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The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is putting more resources behind former Congressman Tom Perriello’s bid to flip Virginia’s 5th Congressional District blue.

Members of Congress in Northern Virginia are part of an effort to investigate US Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) agents involved in the encounter with Carolina Molina, as they hear of more and more ICE incidents in the region.

“I urge Northern Virginians to exercise extreme caution,” Democratic US Rep. Don Beyer said in a statement. “ICE agents are here, they are regularly ignoring their training and departmental regulations that call for deescalation, they are disappearing people, and they are all too frequently becoming out of control or violent.”

Below, I share some of the questions looming over the massive energy merger under review between Dominion Energy and NextEra Energy.

And, a book that explains why labor unions are so fundamental for creating change.

Some housekeeping: Virginia Capital is going down to one newsletter a week on Thursdays. The idea is to give me more time to do reporting that can contribute to more substantive newsletters.

Want to get in touch, or have stories you want me to cover? Reply to this email or reach out to me directly at michaeloconnor@couriernewsroom.com.

Michael O’Connor

Reporter, Dogwood

This is an aerial view of Dominion Energy’s Virginia City Hybrid Energy Center Friday, Sept. 18, 2020, in Virginia City, Va. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)

One of the biggest stories in the state is the proposal for Dominion to combine with NextEra.

It’s a business story and an energy story. It’s also a story about corporate power.

For years now, advocacy groups and politicians have criticized Dominion’s influence on politics in Virginia.

The company doled out over $14 million in political contributions in 2025, with about $7 million going toward Democrats and $6.2 million going to Republicans.

But it’s become more common for Democratic candidates to disavow Dominion money. Spanberger said she wouldn’t take donations from corporate entities—though she later accepted $100,000 from Dominion for her inaugural fund.

So the concern is that given Dominion’s already outsized influence on Virginia politics, won’t the problem only get worse if the company gets taken over by an even bigger company?

It seems like a fair question. But it’s just one of many that people have about this deal.

Michael Pope at Radio IQ reports on what the Virginia Education Association and Local 25 Unite Here are saying about hopes for next year’s public-sector collective bargaining legislation.

“I want Richmond to help Lewis Ginter become the kind of employer that reflects the community-minded organization it says it is,” writes Lou Keeton in an op-ed for the Richmond Times-Dispatch in support of the workers there.

After accounting for tax breaks and other provisions, Amazon and Meta paid less in federal taxes on its profits than average Virginians paid on their state income taxes in 2023, according to an August report from The Commonwealth Institute.

A screenshot of Sonia Vásquez Luna’s campaign site.

As the midterms approach, I’m wondering how candidates are thinking about labor policy.

What does it mean in 2026 to be a pro-worker candidate?

As part of some reporting on this question, I interviewed Sonia Vásquez Luna, the Democratic candidate running in the special election to represent Manassas in the House of Delegates.

Vásquez Luna is the business manager for a local union with the Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA) and she serves on the city council in Manassas.

After Vásquez Luna came to the US from El Salvador in 2001, she got a job as a contract cleaning service worker. She recalled working for the federal minimum wage, which was around $5 an hour, and not having any benefits. Later, she heard that working under a union contract would get her better pay and became a member with LIUNA.

“I started working at the Pentagon as a cleaner,” Vásquez Luna told me. “I actually used to clean the secretary of defense’s office.”

When it comes to labor policy, Vásquez Luna told me she was glad to see the General Assembly raise the minimum wage and pass legislation related to paid family and medical leave and paid sick time.

Like many in the labor movement, she was saddened to see Spanberger veto the public-sector collective bargaining legislation and emphasized the need to keep that fight going.

“When I organize workers, you know, a lot of times it’s not only about the money,” Vásquez Luna said. “It’s about respect. It’s about being seen, and it’s about having a job with dignity.”

(Verso Books/YouTube)

I recently finished Anton Jäger’s slender but dense book “Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences,” published earlier this year.

The book explores how we arrived at this moment where everything feels political but in a fleeting way that almost never results in meaningful change.

It’s an abstract, academic little book with a lot of big ideas and ten-dollar words. But one I nonetheless enjoyed.

Its core argument is that the smaller roles played by political parties and labor unions in daily life along with the saturation of social media across society has made it harder to effect policy changes that benefit working people.

Scrolling on our phones gets us hyped up by whatever happens to be trending, but low rates of union membership and disillusionment with the main political parties means people have nowhere to meaningfully channel their political angst.

“Leaders can, of course, try to choreograph these broods with social media posts of their own, television appearances, or ‘anti-disinformation’ campaigns,” Jäger writes. “But such choreography is no substitute for durable organization.”

For Jäger, the only way forward is to reverse this trend by increasing union membership and participation in political parties, as daunting and challenging as that might be.