The political crisis in Virginia threatens to turn a state that has trended Democratic back into a battleground, a development that could complicate the party’s effort to defeat President Donald Trump next year.
The political crisis in Virginia threatens to turn a state that has trended Democratic back into a battleground, a development that could complicate the party’s effort to defeat President Donald Trump next year.
Three of the state’s top Democrats are engulfed in a scandal that has shaken the state government. Gov. Ralph Northam and Attorney General Mark Herring have admitted wearing blackface as young men in the 1980s. Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, meanwhile, has been accused of sexually assaulting a woman in 2004, an allegation he denies.
The men are resisting calls for their resignation.
Virginia’s increasingly diverse and urban population has fueled Democratic victories for a decade. But Democrats are anxious that the dizzying developments could suddenly halt their progress. The prospect of losing Virginia’s 13 electoral votes would spread Democrats thin as they try to win back upper Midwest states that voted for Trump while making a push in GOP-leaning states like Georgia and Arizona.
« This doesn’t change the blue direction of the state long-term, but this certainly complicates things for Democrats in the immediate future, » said Virginia native Carolyn Fiddler, a top operative at the DailyKos website, a force in liberal politics nationally. « Everyone, presidential candidates, Democratic candidates here and everywhere, are going to have to wrestle with this. »
Josh Schwerin, who worked for Northam’s predecessor, Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe, said, « Voters could take this out on Democrats… less as an ideological shift but more as an issue of repercussions for genuine political scandal. »
The president himself gleefully agreed, predicting in a tweet Thursday that he will reclaim a state he lost by 5 percentage points to Hillary Clinton in 2016. « Democrats at the top are killing the Great State of Virginia, » he tweeted Thursday. « If the three failing pols were Republicans, far stronger action would be taken. Virginia will come back HOME Republican) in 2020! »
Trump’s taunt ignores his own history of sexual assault allegations and his contorted relationship with race, including when he insisted after a 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that there were « very fine people on both sides » of an encounter that left a counterprotester dead.
