The Virginia House of Delegates

It's 71 Virginians, you asshole!

What's Going On?

Oh, those wacky Virginians. Like the New Jerseyans, they decided to get all jazzy and do off-year elections. Their Senate only holds elections every four years, so they won't be up until 2015, but the lower house, the Delegates, go every two. All 100 seats in the House of Delegates will be up in 2013. This will be an interesting early indicator of where things are at with the public view of Obama's second term, and the Democrats in general. Virginia is—and this is still weird to me—a swing state of sorts. In fact, it's gone blue the last couple Presidential elections, even as its statewide politics tend to lag behind that leftward movement.

As a purplish off-year-election state, Virginia can tell us a little bit (not a lot, but a little bit) about where Americans' heads are at with regard to Obama and the Dems. In 2007, for example, the GOP lead in the House of Delegates dropped from 60-40 to 56-44. More importantly, the Dems went into the election down 23-17 in the state Senate and came out the other side with a 21-19 majority. These weren't massive swings, but in a state that was still, at that time, pretty red, they were simultaneously reflections of 2006's national anti-GOP wave and harbingers of 2008's national hope-and-change-and-Democrats wave.

2009, on the other hand, was not so friendly to the Democrats. By late 2009, you'll recall, there was already a lot of intense anger directed at the President and his Congressional allies over health care reform and other barely-left-of-center initiatives like the toothless financial regulation bill. As they're wont to do, the conservative Republican entertainment complex had whipped the easily-swayed masses into a froth and frenzy over various fabrications and lies. Painting the least progressive President since Coolidge and Hoover (seriously, I'm saying that and I'm prepared to defend it) as a socialist, they scared the bejesus out of Americans too busy—or perhaps too lazy—to do their own research.

Pictured: About half of the American electorate.

Virginians got caught up in that too, of course. Heading into the election, the Dems were down 55-45 in the House of Delegates. They took a beating and came out of it down 61-39. They hadn't done that poorly since the first Bush Presidency. But things only got worse. 2009 was a warning of things to come in 2010, to be sure, but the Virginia electorate wasn't finished punishing local Democrats for centrist national policies they had nothing to do with. By 2011, the Democratic brand was still tarnished both in Virginia and nationwide. You'll recall that in late 2011, it was still considered plausible that Barack Obama could lose his bid for re-election, and it was all but certain that the Dems would lose the Senate, or at least fall into a 50-50 deadlock, with control decided by the Vice President.

"Ladies. Ladies. Ladies. I got it covered."

Virginia reflected that national mood quite well, even if it didn't predict what happened nationally the following year. How could it have? Virginia Republicans didn't make it their mission in life to show their asses in public at every opportunity. No Todd Akins, no Richard Mourdocks, no Michele Bachmanns in these races. And they racked up a 68-32 advantage. You can be forgiven for feeling like that looks insurmountable, because...yikes. 36 seats.

Literally, it has not been this bad for the Dems in the House of Delegates since...well, basically since the Civil War. Yeah. Since we were basically a completely different party. In the history of the modern, post-Dixie Democratic Party, it's never been this bad for us in Virginia. (Things didn't go quite so horribly in the state Senate, as we only dropped from a 22-20 advantage to a 20-20 tie, with control of the chamber going to the Republicans due to their possession of the Lt. Governor position.)

Give Me Back My Family!

I want this chamber back. It was ours not so very long ago, but, to be honest, that was a different Virginia Democratic Party. That was a party that had been coasting for decades on the last vestiges of Dixiecrat power, nostalgia, influence, and incumbency. It had not yet become what so many Southern Democratic parties are becoming, diverse coalitions that finally reflect what the national party decided to become years ago and spent years evolving into. And now that the real Democratic Party has come to Virginia...we're getting massacred there, just like everywhere else down South. But the Republicans can't win the way they've been winning forever.

Sooner or later, the new Democratic coalition will dethrone them almost everywhere. Virginia is probably going to be one of the first states where that happens. Let's start building it now. Hell, let's just take it this year. There are 19 seats we could get. Yeah, it's a long shot, but if we don't net 12 at least in 2013, I call that a failure.

A couple of notes on strategy...

There are a couple of stratagems I've been thinking about with regard to Virginia. One of them, and this will become quite apparent throughout this entry, is focusing on fresh faces—or, in the case of Mary Sue Terry, just a face that hasn't popped up in this particular arena before. The Dems probably could recapture some of these seats by just trotting out the same white guy who lost in 2011 or 2009, but would it be an enduring victory? We want seats that can survive. We build those kinds of victories by using new candidates where possible, and by using candidates that reflect the changing face of the Democratic coalition. And where do we find these candidates?

Going back to the baseball analogy I've used occasionally throughout the short life of this blog, we can often find these candidates by calling them up from the minor leagues. That's why, in this entry, I'll be recommending that the Virginia Democrats draft up 11 mayors and three city council members from some of the major urban areas in the state. Not only do they represent fresh ideas and fresh policy in the House, but they also represent the shifting demographics of the new Democratic coalition.

My suggested candidate for the Third District.

But as a strategy, that pretty much runs its course by the end of primary season. The second strategic point I've been thinking about is one that's more general election focused, and this is how we run against the Republican Party of Virginia. The GOP in this state has controlled the agenda and the narrative for what seems like an eternity now. Even before they officially took control of the legislature and so many of the statewide offices, the general thinking in the politicosphere was moving rightward. How do we take it back?

I think Medicaid can be the issue. Virginia hasn't ruled out the Obamacare Medicaid expansion yet, but it is considered to be leaning against it. That's a decision that is made not by Virginia's Congressional delegation, but by its governor and its state legislature. And that means it can and should be a campaign issue in 2013. Hundreds of thousands of Virginians will not be able to get Medicaid because of the Virginia Republican Party's politicization of the issue.

And make no mistake, it's baldly political. The expansion comes almost entirely from federal money, and even though the federal share eventually tapers down to only 90%, that's still a massive increase in federal coverage. Virginia Democrats should absolutely make an issue of this, and it should be framed as Republicans cutting Medicaid. Because essentially, that's what they're doing.

Vulnerable Democrat Seats

Well...that's the “good” news. There basically aren't any. The Dems have been so thrashed (and their districts gerrymandered into oblivion) that the GOP is looking at a serious case of diminishing returns. I really can't see how any of the currently Democratic seats could go red short of retirements. So far none, on either side of the aisle, have been announced. So take that, Republicans! We're not gonna lose any seats, because we've already lost every seat possible! Yaaaaaaaay...

"Ha, ha, ha! Aaaaaalll part of the plan...*coughs blood*..."

Vulnerable Republican Seats

District 2

Incumbent: Mark Dudenhefer. (It's a pretty awesome name.)

New shit has come to light. Get ready to be privy to all the new shit.

Why he's weak: Well, for starters, he didn't win by that much last time around. 12.4% looks big, but not when you take some of the other numbers into account. For starters, that 12.4% only represents 1,260 votes. There were barely 10,000 ballots cast in the race. It's one of the effects of an off-year election, particularly in a small, less important district. Although the Second has a slice of solid blue Prince William County, it's mostly made up of light-red Stafford County. But Stafford only went for Romney by a few thousand votes. And it was even less red in the 2012 Senate race, although it did ultimately go for George Allen.

Furthermore, Dudenhefer has not been particularly noteworthy as a Delegate. He's in his first term, he doesn't have the sweet committee assignments, and he's a pretty run-of-the-mill Republican. His legislation has been unremarkable.

"And if even if he's a lazy Delegate--and the Dudenhefer was most certainly that. Quite possibly the laziest in the Virginia House of Delegates, which would place him high in the running for laziest worldwide. But sometimes there's a Delegate...sometimes there's a Delegate...Aw. Lost my train of thought here."

Why he's strong: Well, he's a veteran. I mean a veteran of the military. That plays well in this area (in most areas, really.) He'll be running in a district that, while not solid red, is definitely not purple or blue. And he seems to have a pretty good mind for localizing his politics. A hallmark of his first election campaign for the seat was his ability to talk about what his potential constituents wanted to hear him talk about. And even though he was wrong on a lot of it (his commitment to a stupid highway widening project, for example), that kind of thing plays well. He's probably a somewhat better campaigner than he is a policymaker.

Get used to this Big Lebowski bit, because I'm not letting it go.

Who can beat him: Dudenhefer's 2011 opponent, Esteban Garces, was probably too progressive and too brown for a district both centrist and 72.8% white. On the other hand, he performed pretty well. In a very tough cycle for Democrats, he made the race interesting and came within 1300 votes of victory. Sure, percentage-wise, that's a lot of votes, but what if he'd benefited from a stronger get-out-the-vote effort? Perhaps more important today, what if he'd been running on the heels of a major national vindication of the Democratic message and brand?

"You got a date with destiny Wednesday baby!"

The 2012 election narrative is that, against all odds and in what once seemed like impossible conditions, the Democrats prevailed across the board. The narrative also holds that they achieved this by assembling a strong coalition, demographically diverse and sociopolitically emergent. With stronger backing from Democrats and their allies, Garces can bring that narrative to the Second District next year.

"That's just, like, your opinion, man."

Price Tag: Guess how much money Garces spent on his campaign last year. Go ahead, guess. Got your guess ready? Okay, now here's the answer: about $45,000. Now of course that's fine if you're running for mayor of Topeka, KS, but this is grown-up politics. Dudenhefer (who, I'm sure, did not call his fundraisers Dudensessions for Dudenhefer's Dudes, but he should have) raised over $133,000. You're not gonna win a lot of campaigns like that. The Dudenmeister can be expected to raise 200K for his second go-round. We need to rustle up at least twice that amount for Esteban—or, indeed, for whoever challenges him.

"Far out, man."

District 9

Incumbent: Charles Poindexter.

Pictured: Charles Poindexter, probably.

Why he's weak: Other than 2011, he really hasn't had to run against a serious opponent in these Delegate races. 2011 pitted him against his first strong challenger, Ward Armstrong. Ward was also an incumbent, but redistricting had moved him from the Tenth to the Sixteenth, so he moved to the Ninth instead. 40% of the new Ninth District (Patrick and Henry Counties, specifically, and yes, it's funny that those two counties are next to each other) was formerly part of Armstrong's Tenth District, so he figured he had a decent shot.

Why he's strong: Ward was right that he had a decent shot. He only lost by 5.4% of the vote, which comes to 1,349 votes in raw numbers. Unfortunately, he was missing the key blue constituency of his old district, the city and county of Martinsville, which has been cleverly buried in the strongly red Sixteenth District. And that's going to continue to be the problem for any Democrat running in the Ninth. Those 1500 votes that will put a Democrat over the top in this district will have to be scraped and scrounged for, because they're not coming from any reliably blue place.

Troublingly, Armstrong actually outraised Poindexter in 2011, about $1.3M to $1M, and he still couldn't quite close the deal. But take a look at where the money came from. Poindexter got almost $600K from the Virginia GOP. How much did Armstrong get from the Virginia Democrats? About a quarter of that. What that illuminates is that the Republicans made this race a priority.

Even though they didn't give Poindexter enough money to give him a bigger war chest than his opponent had, they brought the fullness of their campaign efforts to bear in this district. Fun fact: while the Democrats spent some $4 million on 47 different candidates in the 2011 election, the GOP contributed to exactly three candidates. They didn't even spend a full million, and fully 76% of their spending went to Poindexter. They gave a damn about this race.

Who can beat him: You could go back to Ward, but I think a different direction is better. Personally I like Mary Sue Terry, and I like her for several reasons. First, she was a well-liked two-term Attorney General of the state. That was quite awhile ago by now, and right after that she lost her gubernatorial bid to George Allen (who just lost his Senate bid to Democrat Tim Kaine, so circle of life), but I actually think the time she's spent out of politics is a good thing.

Which leads to my second reason: the Hillary effect. People love women politicians, especially when they haven't heard from them in awhile. For some reason we tend to romanticize our women politicians, especially the ones we see as having blazed a trail. Hillary is often pointed to as the first (and, until Michelle Obama, pretty much only) modern First Lady to take a truly active role in her husband's politics; Mary Sue Terry, by the same token, was the first woman elected to statewide office in Virginia, the second woman to serve as a state Attorney General anywhere in the country, and the first elected official in Virginia to earn more than one million votes in a single non-federal election. Yeah. She basically invented women in politics in Virginia (and was pretty instrumental in creating a role for women in national politics, too.)

Third reason builds on from the second one: Mary Sue Terry has a hell of a lot of cachet with Virginian women. She's made her life's mission, post-politics, to get more women into politics. She started a super PAC called The Farm Team to help Democratic women get elected. Terry can bring 2012's pro-woman wave home to Virginia in 2013. There aren't enough women in Virginia politics. If Mary Sue really wants to see more, she oughtta jump back into the game herself. Fourth reason builds on from the third one: that super PAC. Mary Sue still knows how to fundraise, she has a statewide network already built up, and she's got connections even outside the state.

Pictured: The Farm Team's slate of 2012 candidates.

Fifth and finally, electing Mary Sue to this seat positions her perfectly to run for state Senate in 2015. In 2011, in Senate District 20, Republican Bill Stanley beat Democrat Roscoe Reynolds by 644 votes. Mary Sue could mount a very serious challenge to that in the Twentieth, for all the reasons she could mount a successful challenge in the Ninth House district.

She does have some weaknesses. She lost that gubernatorial election because she was a pretty true-blue Democrat. She didn't gussy herself up like a Southern belle; she ran as a strong woman. (Granted, that might actually play well today; see Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota.) She wasn't married and still isn't, and has been rumored to be gay (didn't stop Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin.) She was in favor of gun control. The religious right gave her a good beating as well. But ultimately, most observers said she lost the election because she didn't campaign that hard. She owned a 29-point lead early in the campaign cycle, and probably figured she could coast to victory on her Attorney General incumbency and her massive early advantage. She won't make that mistake if we draft her to run for this seat.

Price Tag: $2M minimum, preferably more like $2.5M or $3M.

District 12

Incumbent: Joseph Yost.

Why he's weak: Yost won in an open-seat race by 3.4%, just 522 total votes. That's pretty much all I need to say.

Why he's strong: The district, in terms of national elections, is pretty red, and other than going right back to Don Langrehr, the guy Yost beat in 2011, the Dems don't have much of a bench here (kind of a recurring theme with the Virginia Democrats.)

Who can beat him: I like Anthony Flaccavento here. The reason is that he just got his ass beaten in the race for Virginia's Ninth Congressional seat, by 22.4% and almost 70,000 votes. What's that? Sounds like a weird reason? Here's the thing: it got Flaccavento--an organic farmer new to politics--a bunch of name recognition. Furthermore, the broader Ninth Congressional District is a lot redder than the Twelfth State House District. Flaccavento built up a pretty enthusiastic base of support and some pretty impressive fundraising for a political newcomer.

His opponent, Morgan Griffith, outspent him about $550K to about $350K. While that's a significant gap, Flaccavento's ability to bring in that level of support without any prior experience or network speaks well of him, especially when Yost, the incumbent here in the Twelfth, raised about the same amount of money in 2011 as Flaccavento did in 2012. Also, Flaccavento still has about fifty grand in his war chest.

One big potential roadblock here is that Flaccavento seems to want to leapfrog straight to bigger and better things than the statehouse. He's already talking about running for the Ninth again in 2014, as obviously ill-advised as that seems. If the Dems can convince him to start with something smaller and more manageable, I think he can take Yost on. He's much more charming and charismatic than Yost, and he's got the same ability to fundraise.

"Oh hi. Didn't see you there. You know, politics is a lot like organic
onion farming. Sometimes it's red, and sometimes it's white, but it can
always be delicious if we just believe. And also if we don't use pesticides."

Another big potential roadblock: Flaccavento doesn't live in the Twelfth. But guys, the Dems have ZERO bench in Giles County, and as near as I can tell, you don't have to have lived in a district for any specific amount of time. So someone get Flaccavento to buy a second home in Giles County, put the organic farm in a buddy's name, and run in the Twelfth. Come on. Let's make it happen. This seat is gettable.

Price Tag: $1M

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