History, Mark Twain once said, doesn’t repeat, but sometimes it rhymes.
The question for Virginia this year is whether Tim Kaine rhymes with Bill Spong and whether Hung Cao rhymes with Bill Scott.
Those with long political memories recall 1972 as the year that a Republican presidential landslide helped Scott upset Spong, the heavily favored Democratic incumbent in the U.S. Senate race in Virginia that year.
We won’t see a 1972-style margin in this year’s presidential campaign, but the most recent polls — all taken before President Joe Biden’s exit from the race — did show the contest tight in Virginia, with some showing Trump slightly ahead (but within the margin of error). We don’t know yet how Vice President Kamala Harris’ ascension to the top spot on the Democratic ticket will change things, but until we see evidence to the contrary, we should assume that Virginia will be “in play.” We also know that we see less ticket-splitting than we used to have, so if the Trump-Harris race is tight in Virginia, how likely will it be that the Kaine-Cao race also turns out to be tight? If Trump were to win Virginia (which is entirely possible), would that create the conditions for Cao to upset Kaine — which would surely then stand in the same category as Scott’s unexpected victory over Spong?
Those of you who are regular readers know what’s about to follow: math and history.
The history comes first: To understand what might happen in 2024, and what did happen in 1972, we need to go back to 1966. That was a red-letter year in Virginia politics. Suburban growth and the Civil Rights Movement were rearranging the state’s political landscape. The Byrd Machine was falling apart. Sen. Harry F. Byrd Sr. had died the year before, and so 1966 saw not one but two U.S. Senate elections in the state, both of which pitted younger, more liberal Democrats oriented toward the national party against older, conservative Democrats of the state’s rights variety.
In both cases, the key event was the Democratic primary, not the general election, because Republicans weren’t yet that strong in the state.
The Democratic primary in the special election to fill the rest of Byrd’s term pitted state Sen. Armistead Boothe of Alexandria against Harry F. Byrd Jr., who had been appointed to the seat until a special election could be held.
The Democratic primary for the regularly scheduled election involved state Sen. Bill Spong of Portsmouth challenging longtime Sen. Willis Robertson.
Both primaries were exceedingly close, and they resulted in a split decision between the younger liberals and the older conservatives: Byrd won with just 50.9% of the vote over Boothe and a margin of just 8,225 votes. Spong, though, ousted Robertson by an even narrower margin — only 611 separated the two.
Both Byrd and Spong went on to win that fall — that was to be expected — but in a sign of how much Virginia was changing, Spong polled a higher percentage of the vote (58.6%) than Byrd did (53.3%).
Spong had been one of the so-called “Young Turks,” a group of younger, more liberal (or, at least, less conservative) Democrats in the General Assembly who had pushed back against Massive Resistance and other Byrd Machine policies. It’s said that President Lyndon Johnson personally recruited Spong to challenge Robertson after Robertson opposed both the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Spong based much of his campaign theme of generational change — he was 45 at the time, Robertson was 79. Spong’s campaign materials proclaimed he was “A Man for Today,” implying Robertson was a relic of the past, which by then he was. It’s also no accident that the two more liberal challengers — Boothe and Spong — both came from urban areas in the growing metros of Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads, while the incumbents came from rural ones, both in the Shenandoah Valley.
Encyclopedia Virginia remembers Spong as soft-spoken and moderate in temperment, although with a wry sense of humor (much like Kaine today). Encyclopedia Virginia recalls: “Spong once told an audience at the National Press Club that he and senators Russell Long and Hiram Fong were going to introduce a bill to protect the rights of songwriters in Hong Kong. The legislation, he joked, would be known as the Long Fong Spong Hong Kong Song Bill.”
Going into 1972, Spong was widely expected to win reelection. At that point, Virginia had only elected one Republican to statewide office since the 1880s: sitting Gov. Linwood Holton. George McGovern’s presidential campaign proved fatal, though. Republican Bill Scott tied Spong to McGovern at every opportunity, and Spong didn’t think it was worth responding. He held off campaigning to stay in Washington to focus on bills he was interested in. “I was so concerned with protecting endangered species,” he later said, “that I became an endangered species.” In the days before limits on campaign donations, one donor dumped $250,000 — big money in those days — into Scott’s campaign for a last-minute ad blitz. Scott won, 51.4% to 46.1% for Spong (and 2.4% for a third-party candidate). Virginia was stunned by the upset.
Scott is remembered ignominiously. A magazine article listed him as one of “The Ten Dumbest Members of Congress.” The magazine article may not have gotten much circulation, but Scott called a news conference to deny the allegations. He retired after a single term. That part isn’t why we’re here today, though. It’s this: Could Cao upset Kaine in much the same way?
Now we get to the math.
The recent Virginia Commonwealth University poll put the Senate race at Kaine 49%, Cao 38%. An Emerson College poll had it Kaine 49%, Cao 39%.
Much may depend on the presidential race. If Harris carries Virginia, it’s hard to see Kaine losing. The universe of Harris-Cao voters is probably quite small. The danger for Kaine comes if Trump wins in Virginia. The higher Trump’s percentage goes in that scenario, the more risk for Kaine: How many Trump-Kaine voters will there be?
Democrats may scoff at the prospect of Trump carrying Virginia, but multiple polls have been quite consistent — the race has been basically tied in the Old Dominion and it’s too soon to tell yet what impact switching Harris for Biden will have. She might energize young voters and others who felt that Biden was just too old for the job. She might also lose others. We may need to wait until after the Democratic convention Aug. 19-22 to get a true fix on the state of this tumultuous race.
In the meantime, let’s consider this:
- Kaine’s two previous senatorial runs came during a favorable political climate for Democrats. In 2012, Barack Obama was carrying Virginia en route to reelection, while 2018 coincided with Trump’s midterms. This year isn’t starting off so good for Democrats.
- If Trump’s 2024 vote stays exactly the same as it was in 2020 — and there’s no guarantee of that — then Harris will need about 2 million votes in Virginia to win. Biden took 2.4 million four years ago, so she has some room to run weaker, but it’s entirely possible that Trump runs stronger than he did last time and takes more than the 1.9 million votes he polled in Virginia. If Harris runs at Hillary Clinton levels from 2016, keep in mind that Clinton polled slightly less than 2 million votes in the state, so a Clinton-level performance for Harris in Virginia potentially tips the state to Trump. Here’s where that leads:
- Kaine took just over 2 million votes in 2012, his high-water mark. (On the plus side for Kaine, he did run slightly head of Barack Obama in Virginia that year, so might well run ahead of Harris this year). Still, to be on the safe side, Kaine will need more votes than that this time. He may well be able to win all those, but he also needs Harris to do well. Cao may be unknown to most voters, and he may have a penchant for saying dumb things — calling the Staunton newspaper “podunk,” saying Abingdon was too far to drive, saying anything south of Loudoun and Fairfax is “Southern Virginia” — but none of that may matter if voters are in a straight-ticket mood and Trump somehow wins Virginia.
- Finally, in modern times (which I date from Holton’s election as governor in 1969), we have only one example of a U.S. Senate candidate from one party in Virginia winning at the same time that the state was voting for a presidential candidate of the other party. That lone exception was Democrat Charles Robb against a little-known Republican in 1988. (Byrd Jr. won as an independent in 1976 but he was clearly the right-of-center candidate that year, and Virginians voted for Republican Gerald Ford for president.) In the other two — Spong-Scott in 1972, Charles Robb-George Allen in 2000 — Democratic incumbents were pulled under when Republican presidential candidates carried the state.
Few in Virginia in 1972 saw Spong getting swept away. I’m certainly not predicting that Kaine will lose in 2024, but I am saying that some of the underlying conditions are similar — a Democratic incumbent running for reelection in a presidential year where the environment at the moment is in favor of Republicans.
Do you see what I see in this photo?
I write a weekly political newsletter, West of the Capital, that goes out every Friday. In this week’s edition, I’ll examine something unusual at the JD Vance rally in Radford and why it’s good news for Republicans. Hint: It’s in the photo above.
You can sign up for that or any of our other free newsletters here:
