The trouble with getting elected a Democratic congressman from a Republican leaning district? Staying elected a Democratic congressman from a Republican leaning district. Tom Perriello was one of 2008’s biggest surprises, eking out a recount win over six-term incumbent Virgil Goode for the Fifth District congressional seat. This year, he’s taking shots from the right and the left over his health care votes, and was almost burned in effigy. With 2010 still a year off, political junkies are already pulling up seats to see if the 35-year-old Perriello can pull it off again.

“Next year is going to be a new experience for me, to be on the top of the ticket,” says Perriello, who kicks off his re-election campaign this Friday with a fundraiser at Live Arts. “The nice thing about being the incumbent is that I just get to focus on doing my job as well as I can, representing folks as well as I can, and I certainly like my odds. And I’ve always enjoyed being underestimated by the right.”

Republicans certainly are salivating. The Fifth District narrowly favored John McCain in 2008, and went for Republican Bob McDonnell 61 percent over Creigh Deeds in this year’s governor’s race. Turnout in 2010 will be lower than in 2008, so Perriello will likely need to win even more of the district’s independents and moderate Republicans. Conservatives like to think he blew his chances with those groups by voting for the health care bill as well as cap and trade legislation.

“He has shown he is just out of touch totally with what the people in the Fifth District want,” Fifth District GOP Chairman Tucker Watkins recently told The Roanoke Times. “I don’t think he sees the writing on the wall at all.”

Perriello bashing came to a head on November 13 when the Danville Tea Party said in a press release that it would burn him in effigy along with Nancy Pelosi at a “Fired Up for Freedom” rally. The group snuffed the event days later after a firestorm broke out in the national media.

But has Tom Perriello’s political career already gone up in flames? There are still far too many undefined variables to call it 11 months in advance.

The biggest variable is who gets the GOP nomination. Six candidates are vying for the Republican nod—and none of them are shoe-ins to beat Perriello. The best known, Robert Hurt, is a state senator out of Pittsylvania County, which surrounds Danville and is the district’s most populous county besides Albemarle. But this year’s nominee will likely be chosen by a convention of party faithfuls, and that could hurt Hurt: He’s out of vogue with much of the GOP’s anti-tax faction because he crossed the aisle to support then Governor Mark Warner’s 2004 tax hike.

The other candidates are preening for the Most Conservative honor, a contest that Albemarle businessman Laurence Verga is hoping to win with the support of the Charlottesville area’s Tea Party. It helps that Verga’s willing to put his own cash on the line, funding his campaign to the tune of $50,000 out of pocket, according to September FEC reports. But Verga has never been elected to public office, and Ken Boyd, of the Albemarle Board of Supervisors, could be a compromise choice because of his combination of pro-business bona fides and campaign chops.

Working to Perriello’s advantage is that one would-be Republican, Bradley Rees, has already announced he will instead run as an independent. It’s doubtful that Rees, a factory worker in Lynchburg whose biggest issue is tax reform, will win very many votes, but most of them will likely be siphoned from the Republican candidate rather than from Perriello.

Another major variable is the economy. If indeed the housing market and employment rates are on the way up, Republicans will have much less to crow about. Polls indicate that many Americans are currently skeptical about health care reform, but that doesn’t mean that they will remain so once it’s passed.

Not that Perriello’s fate is necessarily tied to the rest of the Democrats. He has focused on constituent services and appears regularly in the district to explain his votes in Washington. He bucked his party in voting against releasing the second round of TARP funding, and voted for the Stupak-Pitts amendment to the health care legislation, which restricted funding for abortion. The latter cost him points with some Democrats, but, as with all of his votes so far, Perriello is unapologetic: “I made a pledge to my district that I would not support a bill that would include federal funding for abortion.”

He’s also very careful when asked whether he would like President Obama to help campaign for his re-election. “I’ll be proud to campaign with the president next year,” says Perriello. “But I think that people are going to look at us as individuals and ask, ‘What has Tom done?’ and I think, generally speaking, so far people say, ‘This guy is working his tail off and genuinely trying to find pragmatic solutions, and this is someone I can work with.’”

In the end, Perriello’s re-election will come down to convincing enough Fifth District voters—the kind of voters who show up even when there is no president or senator on the ballot—that he is someone they can work with. That will mean convincing independents that he is not marching in lockstep with Democratic leadership, while talking down disappointed liberals who see him as a Republican in disguise.

It’s a tough balancing act. But Tom Perriello hasn’t fallen off the beam yet.