By Kristin O’Donoghue
“When I was a young man…I’d get so wrapped up in elections,” says state Senator Creigh Deeds, who represents Charlottesville and some surrounding rural areas. “But an election is not an event, it’s part of a process. The work continues after the election.”
Still, it was a consequential election: For the last two years, Democrats controlled all three branches of state government. Then, on Tuesday, Glenn Youngkin beat Terry McAuliffe by 2 percent, ending a losing streak for Republicans, who haven’t won a statewide Virginia election since 2009. The GOP also flipped the House from a 55-45 Democratic majority to a 52-48 Republican advantage. Democrats hold a slim 21-19 majority in the state Senate.
The change in party control of the legislature could have huge consequences for the state’s future.
Despite the losses, Deeds remains hopeful that there’s legislation the Democrats can get passed with a Republican House of Delegates and a Democratic Senate. Deeds has spent 29 years in the state legislature, and he’s been in the minority for 16 of those years. “Democrats won’t put the breaks on anything, they’ll just temper policy goals with a little realism,” he says.
Delegate Sally Hudson, meanwhile, is concerned that some of the progress of the last two years will slow or halt. For example, meaningful change Democrats had made on criminal justice reform risks being undone by Republicans.
“Virginia still has draconian laws that Democrats were trying to unwind,” Hudson says. “I worry that work will start slowing down.”
Some new initiatives, too, are suddenly in jeopardy. “Marijuana legalization is still a work in progress and there’s a lot to be determined,” Hudson says. “Democrats and Republicans have a very different vision for that.”
On the bright side, “we still have a lot of energetic members of the House—there’s been a sea change in the past few years and we now have a diverse and vibrant body of members in the House,” Hudson says.
Rob Bell, a Republican delegate representing parts of Albemarle County, declined to comment.
Shenandoah Republican Delegate Todd Gilbert is set to move from House Minority Leader to Speaker. In a recent statement, he claimed that for the past two years, “the Constitution and the rules and our procedures have been run over.” Republicans are going to try to “run a more open process,” and fix some of the institutional damage they claim was caused by the Dems.
Gilbert said in a news conference that Republicans’ top priority will be education and that they’ll also work on “tweaking, not scrapping” the recently implemented marijuana legalization bill.
Many of the promises Youngkin made on the campaign trail, such as slashing the transportation budget, privatizing public education, and limiting women’s access to safe and legal abortions, will likely be “hugely unpopular” in Virginia, says state Senator Ghazala Hashmi, a Democrat representing District 10, which contains parts of central Virginia from Powhatan to the outskirts of Richmond.
“We know that Virginians have no desire to replicate the failures of other GOP-led states such as Texas and Florida,” she says.
Looking around the country, Youngkin’s win could change the way Republican candidates approach their 2022 races. In particular, other GOP candidates might borrow from Youngkin’s education playbook, according to J. Miles Coleman of the University of Virginia Center for Politics.
In the final stretch of the campaign, Youngkin promised more parental involvement in the educational process and emphasized his opposition to critical race theory, a high-level framework for understanding race, which is not taught in any primary schools in Virginia.
“By the end of the 2021 campaign, Youngkin was very clearly the ‘education’ candidate. Perhaps the bigger lesson there is that candidates would be smart to pick one or two signature issues like that and stick with them,” Coleman says.
Virginia’s 11 U.S. Congressional representatives are up for reelection in 2022. Democrats currently hold seven of those seats, but at least two will be very competitive elections. Democrats need to “communicate their successes better,” Hashmi believes, pointing to the recent federal infrastructure bill as an example of the kind of thing worth emphasizing.
UVA politics professor Jennifer Lawless agrees, saying that “Democrats need to focus on what they have delivered to everyday Americans.”
“No politics is local,” Lawless says. “In recent decades, national issues have dominated local political agendas. National figures endorse and stump for local candidates. And money for state-level candidates floods in from national donors. Despite talking points to the contrary, that’s exactly what we saw this time around.”
Hudson says delegates have to push back on this trend. “Candidates who prevailed did the best job connecting with their community, and addressed issues at the top of their constituents’ minds,” she says. “There is something very small-d democratic about running for delegate.”
Democrats won’t change their policy priorities given the new landscape, say Hashmi and Deeds. The party will continue to prioritize public schools, higher education, infrastructure, the environment, support for small business, and access to health care.
“We’ll get through this,” Deeds says. “We just have to work harder.”
Kind of blue
Charlottesville City went 82.9 percent for McAuliffe and 16 percent for Youngkin, and McAuliffe took Albemarle County 61.9 to 37.4. Those might sound like Democratic blowouts, but it’s a lower margin of victory than other Democrats have enjoyed here in recent elections. In total, McAuliffe won the combined Charlottesville-Albemarle area by 36 percent. In 2020, Joe Biden won the area by 46 percent, and in 2017, Ralph Northam won here by 40 percent. Cutting down Democratic margins of victory in super-blue areas was one key to Youngkin’s victory.
Additionally, turnout fell from the 2020 presidential election, as always happens in off-year elections. Biden got 17,500 more votes in Charlottesville and Albemarle in 2020 than McAuliffe did last week.
Local winners and losers
Republicans Chris Runion, Rob Bell, and Matt Farris, and Democrat Sally Hudson, the four House of Delegates members who represent Charlottesville and Albemarle, each easily won re-election for another two-year term.
Locally, former school board member Juandiego Wade and UVA planner Brian Pinkston cruised to victory in the City Council race, earning 42.5 percent and 36.9 percent of the vote, respectively. Independent candidate Yas Washington finished third with 12.5 percent. Current Mayor Nikuyah Walker, who dropped out of the race in September, after her name had already been printed on the ballots, earned 7 percent of the vote. The vote split between council candidates was remarkably even across the city’s voting precincts; no candidate had particular strengths or weaknesses in any part of town.
Lisa Larson-Torres won re-election to the Charlottesville school board, where she’ll be joined by newcomers Emily Dooley, a former teacher, principal, and realtor, and Dom Morse, a teacher at Community Lab School. In Albemarle County, incumbent Graham Paige dispatched a write-in challenge from conservative Randy Zackrisson. —Ben Hitchcock