As Democrats duke it out in Va. primaries, GOP nominees won't be seen together
"I Voted" stickers are displayed at a Richmond polling place during the 2022 midterm elections. (Photo by Graham Moomaw/Virginia Mercury)
In about 10 days, we will know the names of all the candidates who will appear on November's general election ballot for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general in Virginia.
What we might not know by then is whether both parties' tickets are unified.
The nominees are set in the Republican Party. So there should have been no need there for the acrimony and infighting that tests the bonds of party cohesiveness in the run-up to primary elections and then the strained, awkward rapprochements that follow. Right?
The Democrats still have that bridge to cross with a six-way primary for lieutenant governor and a one-to-one showdown in the attorney general primary.
Levar Stoney ended his two terms as Richmond's mayor days before a January water treatment plant emergency left residents of the city and some parts of surrounding localities either without water altogether or having to boil it before consumption. Aaron Rouse is a former football star and state senator representing Virginia Beach. Ghazala Hashmi is also a state senator whose district takes in parts of Richmond and Chesterfield County. Three other candidates are newcomers to state-level politics: Victor Salgado, a public corruption prosecutor who resigned from the Justice Department after President Donald Trump's election; ophthalmologist Babur Lateef and lawyer and labor leader Alex Bastani.
The winner faces Republican nominee John Reid this fall.
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Democrats Shannon Taylor, Henrico County's two-term commonwealth's attorney, and Jay Jones, a former Virginia delegate, former District of Columbia assistant attorney general and son of the late judge and legislator Jerrauld Jones are vying to be the state's next AG. The victor faces Jason Miyares, a Republican seeking a second term, in November.
The party's gubernatorial nominee, former U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger, has no intraparty opponent. She and the Republican nominee, Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, are already on a general election collision course.
We shall see if the Democrats can keep it sufficiently civil to credibly make amends once the ballots are counted and nominees declared on June 17. So far, they've created little drama as each, to varying degrees, claims to be the best prepared to stand against Trump, who is zero-for-lifetime when his name has been on Virginia's ballot and has been an albatross for his party here.
Va. statewide GOP nominees refuse to buck Trump in a state where he's a proven albatross
Time will tell if the Democrats — who rarely meet an opportunity they can't squander — form a united front and make compelling arguments for voters to trust them, not just assume Trump will sink his ticket again.
From job losses mainly in Northern Virginia to varied urban dysfunctions in Richmond to persistent economic atrophy in rural areas, their nominees need to do the research, listen to a broad swath of constituents and bring fresh, resonant answers to the table.
As for Republicans, fate seemed to smile on them by obviating the need for primaries. Rather than spending time and money eviscerating one another, they had the chance to marshal their resources, cultivate cohesion as a ticket and fire outward at Democrats quarreling among themselves.
That didn't happen. Segments of the GOP trashed President Ronald Reagan's 11th Commandment and launched a homophobic, incomprehensibly stupid and ultimately futile effort to blackmail Reid — Virginia's first openly gay statewide nominee — into quitting the race.
For more than a week, Virginia Republicans watched their party's elite practice a shocking level of fratricide, particularly for a critical statewide election year. What began as a Machiavellian plot to bully Reid into retreat in the face of ruinous (and specious) accusations, enlisting allied evangelicals behind the putsch, resulted in the governor himself, Glenn Youngkin, playing the heavy.
They didn't know Reid. A former conservative talk radio host who inherited a flinty bring-it-on mindset from his dad, the late Del. Jack Reid, the younger Reid responded with the political equivalent of brass knuckles on one hand and a busted long-neck beer bottle in the other. He shot back with blistering social media videos and a sobering cease-and-desist demand from his lawyer that suggested imminent libel litigation.
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Things died down a bit after Matt Moran, a top Youngkin political Svengali, took the fall. After damning disclosures and Republican recriminations dominated each day's news cycle for more than a week, Moran was done as the head of Youngkin's fundraising juggernaut political action committee, Spirit of Virginia.
You'd imagine that would be both a teaching moment and/or occasion for healing. Yet through it all, Earle-Sears has made clear her assertion that it's every Republican for himself (or herself).
Earle-Sears was a no-show at weekend campaign appearances with Reid in heavily GOP-voting Southwest Virginia the day after the scandal broke in late April. Reid campaigned with U.S. Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Salem, and was warmly received, according to on-scene coverage by Laura Vozella of The Washington Post.
The following week, a GOP 'unity rally' in which Reid was to appear with Earle-Sears, Miyares and Youngkin was canceled without explanation. A defiant Reid booked the same Henrico County venue for the same hour as the canceled event and packed it with hometown supporters. On April 29, Earle-Sears broke her silence on Reid with a statement posted on social media that reads like a divorce petition, saying the focus on Reid 'distracted' the GOP ticket.
'John Reid is the Republican nominee for Lt. Governor. It is his race and his decision alone to move forward,' she wrote. 'We all have our own race to run.'
This isn't the first time members of a statewide ticket have played keep-away from one of its members. In the 2001 election for the top three state executive offices, each party had an odd man out.
On the Democratic side, ticket leader Mark Warner had seen his party get pounded in recent —elections in increasingly Republican-voting rural Virginia. He ran for governor as a 'centrist' who sought to rural voters with promises not to impose new gun restrictions. While he didn't win the NRA's endorsement, he kept the organization neutral in the election. Attorney general nominee A. Donald McEachin, however, had watched gun violence turn his home streets in Richmond into killing fields in the 1990s and was a stalwart gun-control advocate. Not only did the candidates coexist uneasily on the 2001 ticket, McEachin and Democratic former Gov. Doug Wilder slammed Warner over his coziness with the NRA in an extraordinary news conference that would have been front-page news if not for its timing: 9 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001.
Appreciation: Congressman A. Donald McEachin
On the GOP side, gubernatorial candidate Mark Earley and attorney general nominee Jerry Kilgore also avoided getting too close to the party's lieutenant governor nominee, Del. Jay Katzen.
McEachin lost to Republican Jerry W. Kilgore. Katzen lost to future Gov. and U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine.
The difference is that Earle-Sears, the ticket leader, has said it publicly and repeatedly — including once in writing. Miyares has neither embraced nor distanced himself from Reid and/or Earle-Sears. He has remained silent throughout the tumult.
Her position that the GOP candidates were free agents appeared unchanged last week when Radio IQ political correspondent Michael Pope reminded Earle-Sears that she, Miyares and Reid had yet to publicly appear together.
'Actually, as you know, we are all running our campaigns,' she said.
Yes, ma'am. We know. By now, so do Virginia voters.
We're just waiting for you to explain the reason why.SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
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