Former Del. Brian Moran of Alexandria announced this morning that he will step down as chairman of the state Democratic Party after a two-year run in the post.

Moran’s resignation will take effect Dec. 8, when the party’s state central committee will meet in Williamsburg and elect a successor. State Del. Charniele Herring of Alexandria, who holds Moran’s old seat in the House of Delegates, already has announced her candidacy for the party leadership post.

Moran became the party chairman in December 2010, succeeding Richard Cranwell of Vinton.

“Being the Chairman of the Democratic Party of Virginia over these past two years has been one of the great honors of my life,” Moran said in a statement released this morning. “I am proud to have led a party that played a substantial role in the statewide effort to reelect President Barack Obama and send Tim Kaine to the United States Senate, and laid the foundation to continue our momentum and elect our candidates in 2013 and beyond.”

Moran served in the House of Delegates from 1996 until 2008, when he resigned to become a candidate for governor. He finished third in the party’s 2009 gubernatorial primary. Moran served as chairman of the House Democratic Caucus for seven years. He is the brother of U.S. Rep. Jim Moran, D-Alexandria.

Moran’s full statement is below.

– Michael Sluss Read more »

2008 results

I just went through and looked at the precinct-by-precinct results for the city of Roanoke in last week’s presidential election.

You might take note of the map I’ve linked with this entry: It’s the 2008, not the 2012, results from the race between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain.

It’s worth taking a look at it, not just for comparison but because it’s nearly the same map for the 2012 race between President Obama and Republican Mitt Romney. Every city precinct — with the lone exception of Williamson Road 1 — voted for the same party in the presidential race that it did in 2008. Williamson Road 1, which flipped, voted for McCain in 2008 and for Obama last week.

Most precinct vote totals didn’t change dramatically, although the margins in most expanded. A few got closer. Perhaps the most notable example of that was the Tinker, which Obama won by only 26 votes in 2008. Last week he again won Tinker — but by an even narrower margin of 15 votes this time.

The rest of the other swing precincts that Dwayne Yancey cited in last week’s “Breaking down the vote in Western Virginia” piece widened, even if only by a bit: John McCain won Raleigh Court No. 4 by 12 votes, versus 42 for Romney; Fishburn Park by 14 votes, versus 98 for Romney; and Williamson Road No. 1 by 23 votes — we actually saw a 78-vote swing there, as Obama won this year by 55 votes.

One other oddity worth noting about Roanoke’s vote totals: Virgil Goode won no more than 30 votes in any of the city precincts — except in Williamson Road 2 where he won 289 votes. If anybody’s got an explanation of why he won so many more votes there than elsewhere, by a factor of 10 in most cases, then please let us know in the comments.

Or post your own analysis: You can find the State Board of Elections Roanoke precinct totals from 2008 here and from 2012 here.

– Mason Adams

Virgil Goode

So, how did former Rocky Mount congressman Virgil Goode’s candidacy as the Constitution Party standard-bearer for president do on Election Day?

Well, for starters, his campaign did not make the difference in Virginia, as some Republicans feared it might.

To be sure, the Democrat-turned-independent-turned-Republican-turned-Constitution Party candidate tried to siphon off votes from Mitt Romney (more on that below), but it didn’t matter. Obama eked out a bare majority of the vote in Virginia (50.07%, according to the latest numbers from the State Board of Elections), so even if all of Goode’s votes had gone to Romney, Obama would have still won.

Nationwide, Goode finished fifth.

In Virginia, he finished fourth with less than fourth-tenths of one percent of the vote.

Nationally:
Obama (Democrat) 50.05%
Romney (Republican) 47.9%
Johnson (Libertarian) 0.96%
Stein (Green) 0.34%
Goode (Constitution) 0.08%

I’ve found different totals on different sites, as states continue to tabulate their vote. The highest figure I found for Goode was 115,315 votes nationwide. On the sites I checked, he showed up on 21 states. If that holds up, Goode will have run behind the Constitution Party’s 2008 candidate, Chuck Baldwin, who took 199,437 votes or 0.15% .

Goode  didn’t crack the 1 percent mark anywhere. His best states, percentage-wise, were South Dakota (0.7%) and Wyoming (0.6%), which makes sense since those state are more conservative — although there were plenty of other conservative states where he was way lower than that.

In terms of raw votes, Goode got the most votes in Michigan, where he tallied 16,607 (good enough for 0.4%). Virginia was his second-best state, with 13,482 votes (or 0.36%).

So let’s look at Virginia: Read more »

Jens Soering

In the $80 million campaign for Virginia’s open U.S. Senate seat, you probably saw more attack ads than you care to remember.

But in the aftermath of Democrat Tim Kaine’s victory over Republican George Allen, let’s consider an attack ad that Virginians never saw.

Neither Allen’s campaign nor any of the independent groups that poured millions of dollars into the Senate race made an issue of Jens Soering, the German national convicted of murdering his girlfriend’s parents in Bedford County in 1985.

During his final week in the governor’s office in 2010, Kaine consented to a transfer agreement with the Department of Justice and the German government for Soering, who is serving two life sentences in a Virginia prison. Under the agreement, Soering would have served as little as two years in a German prison before becoming eligible for release. News of the agreement broke on Kaine’s final full day in the governor’s office and several state lawmakers voiced outrage. Gov. Bob McDonnell, the Republican who succeeded Kaine, revoked Virginia’s consent for the transfer shortly after taking office.

When he announced his Senate candidacy in April 2011, Kaine calmly answered questions about his decision to give the state’s consent for Soering’s transfer. But the issue seemed certain to become fodder for Kaine’s adversaries.

So certain, in fact, that Kaine’s campaign was prepared to be attacked on the issue. A Kaine adviser said Tuesday night that the campaign had a response ad ready to go if Allen or an outside group had gone after Kaine on the Soering issue.

Kaine used a similar strategy in his 2005 run for governor, when he responded quickly to an ad attacking his position on the death penalty.

But Kaine never really had to return fire over Soering. The issue came up only twice in the Senate campaign, and Allen never initiated it. Even if he had, it may have had little impact in a race that was decided by 5 percentage points (or 188,031 votes, as of this afternoon).

Kaine was asked about Soering in his first debate with Allen in December 2011 at the state Capitol.  Kaine  said he agreed to the transfer only after the Germans “took it upon themselves” to have a trial, convict Soering and guarantee that he would serve at least two years in prison and never return to the United States.

“And at that point, with those guarantees, my attitude was ‘good riddance,’” Kaine said. “This is a foreign citizen who abused our hospitality and committed a horrible crime. We had the ability to safely transfer him back to his country where he would be imprisoned on the German nickel, not ours.”

Allen, who made parole abolition one of his legacy issues as governor, said at the time that the Soering issue highlighted “a fundamental difference” between the candidates.

“I think there needs to be integrity in government, truth in sentencing,” Allen said.”Tim and I have a very fundamental difference of opinion in how we handle violent murderers and criminals.”

The only other time the Soering issue came up was over the summer, when Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli said his office had discovered an affidavit signed by Kaine that had been used by Soering’s lawyers in a bid to block Soering’s extradition to the U.S. in the late-1980s. But Kaine’s campaign noted that the affidavit had been drafted for an unrelated case, became a public record, and later was used by Soering’s defense team.

That was the last time the Soering controversy got any attention in the campaign.

– Michael Sluss

We’ve been calling attention to the dramatic realignment of the coalfields from being a Democratic stronghold to a Republican stronghold. Here’s some more data, courtesy of the Virginia Public Access Project, a non-profit, non-partisan group that tracks Virginia elections.

Republicans ran stronger in 2012 than in 2008 in almost every locality in Virginia — although, obviously, not strong enough for Mitt Romney to carry the state.

Which localities showed the strongest Republican increase (or, conversely, the biggest decline in Democratic support)? All but one were in the coalfields.

This chart is measured in terms of the drop-off in the Democratic vote from 2008 to 2012.

Lee County  -7.86%
Buena Vista -9.62%
Wise County -10.81%
Norton  -11.31%
Tazewell County -12.61%
Russell County  -12.75%
Dickenson County  -13.57%
Buchanan County  -14.84%

Of note: The only non-coalfield locality on this list is Buena Vista, another former Democratic stronghold. One has to wonder how much of this flip is due to the general realignment of white, working-class votes from Democrats to Republicans — and how much is due to the presence of Southern Virginia University, a Morman-affiliated school, in that city?

And the bigger question, of course, is: Is this realignment permanent? Are the coalfieds now a de facto Republican stronghold? Or is this an abberration due to Obama, either a combination of his cosmopolitian “otherness” and his alleged “war on coal”? In other words, would a future Democratic candidate be able to make more in-roads in the coalfields and reclaim some of those votes?

There are probably lots of things both sides learned from this week’s election. Here are three of them that apply at least indirectly to our corner of the state.

* Virginia will be a swing state again  in 2016. Virginia’s status as a swing state snuck up on us in 2008, as Obama dramatically expanded the map that year. This year’s even narrower margin in Virginia would guarantee the Old Dominion would be on both party’s maps next time around. North Carolina, too.  The Obama campaign seemed to pull back from the Tar Heel State a few weeks out, to concentrate on Ohio. Indeed, Romney carried North Carolina, but not by as much as many observers thought he might. For what it’s worth, that would seem to confirm the Obama campaign’s wisdom in holding its convention in Charlotte, as a play for the vote in the newly purple states of North Carolina and, to a lesser extent, Virginia. Obama didn’t need North Carolina, but any time he forced Romney to spend there was time and resources the Republicans weren’t spending elsewhere.

* Southwest Virginia doesn’t matter for the Democrats anymore, but it sure does for the Republicans. We addressed some of this in a previous post: The Democrats once could count on strong margins out of the coalfields. Now, we’ve seen a dramatic re-alignment, and now the coalfields are delivering strong margins for the Republicans. Maybe this was simply a reflection of Obama’s alleged “war on coal” and his lack of connection with blue-collar voters, which showed up in non-coal areas. But given the way the parties are evolving, how likely are we to see the Democrats make a strong bid for votes in the coalfields again? (Check out this nifty chart showing how the demographics have changed, with Democratic support dropping among whites and union households, and increasing among young adults, college-educated voters and Hispanics). So as I noted in that previous post: Will Democrats ever again set foot west of Radford? By contrast, it’s now the Republicans who will want to maximize the vote there — to help offset Democratic votes elsewhere in the state. Granted, they need to get more of those votes, especially in Northern Virginia, but it’s a safe bet that Republicans will continue to mine the coalfields. I’d wager now that we’d see the 2016 Republican nominee for president make a visit to the Bristol-Abingdon area, close enough to be able to talk about coal issues (as Romney did.) Former Fla. Gov. Jeb Bush was scheduled to speak at Bluefield College before the election as part of an academic lecture series. Weather delayed his visit; perhaps when it’s re-scheduled, it’ll be one of the first Republican steps toward 2016, eh?

* Democrats won’t argue any more over a Southern Strategy vs. a Southwest Strategy. Party wonks have tussled over the past few cycles whether the party should invest in trying to compete in the South, or write off the South and focus on parts of the Southwest with growing Hispanic populations. We see now parts of both are possible. Democrats aren’t going to be competitive anytime soon in the Deep South, but Virginia and North Carolina have twice now proven to be winnable — along with Florida (if that counts as a Southern state.) Likewise, Democrats have now twice in a row won in Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico.

You’d think now Democrats might target Arizona, although Romney won pretty clearly there (55% to 44%). At one point, Democrats thought Georgia might be within their grasp, due to growth around Atlanta. Romney won there 53% to 45%, so it’s not unreasonable to imagine a Democratic path there in the future. (By contrast, Romney took 61% in Alabama.)

Conversely, Republicans might start arguing over whether it’s better to focus on reclaiming some of those western states (which might mean figuring out how to attract Hispanic voters) or, taking note of the Democrats’ declining share of the blue-collar vote, take aim at flipping Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan. Ohio was certainly a battleground this time and Romney made a late run at Pennsylvania. In time, we could see the two parties swap territory — the Democrats have already picked up some Sun Belt states, and the Republicans may be poised to make gains in Rust Belt states. Who knows? The Republicans once had a Southern Strategy; perhaps in the future, they’ll have a Northern Strategy.

– Dwayne Yancey

Former Rep. Rick Boucher, elected in 1982 and served until his defeat in 2010.

Rep. Morgan Griffith, who upset Boucher in 2010 at a time when many thought Boucher was unbeatable.

You’ll recall we’ve posted about how the coalfields have undergone a dramatic realignment, turning from a Democratic stronghold into what this year was a Republican one.

So here’s another thought coming out of that: Does that mean Rick Boucher will turn out to be the last Democratic congressman from Southwest Virginia?

It’s not that I’m preparing to install Republican Morgan Griffith as congressman-for-life, mind you, but just looking at the electoral realities. It used to be, Democrats could win the 9th District by rolling up big majorities in the coalfields, augmented by slimmer majorities in Radford and Montgomery County. Radford and Montgomery County are still quite possible for the Democrats (Radford went for Obama in 2008 and this year; Montgomery County went for Obama in 2008 and then was narrowly carried by Romney this year.)

But as the district expands geographically, it’s picking up more Republican areas (most recently in Salem and parts of Roanoke County). So where will Democrats get the votes — especially if the coalfields are no longer a supplier of big Democratic majorities, or, in fact, any Democratic majority? Put another way, what kind of Democrat would it take to win the 9th District as currently configured? And what kind of special circumstances? Are either of those realistically possible?

– Dwayne Yancey

The line at Central Gym voting location in Pulaski County.

We knew Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Salem, is a congressman. We didn’t know he was a photographer. But overnight, he has sent us, via Twitter, this photo of the long lines at one precinct in Pulaski County.

Mason Adams, Michael Sluss and Mike Gangloff — 3 Ms! — joined in this story today looking at just why the lines in Virginia were so much longer this time.

One day after winning the most expensive U.S. Senate race in the country, Democrat Tim Kaine said he wants to be part of a “common ground caucus” that will work across party lines to put the country’s fiscal house in order and restore public confidence in a dysfunctional Congress.

“I think if we listen to the voices of the electorate, they are telling us over and over and over again they want us to work together,” Kaine said today in a news conference at his Richmond campaign headquarters.

Kaine defeated Republican George Allen in a battle of former governors Tuesday to claim the Senate seat held by retiring Democrat Jim Webb. Kaine will team up with fellow Virginia Democrat Mark Warner in the Senate and plans to be part of the bipartisan coalition Warner is assembling to push toward a long-term deficit and debt-reduction plan.

“The thing that we most need to do in both houses of Congress is really commit to compromise and working together,” Kaine said. “I’ve said from the very beginning of this campaign that that was what was missing in Congress.”

Kaine said he hopes Congress can take action in its lame duck session to avert the January fiscal cliff that would trigger deep defense and domestic spending cuts and expiration of all the George W. Bush-era tax cuts. Kaine said a compromise could give the economy a shot in the arm and serve as “a springboard into the bigger-picture discussion about getting our fiscal house in order.”

“I actually believe that the principal shackle around the American economy right now has been congressional dysfunction,” said Kaine, who showed up in a sweater and blue jeans to chat up reporters.

Warner appeared with Kaine in a campaign ad portraying them as a team that would work together in Washington. Warner worked vigorously for Kaine’s election and was jubilant at the Democrats’ Richmond victory party Tuesday night.

Because of his role in the Senate’s “Gang of Six,” Warner could be a key player in negotiating a deficit and debt-reduction plan. But he also has left open the possibility of making another run for governor in 2013. Warner said Tuesday night that he will make a final decision about his political future by Thanksgiving. Few Democrats expect him to leave the Senate. Kaine said today that he hopes Warner will stay put.

“I really want Mark to stay in the Senate,” Kaine said. “I think Mark is doing some really important work. That bridge-building is being done and what Mark’s doing with the Gang of Six and others is not just fiscal, it’s the effort to rebuild these traditions of comity. . . . He’s playing a really valuable role.”

As for his own role, Kaine said he hopes to land an assignment on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, to focus on education and workforce issues. He also said he would “really like” to serve on the Senate Armed Services Committee, following in the footsteps of Webb and former Virginia Sen. John Warner.

The spending by the candidates, political committees and outside groups on the Virginia Senate race exceeded $80 million. Nearly $30 million was spent by outside groups opposing Kaine, and much of it came from groups that don’t disclose their donors.

Kaine, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said his campaign could countered the torrent of money from outside groups by building a “big, big network” of small-dollar donors and concentrating on voter persuasion.

“One of the things that made me very, very proud about the outcome last night is that I think the outcome in Virginia spoke very clearly to the notion that grassroots, person-to-person politics can beat big checks and negative ads,” Kaine said today.

– Michael Sluss

That’s somewhat of a rhetorical question but it’s rooted in this reality: The Democratic base in Southwest Virginia appears to have evaporated.

Virginia Democrats once relied on a three-part strategy, geographically speaking: They needed big numbers out of the state’s urban areas and other localities with a large African-American population; they needed to try to win Northern Virginia, and they needed to run up big numbers in the coalfields.

Admittedly, they numbers in the coalfields were small, but the margins were large.

Even in the worst of times, Virginia Democrats could count on the coalfields.

No more.

Over the past few elections, we’ve seen the realignment of far Southwest Virginia. Al Gore and his environmentalism played uneasily in the coalfields; this year, Republicans very effectively portrayed President Obama as waging a “war against coal.” And, of course, the realignment of the coalfields fits within the larger national pattern of Democrats losing ground with white, working-class voters — but making up ground elsewhere, among younger voters, growing minorities, and certain types of suburban voters.

Last night, the only locality Obama carried west of Roanoke was Radford. Montgomery County, which went for Obama in 2008, flipped ever so slightly to Romney.

More and more, we’re seeing Democrats focus on not just winning Northern Virginia (which used to be their problem) but running up big numbers there (Obama took 59% in Fairfax County, for instance, and nearly 57% in Prince William County).  And as the population there continues to grow so much faster than the population in Southwest Virginia (which sometimes grows, sometimes shrinks), well, the numbers tell the tale, don’t they?

Last night, we posted some numbers showing how the coalfield vote has switched from Democratic to Republican over the past three election cycles. Here’s an update, which goes back to include the 1988 presidential returns — a year in which Michael Dukakis didn’t fare well nationally, or even statewide, but still ran up big numbers in far Southwest Virginia.

Notice how much the share of the Democratic vote has fallen: Read more »