I hope you like maps, because you’re going to get a lot of them today.
The prompt for today’s column: Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney has announced he’s seeking the Democratic nomination for governor in 2025. That’s not really a surprise. When he passed through Roanoke back in the summer and invited me for a chat at Mill Mountain Coffee & Tea, I figured he wasn’t simply sightseeing.
He’ll be going up against U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger, who represents the 7th Congressional District wedged in between the Richmond suburbs and the Northern Virginia suburbs. If she wins the Democratic nomination, she’d stand a chance of becoming the first woman we’ve elected governor. If Stoney wins the nomination, he could become our second Black governor. The two most likely Republican candidates are Lt. Gov Winsome Earle-Sears and Attorney General Jason Miyares.
If those are the final four, that would put Virginia on the cusp of history: Virginia would have its first gubernatorial election where there’s no white man running. Miyares could be our first Latino governor, either Spanberger or Earle-Sears would be our first woman to be governor, and Earle-Sears would also be the first Black woman to be elected governor anywhere in the country. Only Stoney would not be a first: If elected, he’d be our second Black governor — Douglas Wilder was the first back in 1989.
If the 2025 governor’s race winds up as Earle-Sears vs. Stoney, then Virginia would become the only state with two Black candidates running against each other for the state’s top office.
This started me thinking about Virginia’s record on electing Black candidates to statewide office.
An analysis by the Associated Press in 2016 found that since Reconstruction there are only 10 states where only white candidates have won statewide; that count appears to still be intact. Those states are all in the South and Midwest: Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee, West Virginia and Wyoming. (Note that the criteria here was white or non-white; that doesn’t mean other states have elected Black candidates. In some cases, they’ve elected other non-white candidates.)
Virginia has elected three Black candidates to statewide office four times: Wilder as lieutenant governor in 1985 and as governor in 1989, Justin Fairfax as lieutenant governor in 2017 and Earle-Sears as lieutenant governor in 2021. Two Black candidates have run as Republicans and lost: Maurice Dawkins for U.S. Senate in 1988 and E.W. Jackson for lieutenant governor in 2013. (For my purposes today, I’m only counting major party candidates.) Two Black Democrats have run and lost statewide: Don McEachin was the party’s candidate for attorney general in 2001. Hala Ayala, the unsuccessful Democratic candidate against Earle-Sears in 2021, called herself “Afro-Latina.”
The specific question I set out to explore is how these candidates have fared geographically. As a resident of the western part of Virginia — one who lives in a county that’s officially deemed part of Appalachia — I’ve occasionally seen people from elsewhere call the region, well, racist. Frank Kilgore, a prominent lawyer in Southwest Virginia, takes that kind of thing personally. In 2019, he authored a commentary in The Roanoke Times headlined: “Think twice before calling coalfield Appalachians racists and sexists.” Kilgore felt so strongly about this that he expanded that commentary into a book that was intended as a riposte to the author of “Hillbilly Elegy” who is now a U.S. senator from Ohio: “J.D. Vance is a Fake Hillbilly: Think Twice Before Calling (All) Coalfield Appalachians Racists, Sexists and Ignoramuses.” Kilgore wrote: “I have many times been called upon to account for racism and sexism in the coalfields by my friends from other sections of the state and ‘up North.’” He cited some historical examples to the contrary, including how Norton was the first community in the South to field an integrated Little League team, a barrier-breaking event that is now commemorated with a historical marker.
As a white guy of a certain age, I’m in no position to say to what degree racism still exists. I am curious, though, what Virginians have said in the privacy of the voting booth, where we might be able to get some rough measurements.
Here, election by election, are how Black candidates for statewide office in Virginia have fared. (I’m intentionally skipping over presidential elections so we can just focus on state elections.)
1985: Wilder (D) elected lieutenant governor
The first thing you’ll notice is how much election patterns have changed over the years. When Wilder was elected, this was a pretty standard Democratic map. Democrats won only narrowly in parts of Northern Virginia (he took 52.9% in Fairfax County and lost Fairfax city narrowly) but won big in Southwest Virginia (he took 62.6% in Buchanan County, virtually the same share that he polled in Arlington and Alexandria at 63.3%). Try telling that to someone today and they’ll laugh at you. Other parts of rural Virginia regularly voted Democratic. Democrats in 1985 were greatly concerned that the presence of a Black candidate would sink their ticket. It obviously did not. Wilder ran behind gubernatorial candidate Gerald Baliles, but not that much behind. Baliles took 55.2% of the vote, Wilder 51.8%. Baliles’ victory map looked pretty much the same as Wilder’s.
1988: Dawkins (R) loses U.S. Senate race
Republicans struggled to find a candidate to run against former Gov. Charles Robb in the 1988 Senate race, then at the height of his popularity. They wound up with the little-known Dawkins, who failed to win a single locality. There were just three localities where Dawkins managed to crack 40%: Greene County (41.3%), Augusta County (40.6%) and Carroll County (40.5%). His worst locality was Norton, where he polled just 17.3%, but that hardly seems attributable to race: Wilder had taken 62.7% of the vote there three years earlier.
1989: Wilder (D) elected governor
Wilder’s map in 1989 contracted from four years earlier, which prompted much angst among Democrats on election night that year. I remember being in Richmond and breaking the news to then-state Senator, now U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Newport News, that Wilder was losing counties in Southwest Virginia that he’d won two years previously. For you young’uns, there was no Twitter then and dinosaurs roamed the earth. At the time, a lot of political analysts attributed the changing map to racial dynamics. I’m in no position to dispute that, but what we also see are the first signs of a realignment that has seen Democrats lose most rural areas, while building up margins in suburban areas that were considered off-limits to the party back then.
2001: McEachin (D) loses attorney general’s race.
Don McEachin did not do well in his 2001 race against Jerry Kilgore — not in Southwest Virginia (where fellow Democrat Mark Warner was running up the score in the governor’s race), but not anywhere, really. Kilgore even won Fairfax County, something today’s Republicans can only dream of.
2013: Jackson (R) loses lieutenant governor’s race.
Now we see a more modern election map. By the time that E.W. Jackson ran and lost in 2013 to Ralph Northam, Republicans had come to dominate rural Virginia, particularly Southwest Virginia. That means some counties achieved this distinction: They voted both for Wilder in 1985 and 1989, and for Jackson in 2013. Hold that thought.
2017: Fairfax (D) elected lieutenant governor.
Here’s another modern election map, just from the Democratic side. The map that Fairfax won by looks about the same as that of most winning Democratic candidates these days.
2021: Earle-Sears (R) elected lieutenant governor over Ayala (D)
We see the continuation of the same voting trends, with the Democratic vote concentrated in the Northern Virginia, Richmond and Hampton Roads metros, while the Republican vote is almost everywhere else.
What’s all this mean?
You’ve just seen how much voting patterns have changed over the past three decades, from Wilder’s winning map (for Democrats) in 1985 to Fairfax’s winning map (for Democrats) in 2017. However, when viewed through a racial dimension, here’s what I see: Over those three decades, every locality has had the experience of voting for a Black candidate for statewide office. In 1985, none could claim that. Now they all can — and all but one can do so multiple times. The only locality I can find that’s only voted once for a Black candidate statewide is Hopewell, which voted for Ayala in 2021 — but if you look at the presidential elections, Hopewell has voted three times for Black candidates — Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 and the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris ticket in 2020. Hopewell also voted multiple times for Black candidates for Congress — first McEachin and then Jennifer McClellan. I wonder if any other state in the country can make claim that every one of its localities has voted at least once for a Black candidate running statewide? I’m guessing some cannot.
Virginia had achieved that distinction by virtue of the fact that both Democrats and Republicans have nominated Black candidates for statewide office. The fact that we’ve also seen realignment over that time adds another layer of historical intrigue.
We’ve had eight elections (with nine candidates) where a Black candidate was on the ballot for statewide office (again, I’m leaving out the presidential races). Since Dawkins didn’t win any localities, no locality has voted for a Black candidate every time. But some have voted more Black candidates more often than others.
Here’s some political trivia for you: Some of the whitest counties in the state have voted for Black candidates more frequently than some of the most diverse ones. Buchanan County, Dickenson County, Lee County, Norton, Russell County and Wise County have voted for Black candidates four times (Wilder 1985, Wilder 1989, Jackson 2013 and Earle-Sears 2021), the same number aof times as Fairfax County (Wilder 1985, Wilder 1989, Fairfax 2017, Ayala 2021).
While obviously Fairfax County has far more voters than those Southwest counties, those Southwest counties have cast a higher share of their votes for Black candidates than Fairfax County ever has. Fairfax County went 52.9% for Wilder in 1985, 55.9% for Wilder in 1989 and 67.2% for Fairfax in 2017, 69.3% for Ayala in 2021.
By contrast, Wilder topped out in Southwest at 62.7% in Norton in 1985 and then upped that to 65.5% in Norton in 1985. Jackson took 73.7% in Lee County in 2013 while Earle-Sears’ high point in the state in 2021 was 87.5% in Lee County. Her low point in those Southwest localities, if you can call it that, was Norton at 72.3%.
For what it’s worth, those Southwest counties that have voted four times for Black candidates range from 91.8% white in Wise County to 98.1% white in Dickenson County. Those aren’t the only four-time counties in the state, but they are the whitest among the localities that have voted at least four times for a Black candidate for statewide office. Dickenson, in fact, ranks as the whitest county in the state. The second whitest is Highland County, at 97.4%. It’s voted for Black candidates twice — Jackson in 2013 and Earle-Sears in 2021.
The least-white locality in Virginia is Petersburg, where 75.8% of the population is Black. Petersburg has voted for Black statewide candidates five times (Wilder 1985, Wilder 1989, McEachin 2001, Fairfax 2017 and Ayala 2021), skipping only the two Republican candidates — Jackson and Earle-Sears.
Joining Petersburg as five-time localities are Brunswick County, Greensville County and Portsmouth, all of which have Black majorities, as well as Charles City County, Hampton, is. Newport News and Richmond, which have no racial majority. Then there are three white-majoritiy localities — Arlington and Charlottesville may not be that surprising being such Democratic strongholds, but rural Surry County is more interesting. Surry County has also voted five times for Black candidates — Democrats Wilder in 1985, Wilder in 1989, McEachin in 2001, Fairfax in 2017, then flipped to Republican Earle-Sears in 2021. Surry County is 57.3% white.
Now, I don’t mean for any of this to suggest that we have cured every prejudice in the land because we surely haven’t. Some of these stats are skewed by the increasingly polarized nature of our politics, with many voters reflexively voting Democratic or Republican in a way they once didn’t. Are some of these overwhelmingly white counties — which have voted overwhelmingly for Black candidates — a comfortable place for someone non-white to live? I wouldn’t know, and wouldn’t presume to say, but perhaps the census stats answer that question.
I do, though, suggest that politics is sometimes more complicated than we think.