2021 Election Preview Part 1: HOD/Battle for the Suburbs
https://richmond.com/news/virginia/democrat-rodney-willett-defeats-republican-mary-margaret-kastelberg-in-henricos-hd-73/article_911a2302-392e-5752-b1ed-d15b40fc8df7.html
It’s the RVAPolitics 2021 Election Preview! I’ll be looking at aspects of the election in 5 parts over the next 2 weeks:
TODAY -- House of Delegates: Battle for the Suburbs
Friday 10/15 – Lt. Gov/Attorney General: Party Down (Ballot)
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Another year, another super-consequential election in Virginia.
As a reminder, Virginia is one of two states in the nation (NJ being the other oddball) that hosts elections for statewide offices in an odd-year cycle, mostly for arbitrary historical reasons. So the next few years of VA elections goes like this:
2021: Statewide offices and SOME state legislators
Governor, Lt. Gov, and Attorney General (4 year terms)
100 members of House of Delegates (2-year terms)
2022: Congressional Midterms
Members of the U.S. House of Representatives (11 in VA, 2-year terms)
2023: All state legislators
100 members of House of Delegates (2-year terms)
40 State Senators (4-year terms)
2024: Presidential election
President/Vice President (PSYCH: actually still just voting for electors, but whatever)
Members of the U.S. House of Representatives (11 in VA, 2-year terms)
1 Senate seat (6-year term; Kaine’s seat up in ’24, Warner’s in ’26)
So: this year it’s the big 3 statewide races, plus the House.
[SIDEBAR: Thanks to redistricting, there’s a possibility a court may force the state to add an extra round of HOD elections in 2022, under the notion that it’s unfair to ask voters to wait until the following year to be better represented using the new district borders. But this could mean HOD elections in 3 consecutive years – ‘21, ‘22, and ‘23. I argued last year that this would present an opportunity to FINALLY align our statewide elections with the national calendar, but I think that ship has sailed. Still, boy do we LURV our elections in VA!]
OK, so what happens in this year’s House of Delegates races? For better or for worse, I am not a forecaster; if you want specific guesses about each House race, talk to Chaz. The numbers are important, of course: legislative chambers are all about numbers! Dems have a relatively thin majority right now w/ 55 out of 100 seats, so an individual seat can make a big difference. Still, reliable state-level data is hard to come by, and predicting politics is a tricky business, so I am happy to leave the forecasting to others.
Instead I like to focus on the big picture. What do these House races tell us about the state of politics in VA, and maybe the country? Well, like everything else, it is all about the partisan/ideological divide.
Like most of the country, the state has become divided between moderate-to-progressive urban centers and more conservative areas outside of it. In VA, population and demographic shifts have strengthened the urban corridor from NoVA through Richmond out to the tidewater cities. Still, while NoVA has lots of safe Dem seats and SW/Eastern VA includes many clear Republicans, neither party is completely giving up the fight. I count only 9 districts without one of the two major-party candidates.
So what are they fighting for? The suburbs.
I have argued before that the suburban vote (if such a thing exists), has shifted in recent years. The Republican Party, at least geographically, was based on an alignment between rural areas and the suburbs, as a counter to the more progressive urban Democrats. But as the suburbs have developed, they have become more like cities, both in the problems they face (immigration, affordable housing, etc.) and in the kinds of folks who live there. Suburbanites these days are often culturally progressive. They do not come from hunting families, or were raised religiously conservative. They tend to be on the Democratic side of issues like healthcare, gun control, and anti-discrimination efforts.
Still, this is a recent phenomenon and the Republicans are clearly not going to give up the suburbs without a fight. So how do they win back the suburbs? By pulling out the old GOP playbook. For example, Republicans up and down the ballot have recently tried to make an issue of repealing the grocery tax. (I’m not sure that this is big on people’s minds, but sure.)
But there’s a more powerful, longstanding Republican tactic that’s a little more troubling: appeals to white grievance. Going back at least to Nixon, Republicans have tried to mobilize their base and win over “moderate” whites using race. And this year Republicans are clearly taking a similar approach in VA, not just to win the state but as a test drive for next year’s Congressional mid-terms.
Unsurprisingly, the Republicans have focused on education as their key wedge issue. From “critical race theory” to mask mandates and transgender rights, Republican candidates are using the tried and true tactic of covering up appeals to bigotry and ignorance in language about parental rights (a discourse cemented in the battles over segregation). There is an obvious electoral logic going on here. Using these appeals, you can mobilize your conservative base over concerns about cultural reproduction – a fancy term for fear that your kids will have different values than yours – while still using a broad language of parental control to bring in moderates.
While COVID denial and gender discrimination plays a part here, the “critical race theory” canard is really the central plank of this education platform. Launched by a conservative activist last year in a clear attempt to weaponize anti-racism efforts in schools against Democrats, the term positions white parents as the REAL victims of discrimination from liberal elites and their intellectual nonsense.
We will see how this shakes out in the actual results. A key race to watch in the state is happening right here in Henrico, with first-term Delegate Rodney Willett engaged in a rematch with his Republican challenger Mary Margaret Kastelberg. Voters already narrowly chose Willett in the last election, and since then there’s been no particular reason to vote him out.
So really this becomes a proxy partisan fight, and a good bellwether race for the rest of the state. If Willett wins, that probably means the Democratic majority is safe. If Kastelberg wins, though, that suggests the Republican campaign strategy has been a success, and it could be a really bad night for Dems statewide.
Like most observers of this election, I still think the demographics, and Democrats, will prevail, and they hold on to their slim majority in the HOD. Still, one rule of American politics is to never underestimate the power of white racism; fearmongering often proves effective in troubled times. We will soon find out how troubled.