It could easily have been a day of mourning. A cold November rain dampened a crowd of volunteers last Thursday as they gathered a final time to hear from the man they’d worked but failed to re-elect two days before, Fifth District Congressman Tom Perriello.“Tom, you have changed who I am as a human,” said Nina Gregory, a volunteer who had made 20,000 calls, as she choked back tears. “How can I possibly begin to thank you for truly inspiring me to have the courage to believe in myself once again?” Perriello gave her a long hug.
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Yet the rain and the tears belied what was overall a cheerful scene. Despite losing after only a single term in office, Perriello spoke of how well November 2 had gone, all things considered.
“We outperformed Democrats in the rest of the country by about 12 points,” Perriello told the crowd of two dozen. “Compared to where things went on Tuesday, it really was an amazing showing. You have a lot to be proud of here. …I hope that we’ll all get a night’s sleep and maybe watch Tech play Tech tonight or something fun like that instead of dialing phones.”
On November 2, more than 110,000 people voted for Tom Perriello, including almost 34,000 in Charlottesville and Albemarle. But 119,000 voted for his Republican opponent, Robert Hurt, and so Perriello is one of three Democrats in Virginia, and one of 51 in the U.S., who will not return to Washington as Representatives in January.
What’s next for Perriello? He says he doesn’t know, but that it will involve service. “One of the things that I’ve always really tried hard to do in life is figure out what I’m called to do right now and not chart out some strategy for something else, and it’s ended me up in some very different places. Sometimes it lands me in Darfur and sometimes it lands me in Congress.”
Don’t be too worried about his job prospects. Tom Davis, the former GOP congressman from Northern Virginia, told The Washington Post last week, “If [Perriello] wants to stay in politics, he’s the kind of person you want in politics. He’s principled. He’s earnest. He’s polite. He’s all of those things. He can come up to Fairfax, and he’ll probably win forever.”
But what about the rest of us in the Fifth District—what lessons can we draw from the election results last week? Is it really so hard for Democrats to hold on to the Fifth?
Yes, Virginia. And it will probably get harder.
How did a Democrat get elected in the first place? Isn’t this a conservative district?
 The Fifth District: Tangled up in blue?There are two things about the otherwise solid red Fifth District, which is about the size of New Jersey, that appeal to Democrats. It’s 23 percent African American and its biggest population center is the liberal bastion of Charlottesville. Still, only three Democrats have won the Fifth since it was redrawn in 2001.
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The Fifth District is a New Jersey-sized, mostly rural swath that sweeps from Greene County down through the suburbs of Lynchburg to stretch across the North Carolina border.
Two aspects of the otherwise solid red Fifth District tempt Democrats. First, it’s 23 percent African American, one of the Democrat’s most faithful voting blocks. Second, its biggest population pole is the liberal bastion of the Charlottesville area.
Nevertheless, only three Democrats have won the Fifth since it was redrawn in 2001. One of them, Mark Warner, was the most popular Virginia politician of the decade running for Senate in 2008 against a weak opponent. He cleared majorities in each of the Fifth’s 22 localities, most of them by double digits.
The other two Democrats who won—Tim Kaine for governor in 2005 and Tom Perriello for Congress in 2008—followed a particular pattern: Crush it in the Charlottesville area, win majorities in localities with high African-American populations, and stanch the bleeding everywhere else. To win by razor thin margins, both Kaine and Perriello needed 61 percent-plus of Albemarle voters, nearly 80 percent of Charlottesville, as well as majorities in Danville, Martinsville, Brunswick, Nelson and a couple of other counties, along with no less than 37 percent everywhere else. It’s a tall order, even when the wind isn’t blowing against Democrats.
Perriello must have lost because not enough people came out to vote.
Not exactly. Considering it was a midterm election, and one without a U.S. Senate race, turnout was quite good in the Fifth District: 55 percent of active voters, which was better than any of Virginia’s 10 other congressional districts. It’s also slightly better than the 53 percent turnout here in 2006, which featured the hotly contested Senate race between George Allen and Jim Webb.
But turnout was high because Southside voters went wild for Hurt, the hometown boy.
Not really. This was a narrative I heard prior to Election Day from a few local politicians in Southside—both Republican and Democrat. Hurt, a lawyer in the Pittsylvania town of Chatha, scion of a prominent family in the area, member of the state legislature since 2001, would reap votes all day from loyal Southside voters.
For this to be clearly the case, Pittsylvania County should have voted for Robert Hurt by a greater percentage than it did for Republican Virgil Goode in 2008. Yet Hurt won 61 percent compared to Goode’s 62 percent. The results were similar in nearby Danville, where Hurt won only 41 percent of the vote compared to Goode’s 42 percent in 2008. It was in much of the rest of the district that Hurt gained ground.
Probably because too many African-American voters stayed home.
 Albemarle Democrats credit President Obama’s rally to support Perriello with an increase in student volunteers leading right up to Election Day.
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No, again. Turnout in predominately African-American precincts was similar to the district as a whole, and in some cases it was actually higher.
In the week leading up to the election, I spoke to William Pritchett, a Pittsylvania County Supervisor who represents that county’s only district captured by Perriello in 2008, one with a large African-American population.
“I totally support [Perriello],” said Pritchett. “We’re working hard to get the people out to vote.” He mentioned registration drives, phone banks and transportation on Election Day.
Sure enough, turnout in Pritchett’s Pittsylvania district was among the best in the entire congressional district, only down 6 percent from 2008 compared to a 24 percent decline for Pittsylvania as a whole. One precinct, East Blairs, actually saw 7.5 percent more voters than in 2008—and 80 percent of those voters picked Perriello.
Obviously, that was an outlier. But for the most part, in localities with African-American populations greater than the Fifth District’s 23 percent average, Perriello remained within 1 percent of his 2008 performance. And the only locality where Perriello improved percentage-wise was Buckingham County, which is 39 percent black.
Young people then. Must be that too many UVA students overslept, shrugged and went back to bed.
Not sure if they overslept, but a number of college precincts were down more than the overall average. In Albemarle County’s University Hall precinct, voters were down 45 percent from 2008, even though the county as a whole was only down 21 percent. Charlottesville’s Alumni Hall precinct was similarly off, down 47 percent compared to 30 percent for the city as a whole.
So Obama’s rally at the Pavilion was for naught.
Obama’s Friday night lovefest for Perriello wasn’t enough to get all the students out to vote, but it probably helped Perriello more than it hurt him.
“There’s no doubt that Obama’s visit boosted turnout,” says Isaac Wood, a political analyst at UVA’s Center for Politics. “One visit by Obama is not going to fire people up as much as a year-long campaign did.”
Albemarle’s Democratic chair, Valerie L’Herrou, thinks it helped in ways that can’t be tallied at precincts. Because of Obama’s visit, “we saw a big increase in volunteers from students, from UVA and overall actually,” she says. “I think Obama really helped Tom in Charlottesville and Albemarle.”
Of course, Hurt had help from so much outside money.
 Robert Hurt, here seen celebrating his victory on Election Night, did “a good job focusing on his base, not letting Independent Jeff Clarke become a factor, and essentially running a gaffe-free campaign,” said one political observer.
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Hurt received outside help, no question. The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) spent over $1 million against Perriello, and outside groups in total spent $1.8 million against him, according to The Washington Post. But outside groups actually spent more in support of Perriello, to the tune of $2.8 million from the League of Conservation Voters, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Service Employees International Union.
Perriello thinks that what did him real damage was the early spending against him—namely, a month after he took office. In February 2009, the NRCC bought TV ad time to attack just one Congressman—Tom Perriello—ostensibly for his support of the stimulus bill.
Then Perriello lost because he supported the Democrats unpopular legislation, from the $787 billion economic stimulus, to cap and trade, to health care reform.
That’s certainly something Congressman-elect Hurt believes.
“I think most people recognize that the policies that were enacted by the Democrats were nothing short of an assault on the free enterprise system,” he told me after the election. “Congressman Perriello, with all due respect, did not listen carefully to the people he represented or to those who are the job creators and instead voted for policies that harmed our economy.”
But a “no” vote on health care would also have negatively affected Perriello’s campaign. “I think that’s a difficult counterfactual to examine,” says Wood, “because would Obama still have stumped for him? Would liberals have been willing to donate so heavily and volunteer so much of their time for him if he had done that? Take a look at Glenn Nye in the Second District.”
Indeed, Nye, likewise a freshman Congressman from Virginia, ran away early and often from Obama. He voted against the health care bill and lost by 11 points in a district that Obama actually won in 2008. Perriello at least kept it to 4 points, even though Obama lost the Fifth District in 2008.
It’s hard to see what Perriello gained from the cap and trade vote, given that the bill died with the Senate and it became such a lightning rod for GOP criticism.
But, if Perriello thought it best, perhaps he couldn’t resist a “yes” vote. When Obama called him on Election Night to thank him for his service, Perriello told him, “I’ll always stand with the problem solvers over the partisans any time.”
Yeah, but independents had a hard time sorting partisans from problem solvers, so they voted out the establishment.
It’s hard to tell. Did independents switch parties? Or did a preponderance of GOP voters turn up in 2010 that didn’t show up in 2008? Or did many Democrats stay home?
What we know is that Perriello’s vote percentages were off the most from 2008 in the counties of Greene, Bedford and Albemarle, places that are disproportionately white compared to the rest of the district and where unemployment is disproportionately low. Even though Perriello got 57 percent in Albemarle, he needed to keep his support at 63 percent.
Maybe Democrats had the right policies—they simply got out-communicated.
Every losing party likes to think this, since it means the dumb voters just didn’t understand.
Perriello lays some blame on the Senate for not sharing the House’s urgency to pass bills relating to manufacturing, construction, and foreclosures, though he acknowledges most people don’t care whose fault it was, just that it wasn’t done.
“To me, both parties spent too much time saying, ‘If we just protect the financial sector, enough of it will trickle down to everyone else.’ Well the financial sector is much more oriented to the global economy than the main street economy, so what we really need is an economic strategy to rebuild main street and rebuild our competitive advantage. …That stuff gets a great response in a district like mine from the left and the right,” Perriello says.
Hurt sees things differently—Democrats overspent, and voters want spending cut back. “The people don’t particularly want government handouts,” he says. “What they want is for the government to get out of the way, the government to stop strangling them with these regulations and taxes, and allow them to work serving their customers and their employees.”
Maybe Hurt simply ran the better campaign.
Hurt deserves some credit. Up against an earnest and articulate incumbent, after fighting off seven challengers from his own party, he nevertheless quickly took to the front-runner’s role as soon as he won the primary.
“He’s done a good job focusing on his base, not letting [Independent] Jeff Clarke become a factor, and essentially running a gaffe-free campaign,” noted Wood a few weeks before the election. “Which is tough as a first-time congressional candidate, but it’s really necessary, particularly in this age of YouTube and the 24-hour news cycle.”
Hurt won, after all. Still, it was awfully close given the strong national winds blowing his way. This seat was listed as leaning Republican long before Election Day, yet Perriello did slightly better than Rick Boucher, a Virginia Democrat who had held his seat since 1983, in a race that was considered a toss-up.
This district is rigged for Republicans. It’s that simple.
There’s no question it was designed to swing Republican. After redistricting happened in 2001, Virgil Goode, who had recently switched to the Republican Party, seemed to have a seat for life—at least until Perriello came along.
To hold the seat in midterms, a Democrat will have to win over more voters somewhere, and it’s a bad bet to depend on college kids. I asked Perriello about what the Democrats need to do to win white male voters, especially those without college degrees, though he didn’t seem comfortable talking about such a specifically defined voting block.
“If you’re talking about—call them Regan Democrats, or the kind of people that Bobby Kennedy went after—yeah, they want a fighter, and they want someone who’s fighting for them, and I think when we do that, people come around. And when we try to be a kinder, gentler version of the Republican agenda of protecting the powerful, it doesn’t work very well, because they’re like, ‘I might as well go with the real thing.’”
Speaking of the powerful, redistricting is on the horizon.
It will start after the census figures come in next spring, when we’ll know which states pick up districts and which states lose districts. Then the General Assembly gets to work drawing new maps, and who knows if they’ll carve up Charlottesville and Albemarle.
Since the Governor’s mansion and the House of Delegates are currently in GOP hands, Hurt might find an even friendlier electorate if he runs again in 2012.