House Majority Leader Terry Kilgore, R-Scott, walks through the Capitol during the 2022 Virginia legislative session. (Photo by Ned Oliver/Virginia Mercury)
For more than thirty years, Del. Terry Kilgore, R-Scott, has navigated Virginia politics with a simple motto: “Be nice.” The Republican, who was elected minority leader by his caucus in May, keeps a copy of the credo on his desk on the House floor and embodies it as he roams the halls of the Capitol, dishing out grins in the depths of February budget battles.
Politically, Kilgore’s amiability translates into a willingness to cut deals.
To help Southwest Virginia’s economy, he has embraced projects that are controversial within his own party and constituents, including Medicaid expansion, the legalization of casino gambling and a regional hospital monopoly.
Kilgore declined an interview for this story. But in two interviews last year, he laid out a vision of politics built around compromise.
“If you get 60-70% of what you want, that’s a win,” Kilgore said in July 2024. “A lot of folks don’t see it that way.”
Kilgore’s deals sometimes benefit his donors, his family and himself. He’s sponsored bills that benefit his twin brother Jerry Kilgore’s lobbying clients and helped appoint allies to the local judicial bench. In 2018, his colleagues roasted him with an “Overdog Award,” complete with a trophy overflowing with campaign cash, for driving legislation that allowed Dominion Energy, his largest donor, to keep hundreds of millions in excess profits.
Kilgore’s new role as the top Republican in the House of Delegates means he’ll have to strike his toughest deal yet in this November’s elections: convincing swing voters to trust the GOP against the backdrop of President Donald Trump’s continued unpopularity in the commonwealth. Kilgore is no personal danger in his ruby red district but he needs to help Republican candidates flip two swing seats to retake the House majority. They’re seen as an underdog, with GOP gubernatorial hopeful Winsome Earle-Sears trailing Democrat Abigail Spanberger by 7% among likely voters in a recent poll from Roanoke College.
Kilgore’s job won’t be any easier in January, when the legislature convenes. The bipartisanship he championed for years has been strained by increasingly bitter battles over abortion, guns and surging energy demand. An increasing number of Democrats and some Republicans have taken a critical view of powerful special interests like Dominion Energy.
Still, Chris Saxman, a former Republican delegate who served with Kilgore from 2002 to 2010 who now heads the pro-business advocacy group Virginia Free, said Kilgore was a “very skilled operator” who would pick his battles strategically.
“People confuse nice with weakness, and one should never do that with Terry Kilgore,” Saxman said.
The Dealmaker
Kilgore’s politics are at least partly explained by his background in Scott County, on the Tennessee border.
Shaped by isolation from Richmond — parts of the region are closer to seven other states’ capitals — Southwest Virginia defies easy political categorization. The region elected one of the two first women to serve in the General Assembly in 1923 and sometimes elected Republicans during Democratic Byrd Machine’s dominance in the early 20th century.
Regional lawmakers from both parties learned to band together in farflung Richmond, according to Duane Miller, the longtime head of the LENOWISCO Planning District Commission, which coordinates economic development projects. Southwest Virginia’s small political presence at the statehouse — diminished further by population losses driven by the decline of coal — made bipartisan cooperation essential to winning state attention to the region’s needs, Miller said.
“Whether Richmond is a Democrat majority or a conservative majority, in Southwest Virginia, you have to be able to relate and get along with everybody because we have fewer voices,” Miller said.
Kilgore’s 1993 election to the House of Delegates made him the first Republican to represent the district since at least 1947. He found early ways to make his mark. Working with Jerry Kilgore, who served at the time as Gov. George Allen’s secretary of public safety, the brothers helped bring two high security prisons in the region that are now major employers.
Even as Jerry lost the 2005 gubernatorial contest to Democrat Tim Kaine, Terry rose through the ranks of the House Republican majority, eventually assuming the chair of the powerful Commerce and Labor Committee and the Virginia Tobacco Commission. The commission helped bring broadband to Appalachian hollers, funded scholarships and helped set up Lincoln Memorial University’s veterinary school, the largest private vet school in the U.S.
Kilgore sidestepped pressure to run for Congress and turned down a federal judgeship. As a delegate, he felt he could do more for Southwest Virginia than he would on the bench or in Congress.
“I sort of got into a niche here,” Kilgore said.
The Virginia Way
To Kilgore’s critics, that niche became a little too cozy — emblematic of “The Virginia Way.” The phrase has sometimes been invoked proudly, to describe a form of political civility and pro-business legislative consensus in Virginia. But Jeff Thomas, author of “The Virginia Way: Democracy and Power after 2016,” argues that Virginia lawmakers have regularly prioritized donors’ interests over constituents, enabled by the commonwealth’s nearly unfettered campaign finance laws and lax ethics rules.
“I think that [Kilgore] embodies a lot of what’s wrong about Virginia politics,” Thomas said.
Kilgore’s deep ties to major donors, particularly Dominion Energy, have been a consistent theme in his career. As chair of the Virginia Tobacco Commission, Kilgore and commission members sent $30 million in economic development funds from 2012 to 2014 to help build a pipeline fueling a Dominion plant. VTC’s own funding formulas called for giving less than a quarter of that amount.
Kilgore also backed a $1.8 billion coal-fired power plant in Wise County that Dominion completed in 2012, over the objections of environmentalists who said it was unnecessary. In 2020, with Democrats aiming to quickly retire a plant that operated at 22% of its capacity in 2019, Kilgore struck a deal with the party to delay the plant’s closure — a move he said was necessary to fund local government services. In exchange, he was the only House Republican to vote for the sweeping Virginia Clean Economy Act, a Democratic priority aimed at decarbonizing the electric grid by 2050.
At some points, Kilgore’s legislative causes have overlapped with his brother Jerry’s lobbying clients. Terry Kilgore sponsored 2024 legislation aimed at legalizing gaming terminals at convenience stores. Jerry Kilgore’s lobbying clients included Pace-O-Matic, a key driver of the bill and, through an affiliated industry group, Del. Kilgore’s second largest donor last year.
When one of Jerry Kilgore’s clients and Del. Kilgore’s donors, Mountain State Health Alliance, wanted to advance a merger with a rival hospital system, Terry Kilgore sponsored 2015 legislation allowing the change and led public hearings before it was ultimately approved by the state health commissioner in 2017, over the objections of federal regulators. The resulting company, Ballad Health, has drawn criticism for failing to meet many of the benchmarks set by regulators. Nonetheless, state regulatory filings show Jerry Kilgore, who has continued to lobby for Ballad, unsuccessfully pushed for reduced state oversight of the company as recently as 2023.
The delegate said he and his brother “don’t always agree on everything” and noted Ballad made good on its promises to re-open a shuttered Lee County hospital.
Arguably the biggest nexus for Kilgore’s regional political clout is his law firm, headquartered out of a sturdy former bank in downtown Gate City.
Across the street at the Scott County Court, Kilgore argues cases in front of judges whom he helped appoint. In Virginia, local delegations of lawmakers pick local judges in a largely closed-door process. Kilgore and other practicing lawyer-lawmakers have an unusual relationship with the bench, who hear their cases and require lawmakers’ support to retain their job.
Southwest Virginia’s judgeships are stocked with people Kilgore knows well, including his former officemate, two former associates who worked for his firm and a former colleague in the House Republican caucus.
Given the many factors that go into court cases, it’s difficult to definitively determine whether those ties have given Kilgore’s clients a leg up. Kilgore said he “gets basically what everyone else gets” when it comes to legal outcomes.
But the appointment process has presented other opportunities. In 2021, Kilgore and other local lawmakers appointed Scott County’s top prosecutor to the bench. Kilgore’s son, Kyle Kilgore, who’d finished law school two years before, ran for the vacant commonwealth’s attorney seat and won an uncontested race.
In 2023, local lawmakers appointed their colleague, then-delegate Jeff Campbell, to the bench. Kilgore subsequently purchased Campbell’s law firm. The move allowed Kilgore to pick up Campbell’s clients and, together with a merger with a law firm in Blacksburg, expand the reach of his practice to become among the region’s largest.
Kilgore’s legal clients have sometimes had a distinctly political tint.
When China Machinery Engineering Corp. of Beijing sought to build an arena in Virginia Beach in 2013, they hired Terry Kilgore, who lived a seven-hour drive away, as an attorney — news first reported by the defunct news site watchdog.org, which said Kilgore signed a contract with the company worth $1.2 million.
Kilgore said that the true total was “nowhere close” to that amount. The attorney said that he’d been brought on to the project because his firm “knew some people who knew some people” in Virginia Beach but that his work on the project, which never got off the ground, had been limited.
More recently, Kilgore has provided legal representation to Clyde Stacy, a local coal mining magnate whose 2023 plan to bring a private landfill to Russell County generated a groundswell of local opposition.
As the plan was being considered by the county’s board of supervisors, Kilgore became the board’s attorney, and in at least one case, attempted to squelch criticism of the project, leading some activists to accuse him of having a conflict of interest. Kilgore said he’d recused himself from all landfill business.
A purple state battleground
Kilgore’s new position may bring more scrutiny to future deals. But his immediate task is to raise lots of money and help swing-district Republicans win tough suburban races.
It’s not going to be easy. In last year’s presidential elections, Kamala Harris carried 59 of the state’s 100 House districts, according to an analysis from the Virginia Public Access Project. The Roanoke College poll found 56% of Virginia residents disapproved of Trump’s job as president.
In Kilgore’s view, Virginia’s political landscape has changed since Trump’s first term, when Republicans lost control of the House for the first time in over 20 years.
“President Trump’s doing a lot better,” Kilgore told conservative talk show host John Fredericks in July. “Our economy’s just running on all cylinders right now.”
Kilgore has never come across as a MAGA diehard. But how he handles Trump’s policies — the tariffs, the cuts to Medicaid, the immigration raids, the firing of federal workers — may help define his legacy.
For Democrats like Del. Vivian Watts, D-Fairfax, who spent decades working alongside Kilgore, it can be difficult to square the Republican’s personal warmth with Trump’s politics. She said Kilgore’s new position means he’ll be asked to own the president’s policies or risk provoking his caucus and the White House.
“My bet is that the Terry that I’ve seen for so long will not change into the aggressive partisan spokesman,” she said. “The issue is whether or not the Republican House caucus is going to be satisfied with what’s in front of the camera.”
It’s also not clear how long Kilgore will want the job. The Republican is the first to admit he is in the twilight of his political career.
“I can’t do it too much longer,” he said in a July, 2024 interview.
For now, Kilgore’s Subaru Crosstrek is criss-crossing the state, hitting fundraisers from Chesapeake to Harrisonburg. Saxman, the former delegate, said Kilgore was one of a handful of politicians he knows who seemed to genuinely enjoy politics.
“They have this glint in their eye,” Saxman said. “They just love what they do and they’re really good at it and the people around them really like them, too.”
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