As of 8:15 a.m. today, it looks like Jim Webb will be the next U.S. Senator from Virginia, assuming that he holds his razor-thin lead after a recount. When Virginia elects Democrats to the Senate, it elects conservative Democrats — at least they’re conservative by the standards of the national Democratic Party. Somehow, I’m not expecting Webb to rack up a really high score from the Americans for Democratic Action.
While electing a populist Democrat who likes guns and excoriated liberal elites before he started taking money from them, Virginia voters also passed a constitutional amendment outlawing same-sex marriage with 57 percent of the vote.
Although voters approved $51 million in road improvements in Loudoun County and another $370 million for roads in Prince William, voters in Stafford County rejected a proposed $238 million bond issue that would have funded local roads and park/recreation facilities. Northern Virginia voters approved a slew of other bond issues, mostly for schools. (See the round-ups in the Washington Post and the Free Lance-Star.)
If there’s a seismic shift in underlying political sentiments here, I don’t see it. George Allen fell victim to an increasingly unpopular war and a string of verbal gaffes. At the same time, cultural conservatives won the big culture-war issue of the day, same sex marriage, by a wide margin. And voters in fast-growing Stafford County voted against bankrolling a major road-building program. Stafford residents may dislike traffic congestion, but it appears that they dislike the prospect of spending public money to fix it even more.
From my obsessed perspective as a transportation policy wonk, I find the Stafford vote the most interesting. If Gov. Timothy M. Kaine thinks that voters will rise up in 2007 and throw out legislators who thwarted his plan to raise taxes, he needs to re-think his logic. They certainly aren’t going to evict House Speaker William J. Howell, who happens to represent Stafford County!
In Loudoun and Prince William, voters did approve a number of transportation projects — but they were specific projects that voters could appraise the need for. Voters were not approving a $1 billion a year in taxes for state lobbyists and politicians to divvy up.