RCHMOND — The 2016 elections are more than five months away, but the 2017 state races started long ago.
This is Virginia. Election season is an interminable phenomenon, thanks to the state’s unusual off-year elections filling holes between even-year local and federal races.
Three statewide government slots will be on the ballot next year: governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general. Democrats are largely falling into line behind unopposed front-runners for two of those jobs, though there’s bound to be some jostling in their primary for lieutenant governor.
Republicans have a more robust slate set to duke it out. The plan has been to hold a convention as opposed to a primary in these races, thanks to a deal cut last year in the often fractious inner circles of the state’s GOP diehards. But that is not guaranteed, and a recently remade party committee will have to make the final call.
Virginia House of Delegates members also stand for re-election next year. Senators serve four-year terms and aren’t up again until 2019.
On the Republican side, high-profile GOP fundraiser Ed Gillespie will try to parlay the momentum he built from 2014’s near takedown of U.S. Sen. Mark Warner into a governorship. He started running last year and essentially announced in September.
U.S. Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Westmoreland, will stand for re-election this year in the 1st Congressional District, but he’s in the 2017 governor’s race as well.
He announced in December, at an annual gathering of state Republicans. It was earlier than Wittman wanted to get in, he said, but the timing was driven by Gillespie’s quick ascendancy to front-runner status.
Corey Stewart, chairman of the Prince William County Board of Supervisors and the head of Donald Trump’s presidential efforts in Virginia, announced his run for governor after a dust-up at the Republican Party of Virginia’s recent state convention. Insiders say he was planning the run for some time, but it was a fight with former Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli over delegates to the GOP’s national convention that solidified Stewart’s announcement.
Three Republicans have put in for attorney general: Del. Rob Bell, a former prosecutor and key House leader on criminal justice issues; John Adams, a former assistant U.S. attorney and White House counsel; and Chuck Smith, a Virginia Beach attorney who’s held a number of roles in the state and local party apparatus and lost a four-way city council race in 2012.
So far the GOP lieutenant governor’s race has a trio of legislators in the mix, state Sen. Jill Vogel, of Winchester, state Sen. Bryce Reeves, of Fredericksburg, and Del. Glenn Davis, from Virginia Beach.
“We have a lot of interesting races,” said Steve Albertson, an influential state party member and writer at TheBullElephant.com.
Locally, Senate Majority Leader Thomas K. “Tommy” Norment, R-James City, has endorsed Gillespie and Reeves.
The more candidates in the GOP gubernatorial race, the better it is for Gillespie, according to Chris LaCivita, a well-known Republican consultant who said he isn’t working for any of the candidates.
“The race will become about Ed,” LaCivita said.
Gillespie also has the advantage of his narrow loss to Warner two years ago, LaCivita said. Many see it as a missed opportunity, thinking a little more money and earlier attention could have pushed Gillespie over the top. The longtime lobbyist and consultant, who’s as insider as it gets in Washington politics, has also made inroads with grass-roots Republicans.
“He hasn’t incurred the wrath, really, of anybody,” LaCivita said.
The outcome of this year’s presidential race will likely have some effect on the 2017 races, but politicos differ over how. In one scenario, a President Hillary Clinton could tap Gov. Terry McAuliffe for a federal post, leaving him to hand the governorship to Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam.
Northam, the only Democrat in the governor’s race, could then run as a quasi-incumbent.
Quentin Kidd, who heads the Wason Center for Public Policy at Christopher Newport University, said he’s eager to see whether Virginia’s once predictable tradition of picking a president from one party, then its governor from the other, will hold. The nationalization of politics leads him to believe that it won’t.
“The era of that cycle of us electing a Republican governor after a Democratic president is dead,” Kidd predicted. “I think the new cycle is, if Democrats win, Democrats then have an advantage, and I think the same thing on the Republican side.”
Albertson said he’ll be watching for a coattail effect from the presidential election, “but in general it’s likely to come down to Virginia issues, like it always does.”
Things have been quiet, for the most part, on the Democratic side of this equation ever since Attorney General Mark Herring announced his bid for re-election. With him forgoing a run for governor, Northam is the heir apparent.
Only one Democrat has announced for lieutenant governor: Justin Fairfax, who ran a close race against Herring in the 2013 attorney general primary. Other candidates will likely emerge.
“The conventional wisdom out there is that Republicans have a deeper bench,” Kidd said. “The lieutenant governor’s race will tell me: How deep is the Democrats’ bench?”
After losing all three of these races in 2013, Republicans are chomping at the bit. It remains to be seen whether they can set aside the arguments that have divided them in recent years, but LaCivita said he likes the lay of the land.
“Gov. McAuliffe has given Republicans three years’ worth of material, and I don’t see that changing,” he said.
This was before word leaked that the U.S. Department of Justice was investigating McAuliffe over campaign donations.
Fain can be reached by phone at 757-525-1759.
