by Markus Schmidt, Virginia Mercury (September 27, 2024)
For decades, Virginia’s 9th Congressional District earned the nickname “The Fightin’ Ninth” due to its fiercely contested elections. But for the last 13 years, Republican Morgan Griffith has held the seat with little opposition, solidifying his status as the incumbent.
That could change this election cycle as Democrat Karen Baker hopes to unseat the lawmaker from Salem. A native midwesterner who moved to Floyd County from South Carolina in 2014, she has spent the last seven months traveling thousands of miles crisscrossing the deeply rural and mountainous district.
While Baker takes pride in her decades-long record as a public servant — first as a trial lawyer for the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and as an administrative law judge for the Social Security Administration — she has never run for public office before, “except for treasurer in 11th grade, which I won,” she told The Mercury in a recent interview.
Baker decided to challenge Griffith in Virginia’s most Republican district after being approached by “some concerned Democrats who felt it was important to have a credible candidate on the ballot. And so I said, well, if not me, then who?”
The 9th District, Virginia’s second-largest, is a mostly sprawling and rugged region in the southwestern part of the state covering a large swath of rural and mountainous terrain, including the Appalachian region, stretching from Lee County in the west to Bedford County in the east.
Known for its deep-rooted cultural ties to coal mining, agriculture, and manufacturing, the 9th has historically been a battleground for political power. But in recent years, it has leaned solidly Republican since Griffith flipped it in 2010, defeating Democratic U.S. Rep. Rick Boucher after 28 years.
“This district is a fascinating place because it was the last stronghold for Southern Democrats and did not fall to the GOP until that year,” said David Richards, a political science professor at the University of Lynchburg.
“People there respond to in-person retail politics, they want to see and speak to their candidates,” Richards added. “I think Baker can capitalize on this and she has the right idea by campaigning hard on the ground. But because Griffith has regularly won with over 60% of the vote, it will be a very steep climb for her.”
By campaigning on access to health care, Baker brings her own experience in the field to the table. After her law career, she went to nursing school at Greenville Technical College in South Carolina. She became a registered nurse in 2011 and spent several years at a small rural hospital.
“There were rural hospitals before that may have been struggling in terms of their budgets, but now those hospitals either are closed, or they’ve become urgent cares, so we have maternity deserts where people have to drive hours over twisting mountains and secondary roads to get care,” Baker said.
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Many residents in the district are unsatisfied with the services provided by Ballad Health, a chain of hospitals that has a monopoly on medical care in Southwest Virginia, Baker said.
“People are upset about the quality of care because Ballad underpays its staff. It’s been a revolving door in terms of professionals coming fresh out of medical school, getting a couple of years under their belt, and leaving for greener pastures.”
To address this problem, Baker proposes scaling up the Program of All-inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE), a Medicare and Medicaid program that provides healthcare services for adults 55 and older with chronic health conditions or disabilities. In addition, she wants to utilize the community healthcare centers in the district.
“The majority of people in the district are already on Medicaid, so we have a template for creating better conditions with fairly simple enabling legislation to spread these two programs throughout,” Baker said.
Other issues on Baker’s campaign platform include the creation of a better jobs market that she hopes will retain more younger people in the district, and expanding access to public education.
Since launching her campaign in March, Baker said she has talked to thousands of voters in the district.
“I go to concerts, flea markets, I’m looking for the people that wouldn’t automatically think to vote for me. In other words, leaning Republicans or Republicans. Those are the people that I need to get to know me and to like me for me to win, and so that’s where I am.”
But despite the excitement among Democrats over Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential bid, Baker said she isn’t running on a national ticket.
“That’s not my campaign, because nobody expects Harris to win in the 9th, and I can win because I am for everybody in this district. I tell people I’m a Democrat, but I don’t run out yelling I’m a Democrat. I run out saying, ‘I’m here for you, I will work for you.’”
When talking to voters, Baker said she always asks them about Griffith, her opponent.
“People sometimes go, who’s that? And generally, I would say 80 to 90% of the time, people say, ‘he doesn’t do anything for us.’”
Griffith, however, insists that he hasn’t become complacent in a district where he has previously run for reelection unopposed, underscoring that he takes Baker’s challenge seriously.
“Am I doing more than when I don’t have an opponent? Yes,” he told The Mercury in a phone interview earlier this week. “But I generally work the district pretty hard anytime I have an opponent. We’ve had about 350 stops in the last term in the district, averaging about four events on the days that I am here.”
A Philadelphia native who made his home in Salem after graduating from Washington and Lee University School of Law in 1983, Griffith first ran for public office in 1993, when he was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates, where he served as the House Majority Leader for 10 years.
In 2010, he ousted Boucher, the 13-term Democratic incumbent in the 9th Congressional District, by 51-46%. In the most recent congressional election in 2022, Griffith was reelected to his sixth term after defeating Democrat Taysha DeVaughan by a staggering 73-27%.
As a legislator, Griffith said he was proud of his role in advocating for the Abandoned Mine Land Economic Revitalization Program (AMLER) to implement strategies that return former coal mining sites to productive uses. Since its creation in 2016, the program has brought more than $10 million to the district every year, Griffith said.
During his time in Congress, Griffith has also sponsored or supported legislation to push back against what he called high taxes, unnecessary regulation, and an over-reliance on foreign industry that have strangled private businesses in our communities and prevented job growth.
He has also introduced the EPA Regulatory Relief Act to reduce what he considered burdensome regulations on hospitals, manufacturers, and other businesses in the district. The measure failed in the Senate.
Rebuking his opponent’s claims that he had done little to help expand health care in the 9th, Griffith said he has been a strong supporter of federally qualified health centers.
“We have more than any other in the state of Virginia,” he said.
Griffith also was part of a bipartisan effort to expand care options for people who experience strokes by introducing the Furthering Access to Stroke Telemedicine ACT (FAST) Act in 2017, which helps stroke victims gain faster access to high-quality care through remote evaluation and treatment.
“I’m a big supporter of the telehealth concepts, of our federally qualified health centers, and of trying to make sure that we continue to pay our health care providers enough that they can make it,” Griffith said in the interview.
In June, Griffith touted his role in securing a $1.6 million federal grant benefitting the Piedmont Planning District’s Commission’s Route 122 Regional Corridor Plan, which was funded under the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021 — which he voted against.
In the interview, Griffith explained this contradiction by stating that as a congressman, he had two jobs.
“One is to legislate, and the other is to act like an ombudsman. On my legislative side, I still think it was bad policy. But on my ombudsman’s side, on the side that says I’m supposed to help the district, once it’s passed into law, I would be failing to do my job if I didn’t then advocate for those federal monies to come to the 9th District.”
If reelected on Nov. 5, Griffith vows to continue advocating for what he considers issues that are in the best interest of the people in his district, such as “fighting for medicine, making sure that rural health is getting a fair shake,” and leading the charge against regulations trying to eliminate coal, among other priorities.
“We want to get broadband finished up, and that’s an important issue. I’m hopeful that that will actually happen in the next couple of years. But we just have to keep moving forward and I want to make sure that our tax rates are low,” Griffith said.
On Jan. 6, 2021, Griffith was one of 147 House Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 presidential election, which Democrat Joe Biden won by more than 7 million votes.
Almost four years later, Griffith said that he never took the position that fraud was an issue during that election.
“Some people did, but I believe fraud is a purview of the states and not the federal government,” he said.
Instead, he said that he had concerns with changes that bureaucrats in states like Arizona and Georgia had made to their election laws within 30 days of the election that had not been approved by the respective state legislatures.
“That violates the federal law, therefore, those elections are subject to not being certified,” Griffith said, adding that he doesn’t foresee this happening again after this year’s election.
“I don’t know that we’ll have the same problems that we had in the 2020 election.”
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