Today is a big day. It is primary election day in Virginia. It is an exciting day for sure.
As of this morning, there are 109 Democrats seeking to represent 88 of 100 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates. Tomorrow there will be 88 Democrats left fighting to represent 7,040,880 of the more than 8,001,000 Virginians. Rumor has it two more races might pick up Democratic challengers even today bringing the total to 90.
No matter the results in the various primary races, this achievement alone gives us as a Democratic party cause for celebration. Many of these races have been uncontested by Democrats for decades. We spend diary after diary debating what is the cause of the urban-rural divide. A major contributing factor has to be the fact that we just do not compete in far too many rural areas. We do not even bother to field a candidate. If you do not ask for their vote how can we expect their vote?
In the last House of Delegates race in Virginia, Democrats only contested 56 of these seats. Democrats only told 4,480,560 Virginians out of 8,001,000 we cared enough about them to want to represent them. Showing the additional 2,560,320 Virginians we do care about their concerns is a big deal. It will pay huge dividends for the party in Virginia for years to come.
Not only that, as a practical matter, Republicans now must win 39 contested races to secure a majority. Only 12 Republicans will win their seats by virtue of just signing up to run. Last cycle 44 Republicans just filed the paperwork and got their seat in the House of Delegates. That means only 7 Republicans needed to win contested races in order for Republicans to secure a majority in the 2015 cycle. Let us hope those days are behind us forever now.
Below, at the end of this post, is a list of the races where a Democrat is running with no primary challenger. Clicking on the district number will take you to a data profile of that district, clicking on the name of the candidate will take you to some element of their web presence where you can connect with their campaign and maybe contribute.
I like this post, but why is it you say we need to re-examine our priorities again?
We should rally behind and support each and everyone of these candidates. We should examine our priorities when it comes to elections. Just looking at the $8 million spent to get John Ossof into the runoff election could have meant nearly $100,000 per candidate in these House of Delegates races. And turning back the Republicans in these state legislative bodies should be one of our top priorities as a party. Consider that now Ossof has raised a total of $23 million to represent 730,000 people while far too many of these state legislative races are starved for resources. Funny thing is, those 88 state legislative districts we are competing for represent 10 times the number of people the Ossof seat does.
- 88 Virginia Delegate Seats represent 7,040,880 people, we have contributed around $1,000,000 to these races over the last 3 months.
- 1 congressional seat representing only 730,000 or so people we have contributed more than $15,000,000 to in the last 2 months.
I am not arguing that the congressional seat is not important, but that these House of Delegates seats are not unimportant. We must rally behind these candidates and we must support these campaigns.