It wasn’t exactly May vs. Corbyn, but Virginia’s Democratic gubernatorial primary was a shocker in its own right. The race pitted Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam (the heir to the Clintons’ heir in the Old Dominion) against former representative Tom Perriello…
It wasn’t exactly May vs. Corbyn, but Virginia’s Democratic gubernatorial primary was a shocker in its own right. The race pitted Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam (the heir to the Clintons’ heir in the Old Dominion) against former representative Tom Perriello, a super-progressive who was attempting to sell the Bernie Sanders program down South.
There wasn’t much polling on the race, but all of the public polls suggested that Perriello was a slight favorite.
That’s not how the race turned out.
Northam beat Perriello like a drum. He dominated just about everywhere. In the expensive, progressive, densely populated D. C. suburbs of Alexandria, Arlington, and Fairfax County, he ran ahead of Perriello almost 2-to-1. In the heavily African-American counties of Sussex and Greensville, Northam led by nearly 50 percentage points. The only places where Perriello showed any strength were rural counties in the central and western part of the state and near the West Virginia border. (Interestingly enough, Perriello did best in counties where Donald Trump ran well in 2016. But the Trump story in Virginia isn’t what you might think: He ran slightly behind Mitt Romney’s 2012 numbers.)
It would be easy to overanalyze this result into some broad theory that might go something like, The Democrats are still in thrall to Clintonism and aren’t ready to go the full Bernie just yet. And that may, or may not, be true.
But there’s a flip side to this coin. Perhaps Obama’s progressive coalition—which included liberals, radicals, minorities, and both union members and professional, suburban whites—has truly fractured. And absent an Obama-like figure it is going to be very hard to put it back together because the minorities and the suburban professionals are not especially interested in garden-variety progressivism.
If that’s the case, the urgent question for Democrats is: What made Obama, Obama? Was it his mix of policy positions? His political gifts? His celebrity status? His identity politics? No one really knows, of course. Though I have my suspicions.
Coincidentally, it’s probably worth noting how polished and poised Kamala Harris looked at the big Senate hearings over the last two weeks.
