As Bob Good’s two-year term comes to a close, the representative for Virginia’s 5th Congressional District has reason to feel secure in a potential victory on November 8—VA-5 has elected Republicans for years, with the last Democrat winning by a hair in 2008.
For this article, C-VILLE Weekly wanted to hear Good defend his record in his own voice. However, after multiple attempts to speak with the representative, the candidate didn’t return our calls by press time. So, because Bob Good won’t talk to us, here’s what we dug up on him.
Raised in the Lynchburg area, Good, 57, paints a portrait of his early life that places his family at the edge of poverty.
“I knew what it was like to be in the free lunch line at school,” he said at a candidates forum in 2020, “or to walk a mile down the street to the grocery store because we didn’t have a car, and to buy groceries with food stamps.”
In order to attend his private Christian high school, Good accepted financial assistance, and earned a partial wrestling scholarship to cover his tuition at Liberty University, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in finance and his master of business administration degree. Wrestling became a fixture for him—his scholarship came after he won a state championship—and he eventually became a coach and administrator of the sport. After working for CitiFinancial for 17 years, he returned to Liberty as an associate athletic director.
Good’s faith is a focus of his life and his politics—he identifies as a “biblical conservative.” But his platform rests with the most far-right members of the Republican party. Before he announced his congressional candidacy, he served on the Campbell County Board of Supervisors from 2016 to 2019, where he elbowed his way to the front line of the culture wars. According to The Washington Post, Good joined his fellow county supervisors in condemning the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision legalizing same-sex marriage, and used his position to advocate for state laws denying gender-affirming bathroom use. He also sought to make Campbell County a “Second Amendment sanctuary.”
In his campaigning and during his first congressional term, Good has stayed in lockstep with former president Donald Trump and his ilk. Good has called the COVID-19 pandemic “phony,” and joined notorious GOP members like Marjorie Taylor Green in calling for Anthony Fauci’s firing.
While Good did condemn the storming of the U.S. Capitol Building in January 2021, he also was one of more than 100 Republicans who objected to the Electoral College votes submitted in the 2020 presidential election. Specifically, Good wished to reject EC votes from six states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, all of which Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won. When legislation was introduced to award Congressional Gold Medals to members of the U.S. Capitol Police and D.C. Metropolitan Police for their defense of the Capitol building and the lawmakers inside, Good voted against it.
Though the ’21 insurrection would result in the death of nine people, Good said just months earlier that the threat of violence could only come from one side of the political aisle. “They’re calling for revolution,” Good said about the “radical left” at a private campaign event in fall 2020. “So, the threat is clearly to our democracy, to our republic, to our freedoms is coming from the radical left. I don’t see any evidence of a threat from the conservative side.”
As of October 24, Good has sponsored 37 pieces of legislation, which he told Cardinal News earlier in the month made him “the leader among Virginia Republicans in this Congress with the most bills sponsored.” Many of his proposals attack hot-button issues, such as a September bill supporting a “private right of action” for parents to oppose the teaching of “racial discrimination theory” or “radical gender theory” in schools, and a January 2021 bill denying asylum to undocumented migrants convicted of a crime. None of Good’s bills have made it out of committee.
During Biden’s tenure, Good has only voted in line with the president 3.1 percent of the time, according to FiveThirtyEight. Specifically, Good has been in favor of just three things: repealing the 2002 authorization of military force against Iraq in 2021, extending pandemic-era Medicare telehealth flexibilities this past July, and modifications to merger filing fees and the disclosure of foreign merger subsidies.
Good has voted no on bills that appear to align with his platform, giving a thumbs-down to three September 2022 measures that would support law enforcement agencies across the country. One measure offered agencies funding to investigate unsolved homicides and nonfatal shootings, another aimed to financially assist governments in training mental health professionals to respond to appropriate emergency calls, and a third sought to provide grants for agencies with under 125 officers. (However, these votes are consistent with his fiscally conservative platform.) All three passed the House.
But Good loves to talk, and that may be a big appeal for his voters, especially in the more conservative South Side of the 5th District. “Good is basically a complainer,” says J. Miles Coleman, associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “You look at his Twitter feed, all he talks about is ‘This nation is going to hell under the Biden administration.’ He talks about cultural issues often.”
Sabato’s Crystal Ball has VA-5 as a safe Republican seat this year, says Coleman.
Read part one of C-VILLE’s election coverage here.