Author: Ben Hitchcock

For the last two years, Democrats have controlled Virginia’s state Senate and House of Delegates, and a Democrat has served as governor. The party has used those majorities to reshape the state’s laws. The Dems abolished the death penalty and legalized marijuana. They made it easier to vote in a variety of ways, including repealing Virginia’s mandatory photo ID law. They passed a major bill called the Clean Economy Act, which will force the state’s utility companies to start adopting renewable energy. They increased spending on education, including offering free community college for everyone in the state who makes below a certain income. They passed a moderate minimum wage increase—currently $7.25 an hour, it’ll be $12 an hour by 2024.

In order to see these reforms through, the Democrats will have to remain in power. Next month, all 100 House of Delegates members are up for another two-year term; Democrats currently hold a 55 to 45 advantage in the chamber. And former governor Terry McAuliffe is hoping to win a second term in the state’s highest office. He’s up against well-funded businessman Glenn Youngkin.  

Virginia politics is old hat for McAuliffe. He was the state’s governor from 2014 to 2018. He chaired the Democratic National Committee from 2001 to 2005, and led Hilary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. He breezed through a Democratic primary this summer. Youngkin spent 25 years at high-end private equity firm The Carlyle Group, including two years as its CEO. He spent $5 million of his own money during his primary campaign, eventually triumphing in a ranked-choice convention. 

Throughout the campaign, Youngkin has emphasized McAuliffe’s insider status, trying to position himself as a new face whose business experience would help him run the state. McAuliffe, on the other hand, has tried his best to cast Youngkin as a right-wing radical, taking every possible opportunity to tie the Republican nominee to Donald Trump.

Third-party candidate Princess Blanding will be on the ballot as well, running under the Liberation Party. Blanding’s brother, Marcus-David Peters, was killed by Richmond police in 2018, and Blanding hopes to enact a variety of progressive criminal justice reforms, including ending qualified immunity for police officers, something both McAuliffe and Youngkin oppose. 

Both major party candidates have raised huge amounts of money—each had eclipsed the $30 million mark by August 31, a full two months before election day. In July and August, McAuliffe pulled in $11.5 million and Youngkin added $15.7 million to his chest. By contrast, four years ago Ralph Northam and Ed Gillespie raised $7.4 million and $3.3 million, respectively, during the July and August filing period. Both candidates have raised the vast majority of their money from large donations.

The candidate who has raised more money has won the last three Virginia gubernatorial elections. Tim Kaine’s 2005 victory over Jerry Kilgore was the last time a financial underdog won. 

Democrats have triumphed in every statewide election in Virginia since 2012. In 2017, Ralph Northam won by nine points, and last year Joe Biden won the state by 10. This election will be a test of just how blue Virginia has become—midterms traditionally see votes swing back toward the party that lost the most recent presidential election. If McAuliffe can weather the Republicans’ midterm bounce, it’ll bode well for future Dem dominance in Virginia.

FiveThirtyEight’s poll aggregator shows McAuliffe with a slight edge over Youngkin, polling at 47.6 percent to the Republican’s 45.1 percent. RealClearPolitics’ aggregator shows McAuliffe leading 48.5 to 45.0. The election takes place on November 2. Early voting is now open. 

The Issues 

Education 

McAuliffe has campaigned on raising teacher pay and expanding public preschool options. At the second debate, he said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” a quip the Youngkin campaign has seized on. 

Youngkin has parroted national Republicans’ promises to ban critical race theory in schools. He’s said he’ll direct the Department of Education to protect advanced math classes and other academic tracking practices, and create 20 new charter schools.

Elections

Restoring voting rights to 173,000 felons was among the signature achievements of McAuliffe’s first term. Now, he hopes to go a step further, enshrining automatic restoration of voting rights in the Virginia constitution.  

Youngkin dragged his feet in accepting the results of the 2020 presidential election, before admitting that there wasn’t “material fraud.” He wants to launch an Election Integrity Task Force, which would include requiring IDs to vote and the purging of voter rolls monthly. 

Health care 

McAuliffe wants to strengthen Medicaid and enlist federal money to lower health insurance premiums. He also says he’ll work to put Roe v. Wade abortion protections in the Virginia constitution, making it more difficult to overturn down the line. 

Youngkin opposes the state’s recent Medicaid expansion, and has gone so far as calling the expansion “sad.” He has described himself as “unabashedly pro-life,” and says he’ll tighten abortion laws if elected. 

Environment

McAuliffe hopes to accelerate Virginia’s transition to clean energy, aiming to get the state to 100 percent clean energy by 2035. Along those lines, he says he’ll restructure the state’s regulatory system to incentivize clean energy innovation.

Youngkin’s economic plan includes suspending the state’s gas tax. He opposes the Virginia Clean Economy Act, which Democrats passed last year, and has said that a renewable-energy-focused economic overhaul is not “doable.”

Criminal justice

McAuliffe initially suggested he would be open to ending qualified immunity for police officers, but walked that statement back at the first debate. McAuliffe says he’s never been in favor of defunding the police. He does want to invest in body-worn camera programs.

Youngkin wants to replace everyone currently sitting on the parole board, which Republicans feel has been too generous in granting parole in recent years. He also says he’ll protect qualified immunity. 

Downballot statewide races 

Alongside the McAuliffe vs. Youngkin clash, voters will also choose between Republicans and Democrats for lieutenant governor and attorney general. 

Virginia’s lieutenant governor is essentially the vice president of the state, serving as the tie-breaking vote in the state Senate and the first in line for power should the governor become incapacitated. Additionally, five of the last 10 LGs have later become governor. 

The Republican nominee for lieutenant governor is Winsome Sears, a Marine who served as a state delegate from 2002 to 2004. Since deciding not to run for reelection, she’s sat on the Virginia Board of Education, worked for Donald Trump’s reelection, and now owns an appliance company in Winchester. The Democrats are running Hala Ayala, an immigrant who’s been a delegate since 2017. This year, she spearheaded a bill requiring the Virginia Employment Commission to establish a paid family leave program by 2024. The victor will be the second woman to ever win a Virginia statewide election—Mary Sue Terry served as attorney general from 1986 to 1993. 

Democrat Mark Herring is seeking his third consecutive term as the state’s attorney general. Herring has empowered his office to investigate police departments for civil rights violations, cleared the state’s backlog of untested rape kits, and defended Virginia’s new gun restrictions in court against challenges from the NRA. His Republican opponent, Jason Miyares, is currently a delegate representing Virginia Beach. Miyares’ top priorities are to “punish criminals and protect victims,” fight illegal immigration, and support the police. 

These races are likely to go as the governor’s race goes. In the last decade, split ticket voting has become vanishingly rare in ever-more-polarized American politics. 

In the 2008 presidential election, 83 of the nation’s 435 House of Representatives districts voted for a presidential candidate and a House candidate of opposing parties. In 2020, just 16 districts split their tickets. In Virginia, three of the four gubernatorial elections held from 1994 to 2006 saw split-ticket winners, but all of the last three victorious governors have brought their party’s lieutenant governor and attorney general into power as well. Unless the governor’s race is very, very close, expect the winner to bring his down-ballot compatriots with him. 

Three candidates—Democrats Brian Pinkston and Juandiego Wade, and independent Yas Washington—are running for two open seats on Charlottesville’s City Council. Current mayor Nikuyah Walker initially announced a run for reelection, but dropped out in September. 

Wade is a transportation planner and career counselor by trade who has served on the Charlottesville City School Board for 16 years. He’s been a valued voice in town for a long time, and serves or has served on the boards of United Way, ReadyKids, 100 Black Men of Central Virginia, Cultivate Charlottesville, and Child Health Partnership. 

Wade says his top priorities are criminal justice reform and helping to create more affordable housing in the region. He wants to explore creating non-police emergency lines that city residents can all for aid. From an environmental standpoint, his top priority is increasing tree cover in low-income communities. Wade also says he’ll focus on economic recovery after COVID, and hopes to work closely with the local business community. 

Washington, just 24 years old, is trying to bring a youthful perspective to City Hall. She’s worked for Albemarle Commonwealth’s Attorney Jim Hingeley and Democratic congressional candidate Cameron Webb, and has been a youth counselor for the city. 

Washington hopes to work hand in hand with the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development to help ameliorate the local housing shortage. Her public safety plan includes tightening gun laws wherever council has the authority to do so, requiring police officers to undergo deescalation training, and work with the Offender Aid & Restoration office to reduce recidivism among formerly incarcerated individuals.

Pinkston is a UVA project manager who also has a Ph.D. in philosophy. He’s currently the vice-chair of the Charlottesville Democratic Party. Pinkston narrowly missed out on a City Council seat in the 2019 election, and is back for another try.

Pinkston’s top goals include restoring “a level of collegiality” to City Council’s operations. Like Wade, he emphasizes economic recovery. He’d like to see a stronger Police Civilian Review Board that takes advantage of the new powers outlined by the general assembly, and supports diverting some police responsibilities to Region Ten. He told C-VILLE this summer that the key to criminal justice reform is “to listen to the people actually affected, and not just do progressive wish-fulfillment.” 

The two victorious candidates will serve four-year terms on council. 

Other local elections 

The Albemarle County Board of Supervisors has three of its six seats open, and three candidates are running unopposed in their respective districts. Incumbents Ned Gallaway and Diantha McKeel will each return for another term, and physicist and lawyer Jim Andrews will join the board. The Albemarle County School Board also has three incumbents running for reelection, each unopposed.

In Charlottesville, unopposed Commonwealth’s Attorney Joe Platania will secure a second four-year term after a stiff challenge in the summer’s Democratic primary. The city’s treasurer, commissioner of revenue, and sheriff are also running unopposed for reelection. 

Five candidates are competing for three seats on the Charlottesville School Board. The candidates will meet at a forum on Thursday, October 14. Check back here next week for our coverage of the school board race.

A few leafy green hemp plants sit on the second-floor windowsills in the Charlottesville Cannabis Club’s lounge. A puffy, white sectional couch fills the center of the room. The high-ceilinged space is a little brighter than the tapestry-draped basement you might expect at a members-only marijuana club, though there’s plenty of evidence that stoners dwell here: A bright green print of a weed leaf hangs on the wall, with bullet points taking visitors through a brief worldwide history of cannabis.

Matt Long, the tall, stubbled, 30something proprietor of the month-old business, shows me around the lounge. There’s a projector aimed at a blank wall—for “Cheech and Chong, or a football game,” Long says. He points out the snack bar, where bags of chips and cookies are on sale for patrons who might get hungry. 

It’s four o’clock on a Thursday. Two men sit at the lounge’s table, swapping observations about each others’ vape pens, and a soft herbal aroma fills the air. A battered copy of The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll sits on one coffee table, a box set of the complete works of Calvin and Hobbes on another. 

The Cannabis Club is a new venture, a result of Virginia’s stop-start overhaul of the state’s marijuana laws this summer. The commonwealth’s Democratic majority voted to legalize recreational marijuana sales starting in 2024. In the meantime, in an effort to depress arrests, Virginians are allowed to possess and consume marijuana in private spaces, but aren’t allowed to smoke in public.

“Since you can consume in a private setting, we created a private members’ lounge,” Long says.

For $200 per year, club members can stop by the rooms above Ten Thousand Villages on the Downtown Mall and smoke to their hearts’ content, before heading out, bleary-eyed, toward Charlottesville’s restaurants, bars, and music venues. And anyone can come up to browse the glass-topped counter full of non-psychedelic marijuana-adjacent CBD and Delta 8 products. 

It’s a new business model for our stuffy old commonwealth. Long, though, isn’t exactly new to this game. In fact, he’s cannabis royalty. 

All in the family 

In the 1970s, Charlottesville native and Western Albemarle High School graduate Allen Long smuggled a million pounds of pot into the country. Allen flew rickety planes into the Colombian brush to pick up product. He nearly found himself on the wrong end of a Cuban-American smuggler’s gun. He made $25 million. He was the subject of a 2002 bestselling book, Smokescreen: A True Adventure, by Robert Sabbag. 

Allen Long—Matt’s father—attracted the attention of his hometown, as well. His face graced the cover of the very first issue of The Hook, the Charlottesville alt-weekly that published from 2002 to 2013. 

In his heyday, Allen “was spending his millions, doing coke day and night, wearing thousand-dollar suits, leasing a jet year-round and tipping the pilot $10,000 at the end of each flight,” wrote The Hook. He had “balls like a bull elephant’s—with charisma and cunning in the same large measure,” reads the back cover of Smokescreen.

Eventually, Allen Long’s luck ran out. He spent five years in jail, starting in 1992, when Matt was a little kid. 

The Hook story portrays the recently-freed Long as a reformed man, participating in local charities and trying to raise his children the right way. Allen told The Hook that he’d send his kids to military school if they got caught smoking pot. He kept that promise—Matt did a stint at Hargrave Military Academy in Chatham before graduating from Western. 

The older Long wasn’t reformed, however. He got back in the game, and went back to prison. Allen Long did three more years for smuggling, starting in 2006, and passed away in 2012. 

Growing up, Long knew that his dad wasn’t like all the other dads in the carpool line. “The book came out when I was in high school,” Matt remembers. His classmates “made interesting remarks [about] it,” he says wryly. 

“A lot of them read it, and did papers on it—they’d turn it in for class,” says Long. “The teachers would stop me in the hall and be like, ‘this is not your dad is it?’ And I’d say, ‘No it’s not my dad.’” 

It wasn’t always easy. “There were times where it was shameful,” Long recalls, especially in the conservative central Virginia of 20 years ago. “‘Oh, you know, that kid’s dad is a drug dealer.’ That was a real remark from time to time.”

“And he was a drug dealer,” Long says. “So what could I say about it?”

The younger Long doesn’t remember his father expressing much remorse for the smuggling itself. “He was regretful of how much time he spent away, incarcerated,” Long says. “He fell into that industry, and fell in love with it, and became successful at it. When you become successful at something, it’s kind of hard to pull out of it.”

Matt’s mother, Simone, still lives in the area. How does she feel about her son getting in to the business? “I think she’s proud of what we’re doing, and would like to see it continue,” Long says. “The cannabis industry, it’s always been around. So it’s good that it’s going legal.”

In business 

The younger Long says he’s keeping everything clean. The Cannabis Club has a storefront of sorts, and a lawyer, and a UVA intern. “We are working with legal counsel, we’re trying to do things above board and pay taxes,” Long says. “I don’t want to go to jail.”

Matt moved to Los Angeles after college to work in finance, but remembers visiting a hash bar in Hollywood and understanding the legal pot industry’s possibilities. When Virginia legalized growing industrial hemp in 2018, Long returned home and started his own farm. It’s called Smokescreen Farm, after the book about his father, and is the origin of many of the products for sale at the club.

“I am doing some of the cannabis stuff to keep the heritage going,” Long says. And having dad’s connections is helpful. “We have family friends and stuff, farmers in California that we’ve known for a long time. It’s a second-generational business now.”

Long hopes to turn his space above the mall into a full-fledged marijuana dispensary when it becomes legal to do so in 2024. 

The state will hand out a limited number of dispensary licenses, but the Charlottesville Cannabis Club will have a good shot at getting one. Virginia plans to issue some dispensary credentials through a social equity licenses program, designed to help people who have been affected by the racist enforcement of drug laws get a foothold in the new cannabis industry. If you’ve graduated from an HBCU, live in an “economically distressed” area, were convicted of a marijuana-related crime, or have a direct family member who was convicted, you can apply for a social equity license. Long, because of his father’s record, will be able to apply through this program.

“People whose lives have been ruined by some sort of cannabis conviction—doesn’t matter what color you are, but specifically minority folks—they should definitely have a right to some sort of ownership in the industry,” Long says.

At this point, the local CBD and cannabis industry is predominantly, if not entirely, white-owned. The committee engagement director for the city’s Chamber of Commerce says she isn’t aware of any Black-owned CBD businesses, and the Office of Economic Development doesn’t know of any either. The Charlottesville Black Business Directory also doesn’t show any businesses operating in that industry. 

In the few weeks that he’s been open, Long has attracted 45 members. He hopes to reach 150. He also plans to have live music performances and art exhibitions in the large showroom area, where psychedelic paintings hang opposite the glass case of products. 

Earlier this year, Long’s Smokescreen Farm paired with Three Notch’d to create a hemp-based beer. (Three Notch’d marketed the beer as a “big, pungent, super dank IPA.”) You’d be forgiven if you mistook Long for one of the many craft brew masters wandering around the central Virginia countryside. He’s a millennial white dude brimming with enthusiasm for his locally made product; he’s wearing a baseball hat and a T-shirt with his company’s name written in a curly font. 

Ultimately, the goal is to be the Devils Backbone of weed, Long says—“a solid operator in our own backyard.”

New leaves 

Late afternoon light filters through the smoke of the members lounge. “It’s cool to be able to have a spot to duck in, be with friends,” says one club visitor, in between bong rips. “It’s gonna build a community.”

The conversation soon drifts easily to recollections of exactly where everyone was when UVA’s men’s basketball team won the national title in 2019. 

A neon sign in the window reads “open” in looping green letters, advertising the club’s presence to passersby on the street below. 

The industry has changed since Allen Long’s time. “You don’t meet people like that anymore,” Long says of his dad. He was like a bank robber in an old western flick, someone who really did the dirty work, says the son.

“Now it’s a real industry. People are seeing the recreational and the medical benefits, and the tax revenue and the employment that can come from this,” Long says. “The green wave is rising.”