,” he says. “We were differentiating from a Republican Party that was focused on who uses which bathroom while we were enacting how much it costs to go to the grocery store or get health care. That makes a huge difference. We couldn’t rely on the party brand.” That message synced up with what Democratic gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger was pushing, as well: affordability. 

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Helmer said he went with each of the Democrats in the targeted districts when they went door-knocking to get a better sense of the campaigns on the ground and also sat in on some fundraising calls to coach candidates on how to ask for money. “We executed our plan with military precision,” Helmer says. He understands the meaning of that term, by the way. He’s a West Point grad who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Scott also has a military background as a former Naval officer.

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Besides the 14 Republican-held seats that Democrats targeted, there were four Democrats considered vulnerable. “Defends,” in political parlance: Nadarius Clark in Suffolk, Joshua Cole in Fredericksburg, Michael Feggans in Virginia Beach and Josh Thomas in Prince William County. “Our defends did so well that we were able to shift resources to front-line races,” Helmer says. “It became clear to us in September that our defends weren’t really defends. It was clear that the Republicans had misjudged things.”

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One sign of that came in late summer when campaign finance reports showed that Orrock, the Republican incumbent in Caroline County, was contributing money to the Republican candidate in the next district over. “We had said we were going to take Bobby out,” Helmer says. “He was giving money away.”

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Democrats, meanwhile, were able to shift money to that district because they had so much of it — and were doing so well elsewhere that some candidates didn’t need it.