Barker is one of three veteran Democratic state senators — the others are David W. Marsden (Fairfax) in the nearby 35th District and R. Creigh Deeds (Charlottesville ) in the 11th — who haven’t drawn primary challengers in more than a decade but find themselves, after redistricting, in new territory and highly competitive races with younger, more outspokenly liberal rivals.

Playing out in deep-blue districts, the nominating contests are not expected to affect the partisan balance of the closely divided Senate; whoever wins the nod is all but certain to prevail in November. But the outcome could have implications for regional power and the pace and tone of the Democrats’ agenda in Richmond’s upper chamber.

Democrats rooting for the incumbents say toppling the long-timers — all of whom serve on the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, Barker as co-chairman — would rob the caucus of critical experience and savvy.

“Why do you want to run these people out of office? This is absurd,” said Senate Majority Leader Richard L. Saslaw (D-Fairfax), who is retiring after narrowly escaping a primary challenge from the left four years ago. “What are these people thinking? … ‘Vote for me, I’m different’ — that’s their whole thing.”

But the challengers and their backers say they offer new blood and bolder style, a willingness to shake up a Capitol where they say establishment Democrats have been too chummy with business interests and too willing to compromise with Republicans.

“With redistricting and grass-roots liberal discontent with the party direction on some issues, progressives see an opportunity this year to replace more centrist, establishment-type incumbents,” said Mark J. Rozell, dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. “For the liberal base, it’s more about policy and ideology than about experience. The question is whether the lesser-known challengers can overcome incumbent advantages and mobilize a sizable progressive turnout in an off-year, late-spring primary.”

Barker touts his seniority and knowledge of how things work as he seeks reelection in a district where 94 percent of the voters are new to him. Pekarsky argues that the territory is her community, a place where the mother of six represents about 60 percent of voters as a member of the school board.

Pekarsky says Barker has been “inconsistent” on some core Democratic issues, including gun control. She points to his support for a bipartisan gun deal, hashed out in 2016 between then-Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) and a Republican-controlled General Assembly, that required Virginia to recognize out-of-state concealed-handgun permits; in exchange, Republicans agreed to strip gun rights from domestic violence offenders and have State Police attend all gun shows to provide for voluntary background checks.

Barker said he spent five years pushing for a red-flag law, finally succeeding in 2020 with a measure allowing authorities to temporarily seize weapons from someone deemed by a judge to be a threat to themselves or others. He also noted that he received the endorsement of former Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D) and her gun-control group.

Pekarsky has not taken issue with Barker’s voting record in some areas, such as abortion rights, but said he had not been vocal enough on the topic. “Representation matters and not just by clicking on the right [voting] button, but actually being a leader and a vocal leader,” she said.

Though mild-mannered, Barker played a key role in one of the Capitol’s most raucous abortion rights battles. When Republicans brought a bill in 2012 requiring that women undergo an ultrasound before getting an abortion, it was Barker who quietly alerted colleagues that would usually involve an invasive vaginal ultrasound since most abortions take place early in pregnancy, when the fetus is too small to be detected otherwise.

That detail became a rallying cry for critics, drawing national ridicule and causing Republicans to water down that measure and scrap other antiabortion efforts that year.

On the eve of a critical vote on Medicaid expansion in 2018, Barker recognized that the Senate Republican leader, Thomas K. Norment (James City), was making a last-ditch effort to kill the plan with an arcane procedural move in the Finance Committee. With Saslaw’s help, Barker headed him off.

“I outfoxed Tommy, which was something very rewarding,” Barker recalled in an interview this week.

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Heidi Drauschak, a 29-year-old activist, is challenging Marsden, 75, who has been in the Senate since 2010, where he is chairman of the Transportation Committee. He spent four years in the House before that and led the Virginia Department of Juvenile Justice for two years under Jim Gilmore, a Republican governor.

She vows to upend the “the old ‘Virginia way,’ which is almost too close to, ‘We take our horse and buggy down to Richmond and come back and sow our crops in the spring.’ There is a ‘Virginia way’ that people talk about all the time, and I think that old boys’ club is not working for everyday Virginians anymore.”

Her beef with Marsden is partly one of style — a claim that he is not outspoken enough on abortion, guns and K-12 culture wars. “There’s a difference between voting the right way and really being a champion on these issues,” she said.

If Marsden is not making a fiery floor speech on abortion rights or LGBTQ rights or another liberal cause, he says it’s because he’s deferring to the Democrat best suited to lead the charge.

“I’ve always been there for [LGBTQ rights], but am I going to say, ‘Hey, Adam Ebbin, step aside so I can introduce this bill,’” he said, referring to the Senate Democrat from Alexandria who was the legislature’s first openly gay member. “You tend to give some deference to the needs of your colleagues just like I would want people to defer to me on a juvenile justice issue. That’s how we get along.”

Marsden noted he was the first male senator to endorse former delegate Lashrecse Aird, a staunch defender of abortion rights in a challenge to state Sen. Joseph D. Morrissey (D-Richmond), who describes himself as “pro-life.”

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Drauschak, who serves on the on board of the campaign finance reform group BigMoneyOutVA.org, says Marsden has been too friendly to business at the expense of workers and unions. She points to his effort in 2020 to rein in Democrats’ plans to gradually raise the minimum wage, then set at the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour, to as high as $15 an hour.

Amid concerns that the plan would destroy businesses and local governments in rural Virginia, where the cost of living is far lower, Marsden successfully pushed to slow the planned annual rate increases, with hope that the state could use the time to explore whether it could set different minimums for different regions. The current statewide minimum is $12 an hour; it is slated to reach $15 an hour in 2026.

Calling himself “Mr. Minimum Wage” for the $12-an-hour bills he’d carried for years before Democrats finally passed an increase in 2020, Marsden said he has no regrets about tapping the brakes.

“I’ll stand by that vote all day long because it held Virginia together on that issue. Part of our job is holding things together,” he said. “It isn’t just a question of getting your way and cramming it down people’s throats. That just doesn’t work.”

Drauschak, who was back out on the campaign trail about two weeks after giving birth at the end of April, is impatient for progress.

“We just haven’t been bold enough,” she said.

But Marsden says incremental change can be much more effective, especially in a divided Capitol. In 2015, when the General Assembly was still staunchly opposed to decriminalizing recreational marijuana, he was able to win near-unanimous support for a bill to allow people with epilepsy to use oil extracted from marijuana to alleviate their seizures.

“How do you make things stick? Virginia is moving and drifting left … and you have to resist the temptation of getting ahead of that drift, thinking you can do all kinds of things you can’t do,” he said. “If you get too far ahead sometimes, it doesn’t work. And when you don’t bang on the desk all the time about abortion or guns, when the time is right, they’ll listen to you.”

Deeds, who joined the Senate in 2001 after nine years in the House and was his party’s nominee for governor in 2009, faces a stiff challenge from Del. Sally L. Hudson (D-Charlottesville), a University of Virginia labor economist who joined the House in 2020. She turns 35 the day before the primary.

Guns have been a major theme in the final weeks of the campaign, with Hudson emphasizing Deeds’s longtime support for gun rights before he moved leftward on the issue in recent years.

Deeds long opposed the state’s one-per-month cap on handgun purchases and “cast a pivotal vote to repeal it in 2012,” Hudson said. He voted to reinstate the cap in 2020, when he also supported universal background checks and the red-flag bill.

But he helped sink a ban that year on assault weapons amid concerns that the definition was too broad and that applying the ban to guns already in private hands would amount to an unconstitutional “taking” of property.

Deeds proposed an assault weapons ban this year, which got out of the Democratic-controlled Senate but not the Republican-led House. Hudson called that bill political “posturing.”

“He didn’t draft that after Columbine, he didn’t do it after Sandy Hook, he didn’t do it after Parkland or Uvalde, but a month after he was facing a competitive election, he picked up a pen,” Hudson said, referring to school shootings around the country. “I think our district deserves a senator who is motivated by more than political pressure to do something about mass shootings.”

Deeds said his views on guns have changed over time.

“I’m a country guy. I grew up hunting. I probably learned to shoot about the same time I learned to read,” he said. “My views on guns have evolved. … I got an assault weapons bill out of the Senate this year. I got an F from the [National Rifle Association]. My record, whatever it is, is good enough for Gabby Giffords.”

Deeds, who lost a son to suicide in 2013, said he is proud of his record on mental health and conservation, including a tax credit for conservation easements that’s saved more than 1 million acres. Given his current stance on guns, he said the differences with Hudson are mostly stylistic, noting that he has the endorsements of several abortion rights groups.

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“You catch more bees with honey than with vinegar,” he said. “I work with people and get things done. I’m not as much in your face.”

Hudson contends that the Senate needs more Democrats who will push forcefully for change and are “willing to set the pace for the policy agenda in Richmond.”