by Frank Muraca
When Donald Trump became the presumptive GOP nominee, Virginia’s Republican candidates for governor and Congress offered tepid support. Barbara Comstock, representing the diverse 10th district in Northern Virginia, actually withheld an endorsement, saying that Trump needed to “earn” her vote.
And when House Speaker Bill Howell told the Times-Dispatch that he, too, would back Trump, he tacked on an interesting comment:
Politics at the national level won’t change how Republicans in Virginia govern and lead. We’ve distinguished ourselves from Washington over the years, and I think voters recognize that.
Howell’s comment was true – Virginia has historically distanced itself from the unpredictability of national politics. There was a time when Virginia’s political leaders could step away from national politics, even declining to support their own party in presidential elections. But the fact that Virginia’s Republican establishment fell in line for Trump, whose persona and ethos run counter to the Commonwealth’s image of politicians as genteel statesman, shows how much that independence has waned in the past few decades.
The legacy of Harry Byrd Sr. influences Virginia politics today. From the 1920s until the early 1960s, Virginia was dominated by a one-party oligarchy that maintained unbridled control over the state government. The “Byrd Organization,” was just one of a handful of conservative, Democratic machines that controlled the political apparatus of southern states in the first half of the 20th century. Former Senator John Battle, one of the organization’s top leaders, described it as follows:
It is nothing more nor less than a loosely knit group of Virginians … who usually think alike, who are interested in the welfare of the Commonwealth, who are supremely interested in giving Virginia good government and good public servants, and they usually act together.
V.O. Key, one of the preeminent political scientists to study southern politics in this time period, wrote that Virginia was a “political museum piece.”
Of all the American states, Virginia can lay claim to the most thorough control by an oligarchy. Political power has been closely held by a small group of leaders who, themselves and their predecessors, have subverted democratic institutions and deprived most Virginians of a voice in their government. The Commonwealth possesses characteristics more akin to those of England at about the time of the Reform Bill of 1832 than to those of any other state of the present-day South.
One of Byrd’s most consequential accomplishments was creating a political reality separate from the national scene.
With a small, controllable electorate, Virginia’s Democratic leaders were able to act independently of national trends or opinions. The organization flexed its muscle during the Great Depression when President Roosevelt, a fellow Democrat, was selling the New Deal to the American electorate. Virginia, a Democratic stronghold committed to fiscal conservatism, was one of the least cooperative states in enacting the New Deal’s programs.
“The structure of Old Dominion politics permitted the coexistence of the New Deal and the Organization,” wrote Ronald Heinemann in his biography of Byrd.
The state’s off-year election arrangement kept state elections from being influenced by the heat of a national contest. The electorate remained small and controllable. Provided with jobs in a period of great scarcity, the “courthouse crowd” remained intensely loyal to the leadership. The people who received most of the New Deal money and who might have opposed the Organization had no political voice. Likewise, urban interests, which tended to favor increased spending for educational and welfare facilities, were grossly underrepresented in the legislature and, thus, powerless. Finally, there was rarely an alternative to vote for. Virginia was a Democratic stronghold, and party loyalty demanded that both state and national leaders be endorsed. Republicans were hard to find, and the avid New Dealers were pitifully weak.
For years after, Byrd and his associates were at odds with the liberalizing policies of national Democrats. Byrd himself was one of the key figures in organizing Virginia’s “Massive Resistance” to forced integration of public schools.
One of Byrd’s tools for keeping the distance between Virginia and national Democrats was maintaining a “golden silence” — refusing to support either candidate — during presidential campaigns. And as one of Virginia’s preeminent leaders, he walked the line between Democrat and staunch conservative until his death in 1966.
Last year, while criticizing Governor Terry McAuliffe over an appointment to the Virginia Supreme Court, Del. C. Todd Gilbert, R-Woodstock, told the Washington Post:
We said we were going to see a Washington-style approach to governing take hold in Virginia. We have had battles with the Senate and governors, but I have never seen it this toxic and the only different variable in this equation is Terry McAuliffe.
The idea that Richmond has become as vitriolic and contentious as Washington is not new. But the way Trump’s nomination has played out over the state’s Republican leadership reveals how far Virginia has come from its predictable, oligarchic roots.
As Howell said, national politics won’t affect how Virginia Republicans lead at the state level. But in so many ways, it already has. Today, the electorate is much larger and more diverse, elections are actually competitive, and there’s a genuine struggle between two parties over the future of the state. It isn’t that Virginia is becoming more like Washington, it’s that Virginia is becoming less like old Virginia. Populist candidates like Trump benefit from that change.
Frank Muraca is a free-lance writer in Northern Virginia. He publishes The Nutshell, a newsletter about Virginia public policy.
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