House Freedom Caucus Chairman Bob Good was adamant Wednesday that he could still eke out a win in his bruising Virginia primary contest against state Sen. John McGuire, despite trailing by more than 300 votes.

After the bulk of the ballots were tallied Tuesday night, McGuire — who scored the coveted endorsement of former President Donald Trump last month — declared victory, telling supporters: “I’m your Republican nominee.”

The political future of House Freedom Caucus Chair Bob Good is coming down to the final votes.

After a bitter primary battle with rival John McGuire in south-central Virginia’s 5th Congressional District, the vote count showed an exceedingly tight result Tuesday night, far closer than many expected. With each update to the results, Good and McGuire traded leads that at times were as low as single digits.

A stunningly tight race in Virginia was among the highlights of Tuesday night’s races, which also included contests in Georgia and Oklahoma.

All eyes Tuesday are on Virginia’s 5th Congressional District, where House Freedom Caucus Chairman Bob Good could become the second incumbent ousted in a primary this cycle if former President Donald Trump has his way.

“If he’s reelected, Bob Good will stab Virginia in the back, sort of like he did with me,” Mr. Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, said Monday evening on a 12-minute tele-rally for Mr. Good’s primary opponent, state Sen. John McGuire.

Ben Ingebretson was a reliable Republican voter. A Christian minister who works for a faith-based nonprofit, Mr. Ingebretson said he shared Republicans’ small-government views and agreed with the party’s calls for fiscal conservatism.

Steve Bannon had a mission: Convince Republican voters, just this once, not to listen to Donald Trump.

It was Friday evening, one day after a federal judge ordered Bannon — Trump’s former White House adviser turned MAGA podcast mogul — to prison for defying subpoenas from the Jan. 6 committee. He was spending it in Virginia’s 5th Congressional District, rallying with Rep. Bob Good, the chair of the hardline House Freedom Caucus who had thrilled Bannon and other anti-establishment Republicans by helping to bring down Kevin McCarthy’s speakership.

Republican Michael Rulli won the special election for Ohio’s 6th Congressional District, helping his party expand its narrow House majority.

Rulli, a Youngstown-area state senator and an executive for his family’s grocery store chain, defeated Democratic Air Force veteran Michael Kripchak in the race for the sprawling district along the Ohio River in eastern Ohio.

Rulli will succeed former Rep. Bill Johnson, a seven-term Republican who resigned in January to become the president of Youngstown State University.

A couple closer-than-expected races highlighted Tuesday’s elections in Maine, Nevada, North Dakota and South Carolina, which put Donald Trump’s endorsement power to the test as he heads toward a rematch with President Biden.

But it was an under-the-radar special election in Ohio that turned out to be the biggest shocker of the night. Elsewhere, Trump-endorsed candidates pulled through against their primary challengers, though at least one of them did so with far less breathing room than he may have hoped. 

The Republican establishment has plowed millions of dollars this year into primaries to produce what it views as a less dysfunctional House GOP conference. It’s still got a long way to go.

Major Republican leaders and donors have notched some key victories in their ongoing war against far-right insurgents who threaten the ability to govern as a unified party. But even those successes have come at a cost: the enormous amount of effort, money and time it’s taken to push their candidate over the finish line.