Virginia Republicans prepare to take control of House of Delegates
Republicans prepared to take control of the Virginia House of Delegates on Wednesday after winning key races in swing districts across the state, even as Democrats were not ready to concede they had lost the chamber’s majority.
Republicans appeared to have flipped at least six, and possibly as many as seven, seats in Tuesday’s elections to regain the majority by a narrow margin. Coupled with Republican Glenn Youngkin’s win in the governor’s race, GOP candidates shattered the one-party rule that had allowed Democrats to advance liberal legislation with little obstruction.
But a couple of pivotal races still had not been called Wednesday, with Democrats trailing their Republican challengers by one or two percentage points. House Speaker Eileen Filler-Corn (D-Fairfax) stressed that Democrats would be waiting until all votes were counted to determine who won control of the chamber, perhaps clinging to the possibility that a 50-50 split remained in the cards.
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Regardless, it was certain by Wednesday morning that Democrats had lost their majority, ushering in a new era in Virginia politics.
House Minority Leader Todd Gilbert (R-Shenandoah) said he intended to run for House speaker. He attributed the Democrats’ losses to an unfavorable nationwide political environment for Democrats as well as what he called Democratic overreach in the Virginia General Assembly over the past two years.
It was all “baked into a recipe that led to success all across the board,” he said. “We were totally outspent, but at the end of the day, that money couldn’t move them off their handicap, which was that this environment really created [a situation in which] people really started paying attention to issues we’ve been trying to raise for some time in the education world, in the public safety world, personal finances and cost of living.”
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Meanwhile, Del. Terry G. Kilgore (R-Scott), the House Republican campaign chair for the 2021 elections, announced that he would run for House speaker as well. “It’s time for fresh leadership and leadership that will keep and grow our new majority,” he said in a statement.
Several Republican victories over Democratic incumbents on Tuesday were in districts with large rural populations — including some seats Republicans had previously never won — which political analysts said largely tracked with existing trends of deepening political divides between rural areas and urban and suburban ones.
A number of vulnerable Democrats managed to hang on to seats they had taken over in the Richmond suburbs and Northern Virginia exurbs during the blue waves in the Trump era. Trent Armitage, former executive director of the Virginia House Democratic Caucus, said that was probably Democrats’ most visible silver lining of the night, indicating that many of Virginia’s demographic and political shifts toward Democrats in these areas were holding strong.
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Armitage pointed to the most expensive House of Delegates race of the campaign, in a district in Loudoun County and parts of Clarke and Frederick counties, where he thought Republicans probably had the best shot at winning. Instead, Del. Wendy Gooditis appears on track to eke out a victory, as did vulnerable Democratic Dels. Schuyler T. VanValkenburg (Henrico), Dan Helmer (Fairfax) and Rodney T. Willett (Henrico).
“We did better in suburban areas,” Armitage said. “Fairfax and Loudoun did fine for us, but we slipped further in some of theses rural areas. The divide is becoming clearer and clearer in some of these election cycles.”
Democrats in the Hampton Roads area were not as lucky. Del. Nancy D. Guy (D-Virginia Beach) was projected to lose to Republican lawyer and gun shop owner Tim Anderson, while Del. Martha M. Mugler (D-Hampton) trailed Republican A.C. Cordoza, though that race had not been called. As of Wednesday evening, Del. Alex Askew (D-Virginia Beach) was behind his Republican challenger, Karen Greenhalgh, by 202 votes with all but one precinct reporting, according to the Virginia Department of Elections.
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Those Democratic defeats could be an ominous sign for Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.) in 2022, who faces another tough reelection race in the competitive 2nd Congressional District in the same area.
Elsewhere, Del. Joshua Cole (D-Fredericksburg) was projected to lose by roughly two points to Republican Tara Durant, a private elementary school teacher who made education the focal point of her campaign. Del. Chris L. Hurst (D-Montgomery), who flipped the seat during the 2017 blue wave, and Del. Roslyn C. Tyler (D-Sussex), who has held her seat near the North Carolina border since 2006, were two of the last remaining Democrats representing rural areas that Republicans spent millions targeting. Hurst was projected to lose to Republican Jason Ballard, while Tyler lost a rematch against Republican pharmacist Otto Wachsmann after previously defeating him in 2019.
Tyler’s seat had never been won by a Republican since it was created in 1983. Wachsmann painted Tyler, the chamber’s only Black rural Democrat, as out of touch with the district’s rural values, citing Democrats’ liberal legislative agenda.
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Another Republican newcomer, Kim Taylor, the co-owner of an auto-repair shop with her husband, found similar success in a district that Republicans had never won since its inception in 1983: District 63 anchored in Petersburg, a majority-Black city. Taylor was projected to defeat Del. Lashrecse D. Aird (D-Petersburg) by roughly two points. A map redrawn by a federal court in 2019 due to earlier racial gerrymandering made the district more friendly to Republicans, Armitage noted.
In a statement early Wednesday morning, Taylor boasted that she had managed to defeat Aird despite raising only roughly $200,000 to Aird’s $1.4 million — a Democratic fundraising clobbering that was common to virtually all of Tuesday’s competitive races, including the others Democrats lost.
“The voices of the people of Dinwiddie, Petersburg, and West Chesterfield were heard today,” Taylor said in a statement. “This is a clear referendum on the Big Democrat Corporate spending and radical policies that do not reflect our communities.”
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J. Miles Coleman, associate editor at the University of Virginia’s Sabato’s Crystal Ball, said Democrats’ problem wasn’t so much a lack of enthusiasm among their voters — Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe received over 150,000 more votes than Gov. Ralph Northam (D) did in 2017 — as even greater enthusiasm for the Youngkin ticket. National Democrats’ failure to pass President Biden’s priorities in Congress wasn’t helping, he added.
The Republican State Leadership Committee noted in a memo circulated Wednesday that it had relied on Biden’s waning popularity and Democrats’ intraparty division over a major social-spending package in Washington as part of its strategy to take back the House. “Our main message was that Virginia Democrats were no different than national Democrats and that the far-left agenda they pursued with control of Richmond exacerbated the failures of Democrat-controlled Washington,” said the memo, which the committee offered as a playbook for other states.
On Wednesday morning, Capitol Hill was awash with debate over the effect on the Virginia elections of progressives’ insistence on delaying the congressional infrastructure bill until a deal could be reached on the social-spending package. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, argued that “there is no way that you can say that a 12-point swing in a state is due to Congress not passing one bill.”
But Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), a former governor of the state, told reporters, “We do know these races continue to get nationalized, and what I heard when I was out campaigning for the ticket was: You guys got the White House, the Senate, the House — when will you get more things done?”
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He added, “You can’t win in Virginia if you only appeal to very liberal voters,” though he said he didn’t believe the Democratic majority’s legislative agenda in Richmond played a key role in the defeats.
Mark Rozell, founding dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, disagreed. He argued early Wednesday that Democrats may have misread the waves of anti-Trump resistance for overwhelming support for liberal policies. Their legislative achievements, he said, didn’t resonate with voters in some parts of the state in the same way Republicans’ messaging on issues such as education and taxes did.
“The Republican turnout machine was simply much better than the Democratic one in this election cycle,” he said. “With the top of the ticket emphasizing core local issues such as public education, gasoline taxes — things that make a real difference in people’s daily lives — much of that helped drive Republican enthusiasm to the polls in competitive districts.”
Laura Vozzella contributed to this report.
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