In rural Virginia, Democrats are much like Schrödinger’s famous cat: both dead and alive at the same time.
If you’re not familiar with the thought experiment by the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, now’s a good time to go off into the depths of the internet to explore the mind-bending implications of quantum superposition.
For those of you more interested in politics than physics, you can stick right here without having to understand anything at the subatomic level.
Virginia Democrats have done something this year that’s not often done: They have fielded candidates in all 100 House of Delegates districts. Not all those are competitive districts, of course. In fact, most districts in Virginia aren’t competitive. That’s not the fault of gerrymandering — these lines were drawn by two court-appointed “special masters,” one from each party, who were tasked with doing exactly the opposite of gerrymandering. Instead, this is simply the consequence of residential patterns and voting allegiances: You simply can’t draw a Democratic district in Southwest Virginia or a Republican district in much of Northern Virginia. Democrats have identified 14 districts they consider “target” districts this year; I haven’t heard a number from Republicans but it’s probably about the same or a little lower. There just aren’t that many swing districts.
Nonetheless, Democrats have come up with candidates in every district — some of those with the recruiting help of California doctor Fergie Reid, son of former Del. Ferguson Reid, who in 1967 became the first Black member of the House since the post-Civil War period. By contrast, Republicans have candidates in 84 districts, leaving 16 Democrats either unopposed or with only independents as the opposition.
What we see here are two different philosophies: The Republican approach is don’t waste resources in districts you know you can’t win. The Democratic approach is that having candidates even in no-win districts gives Democrats there a local rallying point — which might help produce some extra votes for the statewide ticket. Like many things, you can argue that either way. That’s not the point here today; it’s simply to acknowledge that these different approaches exist — and that Democrats have been so committed to their 100-candidates-in-100-districts approach that when their nominee in House District 37 (from Craig County to Rockbridge County) dropped out due to health reasons, they promptly found another.
This is the cat that’s alive.
Now we come to the one that doesn’t appear to be.
Our Voter Guide lists everyone who’s running for office anywhere in the state. We’ve built separate pages for each of Virginia’s 133 cities and counties; just find yours and you can see who’s on your ballot, from governor on down to local offices. We’ve also sent questionnaires to every statewide candidate, every House of Delegates candidate across Virginia and every local candidate in Southwest and Southside; you can see their responses (or lack thereof).
What struck me as I compiled these lists is how few Democrats are running in rural Virginia.
On the other hand, this doesn’t surprise me: We’ve watched the Democratic vote shrivel up in rural areas all over the country. As recently as 2004, Democratic candidates for president were still carrying some counties in Southwest Virginia — John Kerry took almost 54% in Buchanan County and 51% in Dickenson County. Last year, Kamala Harris could only manage 14.5% of the vote in Buchanan and 18.6% in Dickenson. Those weren’t even her low points, either. That was in Lee County, where she polled just 13.7% — in a county that Democrat Mark Warner won in his governor’s race in 2001.
On the other hand, local races are rarely as partisan as national races are. The issues aren’t nearly as ideological — they’re often about much more prosaic things such as rezonings, which can still be political, just in different ways. Is rezoning land along U.S. 220 in Botetourt County for a Wawa convenience store an act of liberalism or conservatism? Or is it just a matter of how we feel about tax revenue and traffic?
Nonetheless, the facts are what they are: You can count the number of Democrats running for local office this year in Southwest and Southside Virginia on one hand: five. That’s four in Southwest (one in Montgomery County, one in Smyth County, two in Wythe County) and one in Southside (Prince Edward County). All these are candidates for boards of supervisors, by the way.
I have two maps that attempt to illustrate this but there are, admittedly, shortcomings with both. Here’s the more complicated version and, yes, it makes my head hurt, too.
First, we have some localities that don’t have any local elections this year — or at least no local elections where candidates might have some party affiliation. Those are the ones in gray. The weasel words there are meant to exempt school board elections, where by law candidates must run as independents, and town elections, which tend to be friends-and-neighbors affairs anyway.
Then there are other localities where all the local candidates are independents — those are in white. In many communities, it’s tradition for candidates to run as independents and it’s considered bad form if someone seeks to run under a partisan banner. That means there could well be Democrats out there running for local office, they’re just not identified as such. I know there’s at least one. In Louisa County, Jack Trammell is running as an independent for the Mountain Road District on the board of supervisors. Earlier this year, he was the unsuccessful Democratic nominee in a special election for a state Senate seat.
Trammell tells me by email he’s simply upholding local tradition. “There are a sizable number of local candidates who run as ‘I’ in central Virginia politics due to tradition; this is part of why I am choosing to do so. The violations of the unwritten rule (that locals run as ‘I’) have increased in the past few years, perhaps providing evidence of growing partisanship none of us should be shocked by. However, I am not so cynical that I believe it is purely a strategic move and have often expressed the wish to my campaign staff in prior elections that I (and others) could run as independents if we believed that the issues were complicated enough to warrant not taking a straight party line. In my case, I am the stereotypical fiscal conservative and social liberal — there is no easy place in either party for that. I personally hope that we can preserve that tradition at the local level so voters get to choose on issues and not parties!”
The red color on the map indicates counties where the only candidates on the ballot are either Republicans or independents — but you’ll see Louisa is one of those, so you’ve spotted one shortcoming of this method already. The blue are the localities with only Democrats and independents (they’re mostly in the urban crescent), and the purple shows localities where there’s a mix.
Here’s maybe a better way to look at things:
This map shows the localities where Democrats are running — as Democrats — in blue. The places in gray have no applicable local elections. The ones in white are all the rest. While there might be some Democrats running as independents in those white counties (such as Trammell in Louisa), this gives a much better sense of where officially declared Democrats are — and where they’re not.
This map also requires some explanation:
Montgomery County, for instance, is bright blue around Blacksburg and bright red in the rest of the county. The Democratic supervisor candidate in Montgomery County this year is in District A, just outside Blacksburg. Three of the five precincts in that district voted 70% or more for Kamala Harris last year; the other two precincts were in the high 50s. This is not your typical rural district.
The lone Democratic candidate in Nelson County — an incumbent — is also running in a district that voted for Harris last year. Again, not typical. Parts of Albemarle are rural but overall the county voted almost 66% Democratic last year. We shouldn’t be surprised to find Democratic candidates there.
It’s the Democratic candidates in the more distinctly rural counties — Smyth, Wythe, Prince Edward and even Northumberland over on the Northern Neck — that are more surprising. I also reached out to them to find out why they were running as Democrats and what the reception had been; none replied.
Here’s why all this matters: These local boards are a good stepping stone to higher office. When we look around Southwest and Southside, we see multiple state legislators who previously were on local boards: Del. Terry Austin in Botetourt County, Del. Joe McNamara in Roanoke County, state Sen. Travis Hackworth in Tazewell County. Mitchell Cornett, the Republican candidate for a House seat in a deep red district, is currently on the Grayson County Board of Supervisors. In Danville, where there’s an open seat, both parties have nominated local government veterans: Gary Miller for the Democrats, Madison Whittle for the Republican, both members of Danville City Council. Both also were elected as independents, because that’s the local tradition in Danville for municipal elections.
The political reality is that many of these House Democratic candidates aren’t going to come close to winning — although they might serve their purpose if they help the statewide ticket get some extra votes. The issues in a General Assembly election are simply too ideologically charged for a Democrat to win in rural areas unless they abandon what have become some core Democratic positions on things like abortion and guns.
Maybe Democratic candidates for a board of supervisors seat won’t win, either, but they’re more likely to. The issues are different, and some voters might be persuaded to judge the candidate on his or her merit — “Oh, I know Charlie/Charlene, he/she has pretty good sense.” Of course, that also requires candidates who are reasonably well-known and reflect the communities they wish to represent. We’ll see in November if voters in the few rural counties with Democrats on the ballot think those candidates fit that bill.
If Democrats are to ever rebuild their electoral strength in rural Virginia — and they may not — the key will be electing more candidates to local office. First, though, they need more candidates to run as Democrats, and that’s not happening.
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