Virginia's Elections May Show the Potency of the Demand for Gun Reform

With its off-year state elections, Virginia is often viewed as a test case of where issues and voter mindsets are trending.  Now, with Virginia's so-called urban crescent firmly in the Democrat column in state-wide races, 2019 will offer a test of whether demands for sane gun control laws will help flip control of the Virginia General Assembly to Democrats.  After the Virginia Beach mass shooting, Democrat Governor Ralph Northam called a special session of the legislature to address gun control. Despite strong public support for common sense gun control reform, Republicans arrogantly adjourned the session without and debate on the issues and, in my view, basically flipped the middle finger to millions of Virginians. Typical of this attitude is Tommy Norment, current Virginia Senate majority leader, who made obnoxious, derogatory (and uncalled for) remarks about gun control advocates at a CLE - continuing legal education - course where he was a speaker.  A piece in the New York Times looks at Virginia's role in this regard.  Here are highlights

CENTREVILLE, Va. — At door after door, house after house, Dan Helmer, a Democrat running for the Virginia House of Delegates, found voters of both parties telling him one thing as he canvassed for support Tuesday night: Do something about the mass shootings.

“I have it on the TV right now,” Reza Darvishian, a State Department security engineer, told Mr. Helmer on the porch of his home. “I’m sick of listening to all of this stuff.”

The mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, last weekend have rebooted the national discussion over gun violence and ignited a bitter fight between Democrats and President Trump over whether his divisive rhetoric encouraged the violence. Now Virginia’s off-year elections in November loom as the first political battlefield on the issue. Republicans hold only one-vote majorities in both the House and Senate. Democrats are aiming to capture both chambers and pass new gun control legislation next year.

The Virginia elections will help measure the potency of the issue with voters after a series of mass shootings that has outraged many Americans. And it will match the resources of the movement’s biggest supporter, former New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, against the National Rifle Association, the long-dominant Virginia-based gun rights organization that faces internal turmoil and a steady loss of influence.

The 2018 midterms marked the first time the N.R.A. was outspent by gun control groups in a national campaign.

The issue is already highly charged in Virginia, which had its own mass shooting in May, when 12 people were killed in a Virginia Beach municipal building. The massacre prompted the Democratic governor, Ralph Northam, to call a special session in July and ask lawmakers to consider a package of eight gun control proposals, including banning assault-style weapons and implementing universal background checks.

Republicans ended the session after 90 minutes . . . . .

Now Mr. Cox and Mr. Hugo are the top targets for Democrats and gun control proponents. Both represent suburban districts long in Republican control where voters have rejected the party in the Trump era.

“This will be the first thing on the docket,” said former Gov. Terry McAuliffe. “People are fired up. People are sick and tired of saying, ‘My thoughts and prayers are with you,’ and they want action.”

The Everytown for Gun Safety Action Fund, the political arm of Mr. Bloomberg’s gun control organization, said this week that it would invest at least $2.5 million in Virginia before Election Day . . . . “Virginia is a bellwether state and we are going to be there,” said John Feinblatt, Everytown’s president. “There is no doubt this is a test. This is the next theater for what’s going to happen everywhere in 2020.”

With its odd-year elections, Virginia has a long record of serving as a leading indicator for national contests the following year. The state’s voters in 2009 were the first to reject Democrats in the Obama era, foreshadowing the rise of the Tea Party, and did the same to Republicans in 2017 following President Trump’s election. That year, Democrats swept out a generation of long-tenured suburban Republican lawmakers while coming within a coin flip in a tied race of winning control of the state’s House of Delegates for the first time since 1999.

Virginia remains a complex state demographically and culturally, with wide swaths of rural areas where Confederate flags are common and belief in gun rights sacrosanct. But the current gun control debate comes as the state has nearly completed a Republican-to-Democratic transition in statewide elections, as urban and suburban voters have swung hard away from Republicans over the last decade.

Help make history.  Make sure you are registered to vote and go to the polls in November, 2019, and vote a straight Democrat ticket. If your senator and delegate are in uncontested races, donate time and money to Democrats in competitive races (this is what the husband and I are doing).  We need gun control reform and a host of other measures which will only happen when Republicans are swept from control of the General Assembly.