by Dick Hall-Sizemore
Southwest Virginia elections—The folks in the Mt. Rogers region take their politics seriously. Along all those mountain roads are numerous assemblages of campaign signs like the one shown above, although this is small in comparison to some. (You gotta love a candidate nicknamed “Stingy”!) Because the General Assembly seats are, for the most part, uncontested, the action is with the campaigns for local offices.
Bellwether—The national columnist, E.J. Dionne, Jr., has picked up on David Toscano’s theme of Virginia being a bellwether state. In a recent column, he argues that both parties in Virginia are resorting to the familiar tactic of getting their voters to the polls by “scaring the daylights out of them.”
The Democrats are warning ominously that Republicans, “MAGA extremists,” if they take over both houses of the legislature, will abolish abortion. For their part, Republicans are declaring that Democrats want to defund the police and let criminals “walk easy.” As Joshua Cole, a Democrat running for a House seat in the Fredericksburg area told Dionne, “It’s either abortion or it’s crime.”
Dionne concludes, “Both parties will be intensely watching Virginia for clues about 2024’s political atmosphere…. The upshot: huge sums of money dropped on a few places are turning Virginia into a laboratory where competing theories about what moves voters are being tested.”
Local elections are the most fun–Speaking of local elections, Dwight Yancey of Cardinal News has a fascinating summary of local elections around the state, albeit mostly in the western part. It includes a description of three indicted Republican candidates on the ballots.
