You beat me to it...”doing surprisingly well” is media-speak for having just enough money to do events and limited advertising to keep a candidate’s name in front of the voters, and siphon off GOP votes.
Incidentally, that “libertarian” in Virginia is at it again; Robert Sarvis has collected enough signatures to get his name on the Senate ballot in November, along with incumbent ‘rat Mark Warner and GOP challenger Ed Gillespie. Sarvis is listed as an “attorney, businessman and software developer,” but I have yet to see any evidence as to how he supports himself—other than the Soros money machine.
The fact that the State GOP of Virginia put Gillespie up as their Senate candidate shows that they are perfectly content with Mark Warner as their Senator, just as they are perfectly content with Terry McAuliffe as their governor. The last decent Senate candidate Virginia had was Oliver North, and the state GOP stabbed him in the back, too.