Democrats Hope for a Nationalized Virginia 2019 Election

With things somewhat calmer in Richmond and the clamor for Governor Ralph Northam to resign seeming to quiet down except from mostly out of state and inside the Beltway pundits and talking heads, (the First Lady, Pam Northam was warmly welcomed at the HR Pride launch last Sunday despite the, in my view, anti-Northam idiocy of Equality Virginia), focus is again returning to the 2019 Virginia elections.  I have a piece that hopefully will publish at Smerconish.com sometime soon and other Virginia commentators, including my UVA classmate Larry Sabato are looking forward in their prognostications towards the lead up to November's election during which the entire membership of the Virginia General Assembly will be up for election.  At Sabato's Crystal Ball analysis is done as to where we are at present and how Democrats can move their prospects forward by nationalizing the election to make it, in par, a referendum on Donald Trump.  With Trump opposing payment to many government contractors harmed by the government shut down and many federal employees, especially in Northern Virginia, votes aimed at punishing Trump and the GOP at large could still win the day for Democrats.  Here are article highlights:

For Virginia Democrats, the agony of the moment mixes with the promise of the future

The still-unfolding political crisis in Virginia threatens to derail what could be a breakthrough moment in the South this November for modern Democrats, although it also provides a test of nationalization versus localization that could still break in the Democrats’ favor.  

So here we are, with the top three officials in the state all damaged to at least some degree, but without any real indication as of this writing (Wednesday evening) that any will leave office voluntarily.

What is at stake in the state is more than the future of the three state-level, statewide elected Democrats. Before this cascade of revelations and party chaos, Virginia Democrats were looking at the very real possibility of total state government control and — given that many Southern states were ruled by conservative Democrats before Republican dominance in the region — perhaps the most liberal (or progressive, if you prefer) state government in the post-Reconstruction history of not just Virginia, but the South in general.

The post-Reconstruction political history of the South generally featured conservative white Democrats dominating state governments. But the party’s strength in the South began to weaken for a number of factors, most notably the national Democratic Party’s embrace of civil rights following World War II.

Democrats do not control a single state legislative chamber in the South; that’s true even if one defines the South in a broader way by including states like Kentucky and West Virginia, where Democrats have also lost state legislative chambers in recent years.
The second observation is that control of state legislatures aligns almost perfectly with the 2016 presidential results. Donald Trump won 30 states, and Republicans control every state legislative chamber located in those states.

Virginia is an outlier among the states when it comes to state legislative control — it’s the only state where the majority party in both chambers of the state legislature is clearly at odds with its federal partisanship.

Democrats made huge gains in the Virginia state House of Delegates in 2017, netting 15 seats and winning 49 total in the 100-member chamber. They could have forced a 50-50 tie, but Delegate David Yancey (R) prevailed in a drawing to determine the winner of his reelection bid, where the vote ended in an exact tie. As of now, Republicans hold a 51-48 majority in the House of Delegates with a special election coming next Tuesday to fill a vacancy in a heavily Democratic seat (more on that at the end of this piece).

Democrats made their heavy gains in 2017 on a Republican-drawn map that could not stand up to the strain Donald Trump’s presidency put on it. Democrats ended up making their gains almost exclusively in districts that Clinton carried in 2016. These were districts that Republicans either believed would perform better for them in non-presidential years and/or ones whose Democratic trend only emerged later in the decade. The map may very well be unwound in time for the 2019 elections, as a federal court found that the GOP-drawn map was an illegal racial gerrymander, although it’s still possible that the old map could remain. . . . All told, the Virginia Public Access Project analyzed the new districts and found that just one Democratic district would be harder for Democrats to defend under the new map while six would become harder for Republicans to defend.

The state Senate map, which was a Democratic-drawn map that nonetheless failed to protect the party’s state Senate majority when drawn in advance of the 2011 election, will remain in place regardless of what happens to the House map. Republicans currently hold a 21-19 majority, but they are defending four Clinton-won districts while Democrats don’t hold any Trump-won districts. So the most vulnerable seats appear to be Republican-held ones, most notably an open Northern Virginia district Clinton won with 54% of the two-party vote.

So Democrats need to pick up two seats in each chamber to win outright control of the state legislature. It is reasonable to wonder whether this extraordinary scandal reduces the Democrats’ ability to do so, particularly if the tantalizing (for Democrats) new House of Delegates map falls through. That the three elected statewide state officials, all Democrats, are now compromised complicates the state legislative picture.

To us, the major Democratic concern isn’t necessarily that a significant slice of Northam voters will defect; instead, it’s that Democrats will be on the wrong end of what even before this scandal broke was an inevitable turnout drop from the most recent election. In the two most recent gubernatorial elections, 2013 and 2017, turnout of registered voters was 43% and 48%, respectively; in the two most recent off-year state legislative elections, 2011 and 2015, it was about 29% each time. Democrats will want that turnout figure to be higher, because it probably would mean that their generally less reliable voter base is coming out in stronger force than it did during the Barack Obama era.

This is where the nationalization of American politics could bail out the Democrats. Virginia’s voters sometimes seem to take the White House into account when casting their ballots: 10 of the last 11 gubernatorial elections have been won by the party not in the White House. More recently, state legislative districts that seemed Democratic on paper, or at least at the presidential level, backed Republicans while Obama was president. Perceptions of Trump helped unlock these districts for Democrats in 2017. We see this nationalization in other places.

While Virginia is a more competitive state than either Connecticut or Oklahoma, it has been trending Democratic, and feelings about [Trump] the president could nationalize what otherwise are state-level elections. It’s also worth noting that President Trump’s assertion that Virginia would trend back to the GOP in 2020 because of the Democratic state-level scandals is almost certainly wishful thinking. . . . the state’s trajectory suggests it will vote more Democratic than the nation as a whole in 2020, like it did in both 2012 (by just a hundredth of a percentage point) and 2016 (by more than three points as Sen. Tim Kaine occupied the Democratic vice presidential slot).

Trump benefited from his modified GOP coalition, which is very reliant on white voters who do not have a four-year college degree, in a lot of places, particularly in the electorally vital Midwest. But the tradeoff hurt him elsewhere, such as in Virginia, which is more diverse than the Midwest and has higher-than-average levels of four-year college attainment.

No doubt, the Richmond scandal is an immense headache for Democrats, and a black eye for the commonwealth. If Democrats fail in the fall, the scandal probably will be part of the reason why. But it may be that Democrats suffer through agony all year and then win the state legislature in the fall anyway. If that happened, it would be another triumph for the long-term, nationalized trends that have more often animated politics across the country in recent years than the local ones that seem so politically important in the moment they are happening.

I hope the prediction that the Democrats prevail in November prove accurate.   The reality is that a majority of Virginians - both black and white - are better off and better represented if Democrats hold both houses of the Virginia General Assembly.  Only rural reactionaries, Christian extremists and white supremacist Republicans benefit if the GOP retains control.  This message needs to be broadcast non-stop from now through November and Trump must be incessantly linked to the Virginia GOP as well, especially in areas that suffered from the government shutdown.