Five years ago, Virginia legislator Robert Hurt (R) appeared on a Wild West-style “Least Wanted” poster of a prominent anti-tax organization after he voted for some tax increases in a budget plan to shore up Virginia’s shaky finances.

Hurt’s vote is a major issue as he campaigns for the 2010 Republican nomination to oppose one-term Rep. Tom Perriello (D) in Virginia’s 5th district, where the National Republican Congressional Committee is promoting Hurt as the party’s strongest candidate.

Hurt was in Washington, D.C., last week to do a little damage control: he participated in a weekly meeting of Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), the organization that blasted him in the 2004 poster and in an accompanying press release, and signed the group’s pledge to oppose tax increases as a member of Congress.

“He basically made the case that this was not a vote that he was comfortable with and that it wouldn’t happen again,” ATR president Grover Norquist, an influential conservative activist, told CQ Politics on Wednesday. “But he certainly made the case that in Washington, he’d never vote for a tax increase.”

Norquist said that Hurt “needs to be able to articulate why it’s credible that, having cast that vote, he wouldn’t vote for a tax increase in the future. That’s his challenge in that race.”

Among those sharply critical of Hurt’s vote is Laurence Verga, a real estate developer who is one of six other candidates in the June primary election. Verga earlier this month described Hurt as “the most liberal candidate in the primary.”

“Hurt voted for then-Democratic Governor Mark Warner ’s $1.4 billion tax increase, the largest in Virginia history, “ Verga said. “If that wasn’t bad enough, the state had a surplus at the time, negating any shallow argument that the state needed more money.”

Chris LaCivita, a consultant to Hurt’s campaign, told CQ Politics that Hurt’s vote is something “he absolutely, positively hated and still does to this day.”

“Had Robert known that there was going to be a $1 billion surplus, no way would he have ever considered supporting a tax increase,” LaCivita said. “Clearly he was misled, as I think a lot of people in 2004 were, about the extent of the revenue problems facing the Commonwealth at that time.”

LaCivita also suggested that Hurt’s opponents are cherry-picking a single vote from a record that includes an opposition to tax hikes and excessive spending.

“His opponents will talk about the one vote that he cast that they didn’t like, but they won’t tell you about the 5,285 other ones that they did like,” LaCivita said.

Norquist said that Verga and Feda Morton, an educator and conservative activist, have also signed the federal anti-tax pledge. Norquist said his organization has reached out to all of the Republican candidates in Virginia’s 5th but hasn’t heard back from some of them.

CQ Politics rates the Virginia 5 race as a tossup.