The Democrats’ statewide ticket did something this week that their nominees for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general haven’t done in 12 years: They marched in Buena Vista’s traditional Labor Day parade, then took part in the speech-making that followed in Glen Maury Park.
This used to be a required event in Virginia politics — the fall equivalent of spring’s Shad Planking in Wakefield. The Shad Planking went away in 2017, which also happens to be the first year that the Democratic ticket skipped Buena Vista for more vote-rich venues elsewhere.
Whether you intend to vote blue or not, give Democrats credit for coming back to Buena Vista and an event that has symbolic value across the western part of the state.
This clearly wasn’t something that Abigail Spanberger, Ghazala Hashmi and Jay Jones needed to do. It’s been 20 years since Democrats last carried Buena Vista in a race or any of the offices they’re seeking. In that time, Democrats have won plenty of statewide elections without Buena Vista’s help. When they’ve lost, more support out of Buena Vista wouldn’t have made the difference anyway.
So why does the ticket’s appearance in Buena Vista matter, then? If I were a cynic, I might say this was purely for public relations purposes — Spanberger was accompanied by a video crew, and by Wednesday, her campaign had already produced video of her marching down Magnolia Avenue, surrounded by smiling, happy supporters. Why stage a parade when you can take part in a real one? I’m generally not a cynic, though, so I’ll point out that in many ways all campaigns are, by definition, about public relations, so the Democrats ought to get credit for stepping outside their political comfort zone to parade through a city that now votes 70% or more Republican.
A better question is whether Buena Vista voters heard anything that would bring at least some of them back into the Democratic fold. We won’t know that until the votes are counted in November. Realistically, the voters under the pavilion roof at Glen Maury Park didn’t hear much — there’s only so much you can say in the two minutes each candidate had allotted (and, as I noted in an earlier column, much of what the Republicans had to say was drowned out by hecklers).
All three Democrats did make some reference to rural voters: Spanberger cited her work on the House Agriculture Committee (although Buena Vista isn’t really a farming community), Hashmi and Jones referenced threats to rural hospitals (although the ones usually cited as being endangered by the One Big Beautiful Bill aren’t in the Shenandoah Valley). Still, as with many things, it’s the thought that counts — and nobody in Buena Vista was expecting a policy speech anyway. Republican Attorney General Jason Miyares came the closest to delivering one, talking about how Virginia has reversed its demographic trends that once saw more people moving out than moving in and how it has dramatically reduced addiction-related deaths.
Here’s why Buena Vista matters, aside from all the tradition wrapped up in its Labor Day event: Buena Vista’s realignment from a Democratic stronghold (62.1% for Charles Robb in 1981) to a Republican one (74.3% for Glenn Youngkin in 2021) mirrors the larger realignment of blue-collar voters that has played out nationally.
It’s unclear whether Democrats nationally have come to grips with why this has happened — much less what to do about it — but much of their fate depends on whether they do. Elections are ultimately a math problem, and Democrats have failed it in two of the past three presidential elections. Presidential elections are a math problem where the answer is known in advance. It’s 270 — that’s how many electoral votes it takes to win the presidency. The challenge is how to get there. It’s perfectly fine for Democrats to lose industrial states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania, as long as they find other states with just as many electoral votes or more that they can win. So far, they haven’t, so realistically any path back to the White House needs to run through those states — and the working-class voters in those states.
To the extent that Buena Vista is Virginia’s equivalent of those Rust Belt states (just with a Southern accent), then the Democratic ticket’s decision to spend a few hours there Monday offers at least some indication that the party understands it needs to win back those voters.
It’s unclear to me whether Democrats can ever be competitive again in places such as Buena Vista. Democrats often complain that many blue-collar voters vote against their own economic interests when they vote Republican, but that critique misses two things. First, such voters tend to be culturally conservative, so they feel they’re very much voting for their cultural interests when they vote Republican. Second, such voters often have a different view of their economic interests than what Democrats think they should have.
Some of the Democratic marchers shouted slogans such as “workers, not billionaires,” but it’s unclear how many people in Buena Vista have actual antipathy toward billionaires. Perhaps they are more concerned about how much they’re paying in taxes and not doing the math to see how that compares to, say, Elon Musk? All politics is local, the saying goes, and there’s nothing more local than your own paycheck — and how much the government is taking out of it. I have to wonder how many people simply don’t care if billionaires get what seems to Democrats as a better deal. If that analysis is right, then Democrats have a real messaging problem that no catchy slogan can fix.
There are, however, two things about Buena Vista that could make it susceptible to at least a modest Democratic comeback: tariffs and school funding.
Tariffs: Buena Vista is uniquely at risk to retaliatory tariffs
We all rely on imports somehow — you’re reading this on a device that was probably built in another country, because if that device were built with American labor, you couldn’t afford it. We’ll all feel the cost of tariffs, simply a fancy French-derived word for a tax on imports. President Donald Trump is counting on tariffs to encourage consumers to buy more domestic goods and to encourage more manufacturers to produce those goods in the U.S. The danger is they won’t and, in some cases, can’t. We can’t grow coffee here, so if you really want your morning joe, be prepared to pay more for it. Democrats are warning that tariffs will raise prices; the danger for them is that voters don’t really connect those to Trump’s policies. It’s the classic case of the frog in the hot water; the temperature (or prices) may rise so slowly that the frog doesn’t realize it’s being cooked — and people just see rising prices as a way of life, not a policy choice.
The wild card is retaliatory tariffs imposed by other countries on our exports. If foreign customers balk at the higher prices that come from that, the result could be fewer orders for American goods — and fewer jobs at those American factories. We may not notice prices edging up, but we would, by golly, notice if we lost our job. That’s the gamble Trump is taking — the possibility that disrupting global trade might come back to bite his own supporters when some of them lose their jobs. Coal miners are already feeling this: China has reduced coal imports from the United States by 12% this year and instead increased coal imports from Canada.
Here’s something Trump has on his side, though: Not many American manufacturers are exporters. Some fields are export-heavy — agriculture and coal, for instance. However, most manufacturers don’t export anything. Retaliatory tariffs might hurt them in other ways — on parts, for instance — but the best study I’ve been able to find (from the Federal Reserve) says only 18% of American manufacturers export anything. The threat of retaliatory tariffs may not hit broadly.
Here’s how Buena Vista is different. A New York Times analysis earlier this year sought to identify the communities most at risk of retaliatory jobs — in other words, which ones have the highest share of jobs in sectors likely to be targeted by Canada, China and the European Union. That analysis found that just 3.8% of the jobs in Virginia are in such fields, but those jobs are concentrated in the Alleghany Highlands, Southwest Virginia and parts of the Shenandoah Valley and Southside — all strongly Republican areas. The biggest concentration of all is in Buena Vista, where 28% of the jobs are in fields that could be subject to retaliatory tariffs (although it’s unclear exactly which industries this refers to).
The key phrase there is “could be” because we haven’t seen retaliatory tariffs sting Buena Vista yet. The most recent unemployment figures show Buena Vista’s unemployment rate coming down from 4.2% in June to 3.7% in July, which is exactly what it was a year ago. If retaliatory tariffs ever do hit home, then Buena Vista is a place to watch to see whether job losses due to Trump’s tariffs push voters back to Democrats. For now, though, the threat of retaliatory tariffs seems theoretical in Buena Vista.
Jay Jones, the Democratic candidate for attorney general, used his speaking time in Buena Vista to declare that Democrats “will usher in a brighter day we haven’t seen in three and a half years.” The challenge is whether Buena Vista voters see the need for a brighter day, or whether that bright day is already here. An inconvenient statistic for Democrats: Employment in Buena Vista peaked in June 1999 and then fell to a low under Barack Obama. Employment rose again under Trump’s first term. The pandemic wiped out a lot of jobs and employment, then rebounded under Joe Biden, but still never reached the high it did under Trump 1.0. If Democratic strategist James Carville was right when he said years ago, “it’s the economy, stupid,” then it’s no wonder that Buena Vista voters backed Trump: Employment-wise, Buena Vista had better numbers under Trump 1.0 than it did under either Obama or Biden. Many of the Democratic complaints about Trump — that he’s an autocrat who is endangering democracy and that his policies will gut the nation’s safety net — may feel like distant concepts when the everyday reality in Buena Vista is that jobs are up and unemployment is down.
School funding: Buena Vista is more dependent on Northern Virginia’s economy than most localities.
The typical school system in Virginia gets 34.5% of its per-pupil funding from the state, according to the Virginia Department of Education. Those figures are lower in more affluent suburban areas (Arlington County gets 9.5% of its per-pupil funding from the state) and higher in less affluent, generally rural areas (Scott County gets 66.1% of its school funding from the state).
Buena Vista is very much on the high side — 60.6% of its school funding comes from the state. Buena Vista is a city that takes a lot of pride in its schools; the loudest cheers I heard at the Labor Day parade weren’t for the politicians but for the cheerleaders, who were marching in front of the band. Parry McCluer High School is well-known in sports circles for being a team that always produces an enthusiastic home crowd, no matter what the Fighting Blues’ record might be.
When we say that 60.6% of the funding comes from the state, what we really mean is that about 25% of the city’s school funding comes from Northern Virginia, since 42% of the state’s general fund tax revenue comes from Northern Virginia, and 42% of 60.6% is 25%.
People in Buena Vista may not realize it, but the funding of their beloved schools is tied, in part, to the economic health of Northern Virginia. Buena Vista voters might well agree with Trump’s downsizing of the federal government, but Buena Vista taxpayers could wind up having to pay more if those job cuts tank the Northern Virginia economy — and result in less tax revenue flowing to Richmond and then less flowing out to places such as Buena Vista. We are seeing some softness in the Northern Virginia economy — Arlington’s unemployment has gone from 2.5% a year ago to 3.5% in July; Fairfax County has gone from 2.8% a year ago to 3.6%; Falls Church from 2.7% to 4.4%.
Those numbers may not seem large to those of us in Southwest and Southside — Emporia had the state’s highest unemployment in July, at 8.1%, followed by surrounding Greensville County at 7.1%, and that’s not produced any political outcry (although maybe it should). However, Emporia and Greensville are not the state’s economic engine, and the reason for the high unemployment there doesn’t have a clear political explanation (the closure of the Boar’s Head meatpacking plant over contamination concerns and the closure of the Georgia-Pacific plywood factory because the product isn’t in much demand right now). Buena Vista’s school funding isn’t really tied to whether Emporia and Greensville County are economically healthy; it is tied to Northern Virginia, although people may not see that directly.
Buena Vista is no longer a political bellwether, but it could be an economic one, which does give the city some political significance: If Democrats are to ever make their case that working-class voters should come back to the party, here’s where they could most easily make it. If they can’t make that argument successfully in Buena Vista, though, they’re going to have a much harder time in other communities that have less at stake.
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