WILL VIRGINIA & OTHER RED STATES BECOME BLUE STATES?

The LWCC founder, Kim Drew Wright

 

Until Gov.-elect Ralph Northam (D) won Virginia’s Chesterfield County, the communities southwest of Richmond had been reliably counted on as Republican.  But the voters, infuriated by President Trump, many of them women and Hispanics who had migrated to the area in recent years, they are re-defining Chesterfield County.  They are also upsetting Virginia Republicans who have for years depended on this area.  The GOP had previously used this county to make up for the support the Republican party lacks in the northern urban areas.

 

In this normally Virginia-brand conservative area, dozens of Democratic women roared their liberal politics as their organization’s leader crowed over their party’s historic electoral win.

 

For the first time since 1961, Chesterfield County backed a Democrat for governor, and the driving forces in this suburb included women who defiantly trumpeted a political "label" that their party has ducked for decades.

 

Kim Drew Wright is the founder of Liberal Women of Chesterfield County and beyond, a liberal grass-roots organization that delivered these Richmond suburbs to the Democratic candidate for governor.  “Are we done?” Ms. Wright asked the members of the organization after the Democratic win in Virginia.  “Noooooo!” the women shouted back.

 

These results in Chesterfield are also a potential example of what could be happening in the US well beyond Virginia.  It is happening in those suburbs where the serious anger toward Trump is motivating voters bent on defeating Republican candidates in next year’s midterm elections.

 

“That’s a huge red flag for Republicans and an opportunity for Democrats,” said Jesse Ferguson, a national Democratic strategist. “There’s opportunity in these traditionally conservative suburbs with college-educated white voters who are unwilling to back a Republican candidate. It’s a function of and proof that Trump has tainted the rest of the Republicans running for office.”

 

Chris LaCivita, a Richmond-based GOP strategist who works on national campaigns, said Chesterfield’s results are a pointed reminder of the challenges Republicans face not only to remain competitive in Virginia’s suburbs but elsewhere in the US.  “Midterm and off-year elections are defined by whose base is more animated and engaged, and right now it’s the Democrats,” he said. “You’re going to have to work harder than ever if you’re a Republican in this environment.”

 

There is one issue however is where the DNC has not been able to use this negative attitude toward the president for raising money for the Democratic cause. 

 

Here are the numbers:

 

Overall, since Trump won last November, the RNC has raised $60 Million, and the DNC has only raised $36.5 million.  But the big issue is that the DNC still has a debt from the last election of $2.8 million, while the RNC is totally free of debt.

 

For some reason, the Democrats have been unable to capitalize on the negative Trump issues for raising large amounts of capital from their key supporters.

 

The GOP is holding on to the fact that in the remains of their Chesterfield defeat, Republicans are holding on to what they describe as "their encouraging signs".  That being, that their party’s latest losing gubernatorial candidate still got 7,000 more votes in that county than the GOP’s 2013 nominee.

 

However, the real issue is that the growth in Republican turnout was totally overwhelmed by the area's ballooning number of Democratic voters. Gov. elect Northam received 16,000 more votes than the Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe received in that county in 2013.

 

The Liberal Women of Chesterfield County is an example of a new breed of Democratic activism in Virginia’s suburbs. The group, which says it has admitted nearly 3,000 followers to its private Facebook page, and it has established 13 neighborhood chapters.  It has also canvassed more than 50,000 homes in a get-out-the-vote effort. On Election Day, the group worked with the local Democratic committee to staff all 75 of the county’s polling places, that is something the local Democratic party on its own had previously been unable to accomplish.

 

But the good news doesn’t stop there.

 

Besides championing Northam and the statewide ticket, the group pushed local residents for running for office for the first time.  This included the first openly gay woman elected to the House of Delegates.  She was also a mental health administrator who came within just 128 votes of defeating a Republican House of Delegates incumbent.  There was also a British-born accountant who ran in her first local race and is now Chesterfield County’s newly elected commissioner of revenue.

 

“I wouldn’t have done this every day for the past year if I hadn’t gotten so angry about Trump,” said Wright, a mother of three who had observed politics from the sidelines before last year’s presidential election. “Once you wake up and see how important local elections are, it’s hard to go back to the shadows and stick your head in the sand. Now we have our eye on everybody, from dogcatcher on up.”

 

Wright and her group insisted on including “liberal” in the group’s name, reviving a political brand that Republicans and even some Democrats have avoided. “It was total defiance,” she said. “My mission is to change that connotation of ‘liberal.’ ”

 

The group’s next target is Rep. Dave Brat (R-VA), whose district includes Chesterfield.  Brat earlier this year complained that “the women are in my grill no matter where I go”.  This is a reference to the woman who protested against efforts by Brat and other House Republicans to repeal the Affordable Care Act.  (Most residents of Virginia are very much in support of fixing and saving Obamacare.)

 

Three women and a man who are LWCC supporters are among the six candidates going after the Democratic nomination to challenge Brat in 2018.  The group includes a former CIA operative, an Army veteran, and a former Marine. “Everybody loves to hate Brat,” Wright said. “There’s something about his smug little face.”

 

“In presidential years and in governor’s races, the county where Republicans had their largest margins was Chesterfield,” said Bob Holsworth, a retired Virginia Commonwealth University political science professor. “It was where Republicans always did their best.”

 

But as the area's population mushroomed by nearly 25% between 2000 and 2016, the number of whites in Chesterfield declined by 10% from 2000 to 2010, the percentage of blacks grew by 4%and Latinos more than doubled from 3% to more than 7%.

 

At the same time, Republicans’ victory margins steadily declined. In 2001, Mark Warner was the first Democratic gubernatorial candidate in four decades to get more than 40% of Chesterfield’s vote. By 2013, the Republicans’ winning margin had shrunk to 8 percentage points. In 2016, Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by only 2 percentage points in Chesterfield, setting the stage for the Northam to win.

 

This is only a small example of what is slowly happening all over the country.

I personally attended a large get-together at Thanksgiving and I heard from a number of people here in Silicon Valley that have family connections in Europe.  They emphasized how their relative in Great Britain and other parts of Europe are laughing at Americans and our new president.  In Europe, they are also wondering how long Trump's going to last as the American president.  And they all were saying “You go Robert Mueller!!!!!” ….emphasizing how they hope Mueller’s Russia and obstruction of justice investigation will eventually rid us all of President Trump.

 

But I then asked: “Do you think Mike Pence would be any better?”  It became a bit silent at that point.  As it turns out, the American VP Pence tells the American public a lot of “non-truths”, as does his boss.

 

Anyway, for 2018, things seem to be looking up for the Democrats, especially if they will just stand back and watch Donald Trump continue to self-destruct.

 

I guess at this point, all we can do is hope, pray, and seriously support groups such as Ms. Wright’s: Liberal Women of Chesterfield County!

 

You go girls!!!!

 

Copyright G.Ater  2017