LEESBURG, Va. – A proven way to get voters to the polls is to scare the daylights out of them. In the run-up to November’s elections for Virginia’s state legislature, Republicans and Democrats are doing a bang-up job spreading alarm, on the airways and everywhere else. The outcome hangs on which issue frightens voters the most.
Joshua Cole, a Democrat running for the House of Delegates in the Fredericksburg area, says his doorstep conversations regularly focus on traffic, schools and the high barriers to affording a house. But he is under no illusions about what will decide the contest.
“It’s either abortion,” he told me, “or it’s crime.”
Democrats are betting heavily on anger over the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision and apprehension over “MAGA extremists,” a staple in Democratic ads.
In one of his commercials, Cole speaks of “fighting extremists who want to get between a woman and her doctor” and promises not “to let that happen.” The ad ends with Cole’s mother backing up his promise with the words: “Because my son was raised right.” Voters, says Cole, love his mom’s cameo. “It’s all they talk about.”
For the GOP, crime is the unifying theme. Lee Peters, Cole’s opponent, claimed that Cole “stood with extremists who want to defund the police.” In an ad from Juan Pablo Segura, the Republican in a state Senate race centered in exurban Loudoun County, an actor playing a home burglar “thanks” Segura’s opponent, former Democratic prosecutor Russet Perry, for “making plea deals left and right” and allowing criminals to “walk easy.”
Neither Cole nor Perry, it should be noted, supports defunding the police. In an interview at Shoe’s Cup and Cork, a friendly Leesburg cafe, Perry said the attack ads on crime were factually challenged and fundamentally “disingenuous.” She worked for eight years as a prosecutor under a Republican commonwealth’s attorney and, more briefly, for a Democrat, and also served in the CIA. “For me, crime and public safety is and should be nonpartisan,” she said. But that admirable idea would upend the GOP’s game plan.
Both parties will be intensely watching Virginia for clues about 2024’s political atmosphere, and the margins are tight. Democrats hold a 22-18 seat majority in the state Senate, while Republicans have a 52-48 margin in the House of Delegates. Larry Sabato, director of University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, sees only three to five races as competitive in the Senate and five to eight in the House.
The upshot: Huge sums of money dropped on a few places are turning Virginia into a laboratory where competing theories about what moves voters are being tested.
Abortion rights clearly helped Democrats contain Republican gains in the 2022 midterms, and by doing well in Virginia this year, Democrats would prove the issue’s staying power.
But in 2021, Republican Glenn Youngkin ended a long spell of Democratic dominance with a gubernatorial campaign focused on discontent over the performance of public schools during the pandemic and attacks on “critical race theory.” Youngkin is looking for a GOP sweep of both houses, which would bolster his presidential ambitions (more likely in 2028 than 2024).
Education is playing out in a less ideological way this year – many voters, says Perry, are primarily worried about teachers leaving the profession. Youngkin’s stress this year is on his proposal prohibiting abortion after the first 15 weeks of pregnancy (with exceptions for rape, incest and threats to a mother’s life). He thinks it offers his party nationwide a “reasonable” compromise.
If Youngkin is trying to “cauterize” the GOP’s wounds on the abortion issue, says Fred Yang, a Democratic pollster, his approach could backfire by highlighting an issue on which Democrats have a clear advantage. Cole, Perry and other Democratic candidates are counting on voters’ opposition to any change in the state’s abortion laws and warn that a unified Republican legislature might go well beyond a 15-week ban.
Republican pollster Whit Ayres counters that Youngkin is facing up to the fact that “abortion is as much of a vulnerability for Republicans as immigration, inflation and crime are for Democrats,” and acting accordingly.
The state’s political cognoscenti currently see the likeliest outcome as stasis: Democrats keep the Senate, Republicans the House. But the messiness of politics is inconsistent with the stable conditions laboratory experiments require, and recent episodes could upend the balance in close races between now and Nov. 7.
Virginia is home to exceptional numbers of federal employees, and Sabato thinks chaos in the Republican-led House of Representatives could hurt the Virginia GOP much as the Democrats’ congressional infighting damaged their party in 2021.
State Democratic Chair Susan Swecker sees the election of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) – she described him as “election-denying, conspiracy theorist, gay-hating and anti-choice” – as reinforcing her party’s anti-MAGA message. The mass killings in Maine could raise the profile of gun-safety legislation that Democrats favor.
And, yes, when national analysts are done treating Virginia as a test tube, those actually elected will be back to Cole’s doorstep issues of roads, schools and housing. They are, after all, problems state governments are in the business of solving.
Follow E.J. Dionne @EJDionne on X (formerly Twitter).
