Scandals reveal a party beset by infighting and whispers of conspiracies.
Last week, the drama in Richmond entered a new act. Protesters converged on the Virginia governor’s mansion on Wednesday, carrying Ralph Must Resign signs. The crowd wasn’t composed of the Republicans who have opposed Ralph Northam’s agenda as governor or his recent comments in support of a new bill protecting access to abortion, but from many of the very people responsible for Northam’s election. Democratic activists, and even some prominent young Democratic elected officials, including the Charlottesville city-council member Wes Bellamy, continued voicing their demands for the governor’s ousting.
The protests came during one of the most tumultuous weeks in recent memory in the state capitol. The day after the protests, Northam proposed changes to the state budget to address systemic racial inequalities, after pledging to travel the state on a racial “reconciliation tour.” Those promises came two weeks after he admitted to engaging in blackface, and after a blog found photos from his medical-school yearbook featuring a person in blackface and a person in a Ku Klux Klan robe on his page. Later, Attorney General Mark Herring also admitted to previously engaging in blackface. As of right now, the most serious scandal belongs to Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax, who faces two sexual-assault allegations from women who most recently came forward after Northam’s drama began.
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But despite the protests, and despite public calls since the beginning of February from Democrats in and out of Virginia for all three officeholders to resign, all three remain defiantly in power. The immediate backlash and cascading condemnations from politicians have subsided, giving way to an icy silence from the state legislature and a complicated dance of intrigues in the capital city. The potential disruption of the gubernatorial line of succession revealed rivalries among numerous factions vying to win the office in 2021. In the incestuous and insular world of the state Democratic Party, fragile truces have been broken, and conspiracy theories have tumbled from the dark corners of paranoid minds into the media. Although, for now, no top officials have resigned, the Democratic Party in Virginia is in turmoil.
Democratic factions are perhaps irrevocably divided, and the party has lost much of the moral credibility it has used to counter far-right Republican influence. Without an end to the infighting, a dispirited and disgruntled party base could devastate the Democrats’ prospects for continued momentum and future gains.
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In Fairfax’s orbit in particular, the meltdown of a candidate who was a month ago perhaps Virginia’s favorite son has been accompanied by chaos. On February 3, after Northam responded to calls for his own resignation—a resignation that would have made Fairfax the second black governor in state history—the conservative blog Big League Politics first reported that a woman had implied on social media that Fairfax had sexually assaulted her at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. On February 6, that woman, Vanessa Tyson, a professor at Scripps College, in California, released a statement detailing the alleged assault, saying that she had been in “obvious distress” and “never gave any form of consent.” Fairfax responded with his own statement, and later told The Root that he was “very confident that the entire encounter was consensual.”
On February 8, a second accuser, Meredith Watson, released a statement through her lawyer alleging that Fairfax had assaulted her in 2000, while the two were both students at Duke University. The statement says that Watson shared details of the alleged assault well before she made the allegation public, and that her legal team was in possession of “statements from former classmates corroborating that Ms. Watson immediately told friends that Mr. Fairfax had raped her.” Watson said that in 1999 she’d reported a previous alleged assault by a Duke basketball player—later revealed to be former NBA player Corey Maggette—and that she’d told Fairfax about that report prior to the time when she alleges that Fairfax assaulted her.
The situation surrounding Fairfax has changed rapidly. In the five days between Tyson’s and Watson’s allegations, Democratic calls for his resignation resounded, but didn’t quite reach the fever pitch of the calls for Northam’s resignation. But the graphic nature of Tyson’s expanded description of their encounter, and the emergence of Watson’s account, changed that. The outlook also worsened for Fairfax when he allegedly used profanity in an outburst against Tyson during a private meeting with other high-profile Democrats, according to NBC News. Two days later, the Virginia Legislative Black Caucus released a statement calling for Fairfax to resign, saying, “While we believe that anyone accused of such a grievous and harmful act must receive the due process prescribed by the Constitution, we can’t see it in the best interest of the Commonwealth of Virginia for the Lieutenant Governor to remain in his role.
