Virginia Primary Preview Part I
The state senate
For the second half of our primary preview, covering the House of Delegates and local offices, click here.
SD-11 (Charlottesville area)
Creigh Deeds (i) vs. Sally Hudson
Most Senate primaries are happening this year because nonpartisan redistricting threw a hand grenade into a Senate map where most incumbents had drawn their own district a decade ago. Nowhere is this more obvious than the current 25th Senate district. Creigh Deeds was first elected to a rural, Appalachian state house district along the border with West Virginia in 1991. In 2001, the 25th Senate district, centered around Charlottesville, was redrawn to connect the city with most of Deeds’s house district. Unspoken as a motivation for this drastic change was that the 25th district was then quite swingy, and the popular incumbent was publicly dying of cancer. Indeed, she died later that year, and Creigh Deeds was handed the Democratic nomination for the special election, which he won easily.
Deeds has represented a similar district ever since, but has never fully left behind the moderate rural politician mindset that made him a successful politician in a district that, had it existed in 2020, would have given Donald Trump 68% of the vote. When Deeds ran for Attorney General in 2005, he leaned into his opposition to gun control, even running to the right of his GOP opponent, Bob McDonnell, on the issue; he received the NRA’s endorsement, which he said was "a reflection of my record in the General Assembly,". When he ran for governor in 2009, his strategy was to reach out to rural voters while keeping Barack Obama and the national Democratic Party at arm’s length, even running an ad focused on his opposition to cap-and-trade, as well as coming quite close to opposing what would eventually become the ACA.
Deeds, who once ran a campaign ad declaring “NO SPECIAL RIGHTS FOR GAYS” was also consistent on opposing gay marriage during that campaign, pointing to his vote, breaking with the majority of his party, to enshrine one man-one woman in the state constitution. Deeds eventually dropped his opposition to gay marriage, though it’s hard to tell when. He's voted to allow private prisons (incidentally, opposed to that bill was Charlottesville's delegate at the time), give tax credits to the coal industry, end parole in the state, and keep Big Ag from undergoing even minor environmental regulations, but what’s put him in the most danger is the money he’s taken from Dominion Energy.
Dominion Energy is most of Virginia's power utility company, though it isn’t owned by the state. Instead, it’s a state-granted monopoly, theoretically under intense regulation from the state as a condition of that monopoly, but in practice, they’ve bought off most of the legislature, allowing them to make money hand over fist without adequate concern for quality of service they’re providing, what a reasonable pricing structure would look like, or the environmental impacts of their operations. In the last decade there’s been a growing effort to root out their influence in government. While there’s plenty of grassroots work being done, most of the attention has fallen on hedge fund billionaire couple Michael Bills and Sonjia Smith, who are using their considerable fortune to, depending on your point of view, either attempting to elect voices independent of Dominion, or attempting to outbid them when politicians go shopping. They run the Clean Virginia PAC, which contributes money to candidates who’ve signed a pledge against taking money from Dominion, though they also will both kick large sums to candidates themselves. And Creigh Deeds, though far from the worst Democrat in the state when it comes to being bought off by Dominion, has taken over $100,000 from them in his career.
Sally Hudson was elected to the House of Delegates from Charlottesville in 2019, and immediately became one of the most progressive members of the legislature. Instead of waiting for Deeds to retire, she’s decided to make her move now, with Deeds’s base (ie where he actually lives) out of the district and him buying a new house to even be able to run. Sonjia Smith has dropped over $220,000 on Sally Hudson, allowing her to come close to the massive financial advantage that Deeds has built up.
While the campaign remained cordial for a while, the detente is long over. Hudson has been fearless about pressing Deeds on his gun votes in ads, mailers, and even a website cataloging his votes opposing gun control. She’s called out his carpetbagging, too, and implied that he won’t stand up to party leaders, but the gun issue is the one that’s sticking. At this point, most of Deeds’s ads reference his vote for an assault weapons ban, his endorsement from Giffords, or his F from the NRA (in the most recent session, of course.) Deeds is sweating it so much he’s even trotted out his daughter making a “how dare you” response a few days before the election. Hudson is running a great campaign and Deeds is sweating, but the power of inertia in Virginia politics is immense.
SD-13 (Richmond suburbs and Petersburg)
Joe Morrissey (i) vs. Lashrecse Aird
We’ve heard your feedback: The primary previews are too short! There isn’t enough text! Can’t we do anything to up the word count?!?! That’s why we’re including the entire explanation of Joe Morrissey’s whole deal we wrote when he ran for Congress late last year.
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: Morrissey is back, and more problematic than ever. Richmond’s Commonwealth Attorney election of November, 1989, spawned a monster when a young attorney named Joe Morrissey emerged victorious, and though he only served one term, he spent the next decade in the Richmond legal scene acting like he owned the place, which resulted in multiple suspensions of his law license and, finally, a disbarment in 2001 after a series of convictions for contempt of court, assault, and bribery. After attempts to set up international law practices failed, he decided to get back into politics in Richmond, was elected to a majority-Black state house seat in 2007, and since then has been the rare white politician with enduring appeal to Black voters in the South. This charming man managed to get his law license back in 2011, but that all came crashing down in 2013, when he was charged with multiple counts of child endangerment and one count of child pornography, after it was discovered he was sleeping with his 17 year old legal assistant, and had sent naked pictures of her to his friends. Under pressure from state Democrats, he resigned his seat. Then, incredibly, he won, from jail, and running as an independent, the special election for the vacancy he had caused, and managed to stay in the House.
Somehow, that did not kill his career prospects, and he filed to run for Senate. It was only after he filed that election officials realized he didn’t live in his Delegate district, and he was ejected from the body, again. As for the Senate race, he’d started something he couldn’t finish, and dropped out of it shortly thereafter. Somehow, that didn’t end his political career either, even though he had just been sentenced to a misdemeanor sex crime against his legal assistant (who he is now married to, and taking shocking photos of a different variety with). He ran for mayor in 2016, and, even though he lost, managed to clearly win the Black vote. In 2018, he was disbarred a second time both for impregnating a teenaged employee, and for other assorted corrupt actions he’s engaged in after getting his law license back.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of him either, and the boy with a thorn in his side managed to stage a comeback in 2019, defeating an incumbent Democratic state senator in the primary, finally getting himself to the State Senate, where he serves today. Now, Bigmouth is striking again.
Look, by every indication, Joe Morrissey is about to get smited. Basically every Democratic politician involved in state politics has endorsed ex-Del. Lashrecse Aird in this race. She’s outspent him by a margin of more than 2:1. This is an election making national headlines as a bellwether for how the Democratic Party nationally, and Virginia as a state is going to be handling abortion because Joe Morrissey won’t fully back off from calling himself “pro-life”. He’s going through an impossibly messy public divorce because he was apparently abusive and unrepentantly unfaithful to his underage bride. In our last issue, we wrote multiple paragraphs about him running around begging Republicans to get into the Democratic primary to save him.
And yet, at the same time, Morrissey is a political cockroach. He’s spent decades surviving events that by all rights shouldn’t have just ended his political career, but his ability to go out in public without getting yelled at. We really, really, really hope this is the last time we have to talk about Joe Morrissey, but who really knows?
SD-14 (Richmond)
Lamont Bagby (i) vs. Katie Gooch
Del. Lamont Bagby, part of the moderate Richmond establishment, initially ran for the special congressional election before dropping out to allow state Sen. Jennifer McClellan a clear shot at the nomination in exchange for being handed her Senate seat. Progressives thought they had an opportunity in that special election with Alexsis Rodgers, but Bagby easily trounced her in the low-turnout firehouse primary 71%-21%. While the district has gotten better for progressives (it's all Richmond now) and turnout will be better, Bagby just realistically isn't losing after that kind of performance. It's nice that someone is trying at least, but in addition to not having much of a chance as a white candidate running against a fairly popular Black incumbent in a plurality Black district, Methodist minister Katie Gooch has one major blemish on her record: that check for $50,000—the majority of her campaign money—from her Republican parents. While that's generally not that much of a concern if your parents are just regular people, it is when your father is longtime Republican politician Oklahoma Corporation Commissioner Bob Anthony.
SD-18 (Norfolk and Chesapeake)
Louise Lucas (i) vs. Lionell Spruill (i)
It’s pretty incredible that there’s only one double-bunking primary to come out of the from-scratch remap of the legislature. On top of being the only such primary in the state, it’s by far the most expensive primary today, one of the two candidates involved regularly goes viral as far as state politics goes…and we really just don’t care as much about who wins as much as Virginia politics as a whole seems to.
It’s not like we don’t have a preference—the actual differences between Louise Lucas and Lionell Spruill amount to the former being a proud partisan hack and the latter being in love with bipartisanship, so of course Lucas is preferable—but both Lucas and Spruill are titans of Virginia Democratic politics currently engaged in a no-holds-barred battle for their very existence in politics. The problem is that it is, ultimately, a clash of personalities, not policies, as well as some esoteric concerns about committee seats. Both of them have been in the legislature for over three decades, and are fully seeped in the pro-corporate ethos that both parties maintained for most of that time. Not only are they both taking Dominion money, they’ve both taken over $250,000 in this election cycle alone. They’re also both in their late 70s—no matter who wins, they’re not going to stay in the Senate for that long (...oh god, at least we hope so.)
SD-21 (Norfolk)
Andria McClellan vs. Angelia Williams Graves
The Black districts in the Hampton Roads region were totally scrambled in redistricting, which is why Louise Lucas and Lionell Spruill are running against each other, while there’s a totally new plurality-Black district in Norfolk that may very be about to elect a white senator. State Del. Angelia Williams Graves is still the favorite—functionally the entire Legislative Black Caucus has come out for her, as have both Ralph Northam and Terry McAuliffe, and she is the Black candidate in a district where the primary electorate will be majority Black. But Williams Graves hasn’t been in the House for long—she’s much better known as a former member of the Norfolk City Council, which is also true of her opponent, Andria McClellan. McClellan ran for LG in 2021, and lost the primary badly while almost winning Norfolk.
While neither candidate is particularly progressive, the Dominion/Clean VA dividing line is present here too. Angelia Williams Graves is taking Dominion money, and Andria McClellan is a Clean VA signatory. While Williams Graves has received over $90,000 from Dominion (substantially over, if you count the Dominion share of the money she transferred over from her delegate account) and McClellan has received only $60,000 from Clean VA*, McClellan still leads in fundraising. And while Williams Graves is producing generic, low-budget ads, McClellan has honed a sharp message in slick online spots: that while Williams Graves votes present, McClellan is present. She’s running a tighter campaign, but Williams Graves may still have the winning message. In an internal poll Williams Graves released late last year, she was ahead of McClellan 35%-21%, and when the campaign asked voters if it was important to have a Black senator in the district, 61% said yes. McClellan isn’t a well-known figure or inspiring activist who can turn a race like this on its head. Ultimately she’s just another politician who’s arguing she’s done a better job in a few areas. It’ll be genuinely interesting to see what share of the vote that message can pull.
*From now on, when we say “Clean VA”, we mean any combination of the Clean Virginia PAC, the Commonwealth Forward PAC, Michael Bills, and Sonjia Smith. It’s just too wordy to list out the individual sources. If that’s something that does matter to you, we highly encourage you to look up the candidate’s donors at vpap.org. It’s a great resource.
SD-29 (southern and eastern Prince William County, northern Stafford County)
Jeremy McPike (i) vs. Elizabeth Guzmán
This is the first of four Northern Virginia contests where an incumbent senator is losing his ludicrously gerrymandered district for one that’s mostly new to him, and is now in a fight for his political life. Jeremy McPike is actually one of the least worrisome incumbents in the region, but Del. Elizabeth Guzmán is simply a fantastic progressive. McPike represents a textureless target who so far has prevented Guzmán from finding a foothold in attacking him (she’s tried going after his closeness with data center developers, but the effectiveness is questionable), but that same featurelessness means that he doesn’t really have a lot of voters who know him and want to see him reelected. He’s outspent Guzmán roughly 2:1, but Guzmán knows how to run an inspiring campaign, has managed to get most of organized labor behind her, and this new district is a quarter Hispanic. It’s almost confusing how simple this election is: McPike only has a minor incumbency advantage, and both candidates are trying to make a case for themselves, McPike with his corny fireman-themed “get the job done” message and Guzmán with more progressive message about lived experiences and being a fighter in government.
SD-32 (Loudoun County)
Ibraheem Samirah vs. Suhas Subramanyam
Loudoun County has never been the best place for a progressive to run, and Suhas Subramanyam is a strong favorite to demonstrate why. The current delegate is more moderate than not, but he’s had the sense to not take Dominion money, which means he’s flush with cash and his opponent, ex-Del. Ibraheem Samirah, doesn’t have the money to get out his message, even if he could nail down an effective one. Samirah was a great, progressive delegate, and his loss to Irene Shin in 2021 was heartbreaking, but the reasons why he lost are instructive—he didn’t win over many friends in the establishment willing to campaign for him (incidentally, one who did was Subramanyam), and he didn’t make business interests happy, so he couldn’t raise obscene amounts of money. The district he represented at the time (which was actually almost entirely in Fairfax County) didn’t have a strong activist base, so he had very little besides his under-resourced campaign to work with.
From that perspective, it makes sense why Samirah is such an underdog now—he’s being outspent by more than 3:1, Loudoun County is even worse for progressives than western Fairfax, and Subramanyan is the one with incumbency, both in terms of representing about a third of the district while Samirah only ever had a sliver, and being the candidate currently in office who can call in favors. Samirah is by far the more progressive candidate, but he’s been unable to use that to craft a message that’s going to appeal to a wide swath of the richest county in America. Unfortunately, his campaign never got its foot in the door, and most people expect a blowout loss today.
SD-33 (South DC suburbs)
Hala Ayala vs. Jennifer Carroll Foy
SD-32 was a downer. There’s more to be optimistic about in SD-33, which is, on paper, a pretty similar situation. Both Hala Ayala and Jennifer Carroll Foy are former delegates running for a district which is a bit too far away from the city to be considered inner suburbs. However, this is a more working class district, and the progressive choice, Jennifer Carroll Foy, appears to be in the driver’s seat as the campaign comes to the close. Carroll Foy and Ayala were both elected as progressives in 2017, flipping Republican-held districts, and leaving the house in 2021 to run for statewide office. Carroll Foy ran for governor and lost the primary, while Ayala ran for LG and lost the general, but the result was the same.
Though they were both elected as progressives in the primaries they ran in, Carroll Foy proved to be a solid progressive vote, while Ayala was much flakier. Now that they’re running against each other, Ayala knows she has no chance at appealing to the progressive movement, and is running straight to Dominion for cash. She used to be opposed to taking Dominion money, but as she put it, “People change their minds all the time”. Ayala has tried to turn the issue on its head, questioning Carroll Foy’s commitment to abortion rights because Clean VA had supported some anti-abortion Republicans in primaries. That’s a taste of how disingenuous Ayala has been in this campaign in general, trying to claim her vote to kill right-to-work repeal wasn’t actually a vote against repealing right-to-work. That vote cost her a lot of union support, which has flowed to Carroll Foy. Ayala instead has focused on collecting establishment support such as from Terry McAuliffe and Ralph Northam, resulting in a nasty battle between progressives and the state establishment. It’s anyone’s guess who wins this, and it’s only one of many tossup moderate/progressive senate contests.
SD-35 (Central Fairfax)
Dave Marsden (i) vs. Heidi Drauschak
Dave Marsden is, like many of his Fairfax County brethren in the Senate, stuck in the early 2000s, when there was great enthusiasm for Democrats being the party of business, and lackeys like Marsden doing their bidding made perfect sense. In today’s climate, he’s struggling to defend his record to a mostly new district as his challenger, nonprofit director Heidi Drauschak, attacks him for blocking paid family leave and taking money from Dominion. She has the money to make those attacks thanks to an enormous investment from Clean VA of nearly $600,000. He’s tried to make an issue of that (including in an honestly kind of terrible ad where there are two sets of words happening at the same time that makes it nearly impossible to follow) as well as her residency. Drauschak lived in Pennsylvania until recently, but how recently is under dispute. She claims she moved to Virginia several years ago, but voted absentee in Pennsylvania while traveling the country by RV in 2021, while Marsden points to a lack of voting history in Virginia as evidence otherwise; she claims to be a victim of a known error in the Virginia elections database that wiped about 25,000 records.
The consensus among people in Virginia politics is that Marsden, despite big endorsers like Ralph Northam, is in serious trouble. His old (he is 75, after all) insider image contrasts poorly with Drauschak’s affable working mom persona, and he hasn’t been able to point to many accomplishments from his tenure.
SD-36 (Southwest Fairfax)
George Barker (i) vs. Stella Pekarsky
Geroge Barker is in a similar boat to Dave Marsden. The senator from what was previously a swing district, he’s never been able to get that mentality out of his head, and now it’s costing him. Fairfax County School Board Member Stella Pekarsky is challenging him for this district, and she even represents more of it currently than he does. In fact, he represents basically none of it; his claim to incumbency barely goes beyond being a current member of the Senate. Pekarsky is portraying herself as the better Democrat, contrasting her work on the School Board fighting against Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s efforts to ban books with George Baker’s general reluctance to engage in partisan fights. In fact, Baker has a quite bipartisan reputation, and has struggled to update his image for a more partisan time, focusing, like Marsden, on a “get things done” image and endorsements from the state’s establishment. Unlike Marsden, Barker is handily winning the money war, thanks in no small part due to an eye-watering $240,000 contribution from Dominion. He’s dropped nearly $1 million on this race, more than twice what Pekarsky has, but it hasn’t made him the favorite.
SD-37 (Central Fairfax)
Chap Petersen (i) vs. Saddam Salim
Chap Petersen is the Democrat from Fairfax who needs to go the worst, and might have the best chance of holding on. That’s because, despite his repeated, frequently bizarre acts of spiting his party to vote with Republicans on gun issues, opposing legal marijuana, and publicly working to oust Steve Descano in a district that voted for Steve Descano, Petersen stopped taking money from Dominion Energy in 2016, and has since made nice with Clean VA. The result is that he still has plenty of money in his campaign account, but there’s no one underwriting the campaign of Saddam Salim. Salim is an activist, immigrant, and Fairfax County Democratic Party official, running as, as he puts it, a “real Democrat.” Salim has put up his best effort against a man who plainly should not be in the Senate representing Democrats, especially in a generally liberal part of the DC metro, but he’s raised less than $200,000, and has struggled to get his name out. Petersen has spent a bunch of money but otherwise seems to think he’s going to win easily, as evidenced by him spending his time campaigning for Ed Nuttall in the Commonwealth Attorney’s election instead of his own, and not responding in kind when Salim went negative on him. It’s possible Petersen gets caught sleeping, especially since most of this district is new to him, but grassroots forces are stretched thin, and Salim simply hasn’t been able to get his name out like Petersen has.
SD-40 (Arlington)
Barbara Favola (i) vs. James DeVita
In 2019, Barbara Favola was challenged by Nicole Merlene, a good government activist frustrated at Favola for owning a lobbying firm while serving in the very legislature her firm lobbied. Merlene was underfunded but a diligent campaigner, and received 38% of the vote districtwide, 42% in Arlington. Favola now has an all-Arlington district, but no exciting progressive opponent to go with it. Instead there's James DeVita, a lawyer who appears to be running because he has nothing better to do. DeVita originally launched his campaign running against Adam Ebbin in the neighboring 39th before switching to Favola in the 40th for unclear reasons. He offers little contrast to Favola, and his website’s issues page hilariously greets visitors with the message “I have been a lawyer on both sides of police brutality cases.” Aside from not giving voters a reason to oust Favola, he also just hasn’t raised much money.