The lead-up to the election in Virginia Beach’s 84th House District has been riddled with attack ads and political theater as the GOP incumbent fights off a challenge from a Chesapeake school teacher.
Glenn Davis, 46, has represented the 84th District since 2013. He’s running against Karen Mallard, a reading specialist at Greenbrier Primary School who unsuccessfully ran in the Democratic primary against Elaine Luria for the 2nd Congressional District last year.
Mallard, 53, has authorized several mailers pointing voters to Davis’ legislative record on charter schools and healthcare, saying he’s voted to take money away from public schools, block Medicaid expansion and gut protections for people with pre-existing conditions.
Davis, who served on Virginia Beach City Council from 2008 to 2012 and ran for lieutenant governor in 2017, has been using Mallard’s attacks against him in his own campaign, saying the “deceitful” ads have boosted support for him. He even credited the Democratic Party of Virginia, who paid for the mailers, with a $44,000 in-kind donation on one of his campaign finance reports.
Davis serves on the House’s education, general laws and transportation committees. His focus for years has been on getting rid of the barriers involved in step therapy, a process that requires patients with serious conditions to try and fail some cheaper medications before an insurance company will cover the drug prescribed by their doctor. His bill, which became law this year, gave patients more protections and transparency.
Given that, he questioned why Mallard would accuse him of taking thousands of dollars from insurance companies.
“It’s a bill they hated,” he said. “It’s a bill that significantly limited the health insurance companies’ ability to override your doctor’s suggested treatments if you or your loved ones are faced with a life-threatening illness.”
The Virginia Public Access Project shows over the years, Davis received a combined $6,500 from the founder of health insurer Amerigroup and its former executive vice president; $250 from the Virginia Association of Health Plans; and $150 from someone who works for the behavioral health company Beacon Health Options.
Davis said he filed a bill with then-Del. Tom Rust, a fellow Republican, in 2014 that sought to overhaul Virginia’s Medicaid system while expanding it with work requirements. It would have set up a temporary bridge program to cover low-income Virginians using Affordable Care Act funds. Nearly all other Republicans voted against it.
Since then, he voted against Medicaid expansion language appearing in the budget every year until 2018, when it passed. Davis said he supported the mandatory work requirements and the tax on hospitals’ revenues that covered the cost that otherwise would’ve been borne by taxpayers.
He also voted in 2017 to have Virginia get rid of certain parts of the Affordable Care Act — commonly called Obamacare — in case Congress repealed the law. That would have meant people with pre-existing conditions wouldn’t get coverage, or would have to pay more for it. The bill passed, but then-Gov. Terry McAuliffe vetoed it.
In a 2018 Facebook video, he called the ACA the “worst policy in the history of our nation”.
Davis, who started an information technology company called OnCall Telecom in 2007, said he wants to focus on bringing more technology into schools to ensure equality in education.
His association with the public charter school Green Run Collegiate, which he helped found in Virginia Beach, has been the subject of Democratic attack ads that say he is part of a “dangerous scheme to weaken our public schools.”
Davis filed a bill in 2014 to give more funding for disabled students at charter schools. That bill died in committee.
Mallard, who’s spent her career in education, said she wants to attract and retain more teachers by raising their pay to the national average — $59,660, according to the National Education Association — restoring public funding from the state to pre-recession levels and funding more counselor positions.
“As an educator, I know how to get by with pennies on the dollar; I’ve been doing it for decades,” she said.
She also wants to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour.
During July’s special session on gun control, Davis filed a bill giving localities the option of banning guns in government buildings if the locality provided security measures like metal detectors or police officers.
He also voted with his fellow Republicans — who have a slim majority in each chamber — to adjourn the session after 90 minutes and send the gun-related bills to the Virginia State Crime Commission to study. He said he wanted to avoid “knee-jerk reactions” and “feel-good soundbites” as a way to address gun violence.
Mallard, who filmed herself destroying a AR-15 rifle after the Parkland, Florida, school shooting while she was running for Congress, chastised the GOP for “doing nothing” during the special session. She knew people who were in the building during the Virginia Beach mass shooting, including her next-door neighbor.
Question
What would your first bill or budget amendment be if elected to the General Assembly?
Glenn Davis
Glenn Davis: The first bill that I would introduce in preparation for the 2020 session would be a re-introduction of legislation I introduced in 2019. You may recall last year that the governor ordered an evacuation for parts of Hampton Roads during Hurricane Florence. That order sent tens of thousands of residents along Virginia’s eastern seaboard to state websites to check their flood evacuation zone, crashing state servers for days. When the state servers crashed, I asked the secretary of public safety to email me the flood zone maps which I hosted within my online business file system on Google’s cloud infrastructure. I then sent links to those files out across the state; needless to say, those servers never crashed. My bill would require “information provided by executive branch agencies, to which citizens would reasonably require access during a state of emergency” be transitioned from state premise-based servers to cloud-based server solutions which automatically scale to prevent such crashes. The lives of Virginians should never be put at risk, especially when the solution is as simple as utilizing technology that was launched in 2012.
Karen Mallard
Karen Mallard: Senate Bill 1406 was passed and enacted last year, which gradually lowers the school counselor to student ratio from 1:375 for elementary schools, 1:325 for middle schools, and 1:300 for high schools, to 1:250 students at all levels over three school years. This aligns with the nationally recommended ratio of school counselors to students. However, the funding in the budget does not fully fund the mandate set in place by the General Assembly — it leaves the extra positions up to school localities to fulfill on their own dime. The General Assembly has mandated a higher Standard of Quality, also known as an SOQ, for public schools in Virginia but has not provided the funding for public schools to meet that SOQ. I would propose a budget amendment that would require the Commonwealth to fully fund the mandate that was enacted, as more counselors would have to be hired to lower the ratio.
Question
How should the General Assembly have responded to the Virginia Beach mass shooting that occurred on May 31?
Glenn Davis
Glenn Davis: The General Assembly responded in a very practical manner. As a significant number of bills were introduced within 48 hours of the special session, the General Assembly chose to allow time for reasonable due diligence and public comments from citizens and stakeholders, rather than forcing a “knee jerk” vote. The Speaker’s decision to send all of the legislation to the Virginia Crime Commission allowed for such deliberation, including expert analysis by the (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives), Virginia State Police, Virginia Department of Health, and National Threat Assessment Center of the U.S. Secret Service. Looking through the legislation, it became clear that we took the right approach, as some bills would have had severe unintended consequences. One measure would have inadvertently deemed a popular sporting pistol used in international competitions an “assault firearm” solely due to the unique placement of its five round magazine. If passed, international competitive shooters in Virginia would have faced felony charges for possession of a sporting pistol that is less of an “assault firearm” than the firearms intentionally excluded. I have had much more dialogue with constituents, colleagues, and subject matter experts since the special session recessed to collaborate further on legislation to protect the citizens of Virginia.
Karen Mallard
Karen Mallard: The General Assembly should have passed common sense gun reforms such as Extreme Risk Protection Orders (ERPOs), also known as “red flag” laws, and universal background checks. These are effective, bi-partisan measures that could prevent those who are a clear risk to themselves and/or others from obtaining a firearm. We know that 94% of Virginians support universal background checks and the Virginia Law Enforcement Sheriffs organization has endorsed the adoption of “red flag” laws as a means of addressing gun violence. Our elected officials should do everything in their power to ensure incidents like the May 31 shooting never happen again. We can and we must do better.
She alluded to recent polls saying the majority of Virginians support universal background checks, and said she supported “red flag” laws which have varying degrees of restriction for potentially dangerous gun owners. Davis said he supported a version of a red flag law proposed by Del. Jason Miyares, R-Virginia Beach, which says the person who might be in a crisis and considered dangerous would be subject to a hearing to determine if their firearms should be taken away.
Davis said he also supports requiring anyone who purchases a firearm at a gun show to be subject to a background check.
The 84th House District — which wasn’t affected in the court-ordered redistricting — has been in Republican hands since 1991 when Bob McDonnell (who went on to become governor) was elected as delegate. The district went blue in the last U.S. Senate and governor races, but Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump won it in 2016.
The GOP currently has a one-seat advantage in both the Senate and the House, with one vacancy in each chamber.
The latest campaign finance reports, due to the Virginia Department of Elections on Monday, show Mallard raising $307,915 to Davis’ $62,273 between Oct. 1 and Oct. 24. Davis has more than double the cash on hand to last him until Election Day.
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Marie Albiges, 757-247-4962, malbiges@dailypress.com
