Last week, we briefly touched on the Virginia gubernatorial race for what it showed of the continuing derangement in the Republican Party — a Trumpish candidate nearly won that party’s nomination for governor — but this article at New Republic examines how the race also showed positive news for both the Democratic Party and advocates of moving that party in a more egalitarian direction.
The far-right Republican candidate in the race, Corey Stewart, managed to push his erstwhile centrist Ed Gillespie rightward in the race, so that by the end Gillespie was echoing some of his opponent’s defense of Confederate monuments. However, the article makes the case that in the Democratic primary, an opposite tendency occurred, with former representative Tom Periello pushing winner Lt. Governor Ralph Northam both leftwards and into front-and-center opposition to President Trump.
The Hot Screen believes that the fight to return the Democratic party to its pro-working and middle class roots won’t be settled quickly or by any single, decisive victory. We also don’t think that we should underestimate the staying power of more establishment politicians. The article notes how Periello took the lead in nationalizing the campaign, for instance by making a critique of Donald Trump a major part of his platform, and talking about issues such as the minimum wage, college tuition, and corporate money in politics; yet these appeals couldn’t overcome Northam’s long-standing relations with various political interests in the state. As in Jon Ossoff’s run in Georgia, our instinct says that nationalizing a race is a double-edged sword; you may activate some voters for hitting on supercharged issues like opposition to Trump, but you may alienate others who are interested in someone who really knows what is going on at the state level. Of course, these two things aren’t mutually exclusive, and indeed it seems that part of Northam’s success was in co-opting Periello’s nationalizing of the race with his own long-standing political history in the state.
So while Stewart pushed Gillespie toward taking positions that will likely harm him in the general election, it seems Periello may have pushed Northam in a direction that will help him. And at the level of partisan enthusiasm, Northam also seems well-positioned for the general election: the article notes that “[he] received nearly as many votes as were cast in the entire Republican primary, suggesting that Democrats have close to a two-to-one advantage with energized voters heading into the general election.”
