Is Virginia swinging from a red state to a blue state? Despite high-profile victories in campaigns for Governor and U.S. Senate, Democrats aren’t likely to take control of the General Assembly any time soon, writes Jeff Schapiro in the Sunday Times-Dispatch:
Even with John Chichester, Vince Callahan and five other GOP legislators retiring, Democrats may be in for a rude reminder: that Virginia, at least at the General Assembly level, is Republican at heart.
This has nothing to do with the disposition of voters and almost everything to do with redistricting. Current districts, drawn in 2001 by Republicans to protect Republicans, will give the party an important, albeit artificial, advantage in protecting its shrinking majority.
Meanwhile, concludes Schapiro, the retirement of Chichester and Russell Potts suggest that a Republican-ruled state Senate will tilt to the right.
Although I take issue with the biases embedded in Schapiro’s writing, I credit him with being a shrewd observer of Virginia’s political scene. He’s done a good job of anticipating political shifts inside the General Assembly throughout the transportation debate.
Speaking of Schapiro’s biases, can there be any question as to where Schapiro’s sympathies lie throughout the transportation debate? Writing about a post-Chichester General Assembly, he says:
Dead and gone would be the bipartisan coalition that collapsed this year because of the betrayal of Chichester over transportation by such supposed fellow centrists as Tommy Norment, Ken Stolle, Walter Stosch and Marty Williams.
Got that? Norment, Stolle, Stosch and Williams — all four of them — “betrayed” Chichester by backing a compromise with conservatives in the House of Delegates. Chichester didn’t “betray” them by bucking the party and working with Dems to scuttle the GOP compromise.
Norment, Stolle, Stosch and Williams have their centrist credentials called into question — they are only “supposed” centrists — because their plan would provide a mere $1 billion a year or so in tax/fee/penalty increases for transportation, plus borrowing $2.5 billion, while the true moderate Chichester has called in the past for tax increases significantly higher — tax increases that the Times-Dispatch’s own opinion surveys show are not supported by the public.
The interesting question now, to my mind, is the impact of a Republican shift to the right. The atrocious transportation package passed by the General Assembly is the outcome of four years of Chichester-induced stalement. Were it not for that breakdown in the legislative process, GOP legislators would not have passed a panicky, patched-together bill to make it look like they’re “doing something.” As House Speaker Bill Howell grows into his job — even Warren Fiske at the Virginian-Pilot has noticed — the GOP may become more effective as well.
If a more conservative GOP caucus focuses on devising imaginative, low-tax, market-based solutions for Virginia’s problems, Republicans might well receive a ringing endorsement from voters. If they settle for pushing hut-button issues dear to the cultural right but not the rest of the electorate, Democrats can start plotting the eventual take-over of the Assembly.