How did Bill Stanley beat a three-term Democrat?

“Mom, I won!” yelled an excited state Sen. Bill Stanley on Tuesday night.

Stanley’s mother called in the middle of his victory speech and he stopped to tell her the good news before he finished. Stanley defeated three-term incumbent Democrat Roscoe Reynolds in the 20th District race by just a little more than 1 percent of the votes.

Stanley has won three elections in 12 months to get where he is today. The first was a six-candidate Republican primary, followed by a special election to fill Robert Hurt’s Senate seat after Hurt was elected to Congress. But when Stanley lost that seat to redistricting, he moved to the new 20th District to take on Reynolds, who has been in the Senate for 14 years.

The Senate redistricting plan was designed by Senate Democrats to give a little partisan protection to Reynolds by adding more Democratic-leaning precincts. So how did Stanley get the victory?

“We had a lot of components that hadn’t been tried before,” said Stanley on Wednesday.

He mentioned his projects like the “politics with a purpose” campaign to help raise money for charity and working with grassroots efforts.

He also got the help of Generation Joshua, a Christian youth organization that gets young people involved in politics to help elect conservative candidates. The Generation Joshua callers had competitive phone canvassing competitions and made more than 10,000 calls to voters.

Stanley’s campaign also out-raised and spent Reynolds, burning through more than $1 million. Low voter turnout also helped, some campaign observers said.

In the 20th state Senate District 50,977 people voted out of 130,026 registered voters (39 percent). This was still the second highest voter turnout in any Virginia Senate election.

The Republican candidate also overcame conservative independent candidate that earned about 8 percent of the vote. But Stanley said he was never worried about Jeff Evans chipping away at his base.

“Jeff Evans was not a factor in this race,” said Stanley. “His campaign was a failure from the start.”

Stanley’s victory, along with the probable victory of Bryce Reeves in Spotsylvania County, means that the Republicans earned at 20-20 tie in the Virginia Senate. It can be broken by Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling, giving GOP control.

Reynolds did not formally concede the 20th District race on Tuesday night because the race was so close. If the margin of victory was less than 1 percent, then state law allows for a recount. One of the voting machines in Rocky Mount was not reporting Tuesday night, making exact totals difficult.

According to Stanley, the vote tallies for this machine did not have a factor, and Wednesday canvassing still had him over the 1 percent margin. By 10 p.m. Wednesday, Reynolds had not released a formal statement conceding the race, nor contacted Stanley.

On his Facebook page Reynolds stated, “Thank you to all of those who worked in this election; it is a challenge to get voters to realize how important elections really are to them and to analyze the difference between what is really true in an ad and what is not. We have been blessed with many friends throughout the years.”

Many of his supporters thanked Reynolds for his 25 years of service to Southside in the General Assembly and expressed their sadness to see him go.

“I’m going to give him all the space he needs,” said Stanley who also praised Reynolds service. “When you serve that long, it’s hard.”

Holland reports for the Danville Register & Bee.