When Don Huffman was in law school at Washington & Lee University, one of his professors invited him to attend a “mass meeting” of Republicans in Lexington and Rockbridge County.
Huffman, curious and conservative, decided to go, expecting a meeting of hundreds of people. He was shocked to find attendance was only in the single digits.
He was even more shocked when the much older party activists turned to the newcomer and decided he’d make a fine party chairman — so on Huffman’s first day as a Republican, he was hailed as a leader.
Huffman went on to lead not just the local party in Lexington and Rockbridge, but Virginia Republicans statewide. For decades, he was a dominant force in both building the party and moving it further to the right. For eight years in the 1980s and early 1990s, Huffman was chairman of the Republican Party of Virginia — a tenure that still ranks him as the party’s longest-serving leader.
Huffman died early Friday morning at his home in Roanoke. It was his 98th birthday, and the opening day of the party event that bears his name — the Annual Donald W. Huffman Advance. Others would call the annual post-election meeting a “retreat,” but it bears the unusual name “advance” because Huffman, who founded the gathering, insisted that Republicans should never retreat, only advance.
“Don Huffman was a legend in GOP politics and the namesake of our event this weekend. We will all pause the next three days and honor his memory,” said David Botkins, 1st Congressional District Representative to the State Central Committee of RPV. “In our world, this is like Jefferson passing on July 4th.”
Huffman never held an elected office outside the party, never ran for one, but he stands as a seminal figure in Virginia’s political history nonetheless for his work behind the scenes.
“Don Huffman was a trailblazer for the Republican Party in Virginia, leading it from a small regional minority party to a statewide majority party, and helping to elect several Republican officials, from local county supervisors all the way to senators and governors,” said Rep. Ben Cline, R-Botetourt County, in a statement. “He will be remembered for his wit, his integrity, and his love of family, his Boston Red Sox, and his Roanoke community.”
“For me personally he was a friend, mentor, law partner and political ally for nearly half a century,” said former Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Roanoke County. “I had the opportunity to visit him a few times in recent weeks at Our Lady of the Valley [a Roanoke retirement community]. He was alert, capable and a Red Sox fan to the end. For Virginia and the Republican Party he played a critical role in the 1980s in laying the groundwork for making Virginia a two party state which really took off in the 1990s when we started winning more statewide races and control of the General Assembly. As you know he played an important role in George Allen’s election as governor and my election to Congress, which was the first Republican congressional pickup in more than a decade.”
You’ll notice how often those offering tributes cite Huffman’s devotion to the Boston Red Sox.
Huffman grew up around Lexington and took to baseball as a youth. Less known is that he played on integrated teams, which would have been quite unusual in Virginia at the time, according to state Sen. David Suetterlein, R-Roanoke County, who got to know Huffman when he was later in life and often drove him to political events. While growing up, Huffman saw the legendary Ted Williams play, and that made him a devoted Boston Red Sox fan. Even in his later years, Huffman would often attend games of the Salem Red Sox minor league team (recently renamed the RidgeYaks).
Huffman’s other big love: Virginia Tech. He held season tickets to games in many Tech sports, even attending such low-profile ones as wrestling meets. As a member of the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors in the 1990s (he was a George Allen appointee), Huffman insisted that the school use Hokie Stone, a particular type of grey dolomite limestone, in all of its new construction. Suetterlein says some conservatives didn’t like that because that drove up the cost of construction, but Huffman insisted that these buildings were meant to last for a century or more, so if you measured the extra cost over that time, “the cost was not significant but the beauty is.”
After graduating from Tech, Huffman retired to Lexington and worked in a men’s clothing store — eventually buying the business. After several years, he decided to attend law school, but never forgot his start in the clothing business. “I always found it endearing that he never forgot his days at W&L where he worked at Alvin Denis clothiers,” said Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Salem. “He would often recount his time at both.” Years later, Huffman would appear in ads for a men’s clothing store in Roanoke and was also known to sometimes make a key donation to young men seeking office — a new suit.
Huffman settled in Roanoke to start his law practice; this was the early 1960s, when Virginia was essentially a one-party state run by conservative Democrats. Roanoke was the rare outpost for Republicans, but those Republicans were moderate Republicans, the so-called “mountain-valley Republicans” who traced their political lineage back to Reconstruction. Huffman was more conservative than they were, which made for some awkward moments. “His wife is snubbed, he’s viewed as from the wrong faction of the party,” Suetterlein said.
In time, Huffman formed an alliance with Richard “Dick” Obenshain, the Richmond-based leader of the party’s conservative wing. The year 1969 had seen Republicans elect their first governor since the tumultuous post-Civil War years, but that governor was Linwood Holton of Roanoke, the leader of the “mountain-valley” Republicans. Much of the early 1970s saw an intra-party tussle between the Holton and Obenshain factions over the direction of the party. In his history of the politics of that era — “The Dynamic Dominion” — author Frank Atkinson identifies Huffman as “among the dozen or so party leaders” who were key parts of the Obenshain wing. “Don Huffman’s living room becomes the epicenter of planning to get Dick Obenshain elected party chair and wrest control away from Linwood Holton,” Suetterlein said. The conservatives won, which elevated Huffman’s status in the party.
The presidential election of 1976 saw a similar split nationwide, as former California Gov. Ronald Reagan challenged the more moderate President Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination. Huffman was among those backing Reagan.
“They were sort of the Young Turks of the party,” said Gilbert Butler Jr., a retired Roanoke lawyer and developer who was Republican Party chair in the city when Huffman later chaired the state party. “In retrospect, that was a very brave and impressive thing — he could have just gone with the establishment and been a good boy, but he was a man of principle who felt Reagan would be a better president.”
While those conservatives lost nationally in 1976, they prevailed in Virginia two years later when Republicans nominated Obenshain for a U.S. Senate seat after a grueling six-ballot convention. “We felt when he won that we had grasped the brass ring,” Huffman told Atkinson in “The Dynamic Dominion.” That euphoria turned to grief barely two months later when Obenshain was killed in a plane crash.
Obenshain was laid to rest in Botetourt County, his family’s ancestral home, and it’s telling where conservative leaders gathered afterward to discuss their options: Huffman’s home in Roanoke. Atkinson writes that the consensus was in favor of former Gov. Mills Godwin as their first choice, with Rep. J. Kenneth Robinson as their backup. Neither man was interested, though, and the conservatives grudgingly accepted John Warner, the convention runner-up, as their new nominee — although legend has it that Warner agreed to stay out of party business.
The 1980s saw a strange dichotomy in Virginia politics. Republicans held the state’s U.S. Senate seats, but Democrats held the governorship and dominated the General Assembly by commanding margins. In 1984, Republicans needed a new party chairman, and there was no clear frontrunner. Suetterlein said Huffman told him this story about how a new leader was chosen: State central committee members were instructed to write the names of 10 acceptable candidates on a piece of paper. Then the lists were compared. Only two names came up enough to represent a consensus. One of those was a party activist from the eastern part of the state who just had a job change and couldn’t take the post. The other was Huffman.
These were grim years for Virginia Republicans. They had lost all three statewide offices in 1981, then lost them again in 1985 and yet again in 1989. No one, though, blamed Huffman. “He was always very even-keeled,” Butler recalled. “He was always a gentleman, well-mannered, nice to people, very unlike the political climate of today where, when a party suffers major losses they want to take the chairman’s head as blood sport.” Huffman also made it a practice to call people on their birthdays, which helped endear him to many on his side of the political aisle.
Although Huffman was clearly from the party’s conservative wing, he made it clear that all factions were welcome. One way he did that continues to this day. Previous party chairs had often held a post-election retreat, but only with invited guests. Huffman decided to throw the event open to all — the Republican Advance that now bears his name. Originally held at the Ingleside hotel near Staunton, the event in those days was always in the western part of the state. “He always insisted the Advance had to be in the 6th [Congressional] District,” said Kathy Hayden, a longtime Republican activist from Roanoke who said she considers Huffman a mentor.
Huffman also did something that wasn’t well-noticed at the time: He concentrated on special elections to the General Assembly. “He put together a ‘special election in a box,’” Suetterlein said, a program where “you could get a campaign organized in a short period of time.” That enabled the party to put together an impressive streak of special election victories as Republicans clawed their way up in the General Assembly.
Being a party chair is often a thankless job, but many Republicans look back on Huffman as the key figure who helped lead the party out of the wilderness. It’s easy to be a party chair when your party is winning; it’s quite different when you’re not.
“Don Huffman was an even-handed chairman who worked to keep all the feisty factions of the Republican Party of Virginia united,” said former Gov. and U.S. Sen. George Allen. “It wasn’t really an easier task then, although divisiveness was not as publicly dispersed as now with anti-social media.”
Atkinson, who later served in the Allen administration, agreed. “He had immense regard from all players and factions and managed to hold the party together when it was riven by factional divisions during the serial statewide setbacks of the 1980s, so he is an unsung hero of the GOP rebound in the 1990s with election of Allen, [Jim] Gilmore and General Assembly gains.”
Those elections ultimately led to a Republican majority in the General Assembly that’s only recently been displaced. “I recall in 1999 he said to me the three things he never thought he would see in his life were the collapse of the Soviet Union, Republicans winning control of the U.S. House, and VT playing for a national championship,” Atkinson said. “The first two happened in 1991 and 1994, respectively, and the third happened in 1999.”
Huffman wasn’t always on the winning side: Hayden said Huffman was instrumental in recruiting Oliver North as the party’s controversial 1994 Senate nominee; North led most of the way until a last-minute surge by Charles Robb kept the Democrat in office. However, long after leaving the chairmanship, Huffman was regarded as an important voice in the Republican Party, one whose endorsement offered conservative validation to younger candidates in the party. Well into his 80s and 90s, he was known to offer shrewd advice to prospective Republican candidates that often proved prophetic. “He kept his finger on the pulse,” Suetterlein said.
In more recent years, Huffman — by then a widower — moved into Our Lady of the Valley. Suetterlein said he visited with Huffman this fall and asked if he had voted yet. He had not, but planned to vote by mail. Suetterlein suggested he drive Huffman to the registrar’s office that day to vote — a suggestion Huffman eagerly accepted. “He was excited to vote for Winsome [Earle-Sears],” Suetterlein said, and was especially tickled that John Reid was the party’s nominee for lieutenant governor because Reid’s father, the late Del. Jack Reid, had been a strong supporter of his. Suetterlein said Huffman proudly voted a straight Republican ticket. Suetterlein asked Huffman what he planned to do in races where there were no Republican candidates. “He said ‘I’ll vote for any independent who’s running against a Democrat.’”
Update:
A graveside service will be held at 11:30 a.m. on Wednesday, December 10, 2025, at Oak Grove Cemetery (the former Stonewall Jackson Cemetery) in Lexington.
In lieu of flowers, contributions in Don’s memory may be made to Virginia Tech Athletics , c/o Virginia Tech Advancement Division, Office of Gift Accounting, 902 Prices Fork Road, Blacksburg, VA 24061 with a notation of VT Athletics – Don Huffman.
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