In June 2018, Virginia Republicans nominated Corey Stewart—a Tea Party Republican—to challenge Tim Kaine for his Senate seat. Stewart has gone berserk in his campaign against Kaine. “He’s a small, weak man,” Stewart says of his opponent. “The guy’s an idiot.”
Stewart doesn’t mince words. He doesn’t win elections either. Stewart is a demagogue who has led recent, counterproductive efforts to drag Virginia’s Republican Party further right. Stewart has billed himself as “Trump before Trump was Trump.” Naturally, Stewart has run a Trumpian campaign, aligned with white nationalists and rife with dismal hyperbole. It’s easy enough to imagine Stewart’s temperament playing well in Virginia—a populous Southern state with strong neo-Confederate undercurrents. In any other Southern state, Kaine would be the defensive, floundering Democrat, and Stewart would be the favorite to inevitably replace him. But in Virginia, Stewart is a pariah, and the polls favor Kaine by almost 20 points. The only Republican eager to align himself with Stewart is Donald Trump. The state’s former lieutenant governor Bill Bolling, a Republican, marked Stewart’s nomination as a low point for the Virginia GOP. “I am extremely disappointed that a candidate like Corey Stewart could win the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate. This is clearly not the Republican Party I once knew, loved and proudly served,” Bolling tweeted. “Every time I think things can’t get worse they do, and there is no end in sight.”
Meanwhile, Democrats sound far more optimistic about Virginia these days. Ten years ago, Barack Obama mounted an ambitious effort to win Virginia. Democrats hadn’t taken the state in a presidential contest since Virginia backed LBJ’s election in 1964. John McCain’s campaign spokeswoman, Nancy Pfotenhauer, famously ridiculed the Democratic Party’s outlook on Virginia. “I certainly agree that northern Virginia has gone more Democratic,” Pfotenhauer told MSNBC anchor Kevin Corke. “The Democrats have just come in from the District of Columbia and moved into northern Virginia, and that’s really what you see there. But the rest of the state—real Virginia, if you will—I think will be very responsive to Senator McCain’s message.” Pfotenhauer trivialized the state’s Democratic voters, but she also characterized them as somehow foreign. Thus, Pfotenhauer implied that northern Democrats might place Virginia’s overall identity—its Southern identity—under siege.
Indeed, outsiders tend to regard Virginia as a state that straddles the East Coast divide, fluctuating between Southern and Northern phases. In the 21st century, Virginia has defied the Republican domination of Southern politics. Ultimately, Obama beat McCain by six points in Virginia, and then he beat Mitt Romney by four points in the state four years later. In 2016, Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by five points in Virginia. In the past 17 years, Virginia has elected four Democratic governors and three Democratic senators. Virginia is, despite its Southern inclinations, a blue state.
In Texas, Georgia, West Virginia, and elsewhere throughout the South, Democrats now struggle to overturn Republican dominance in states where Democrats dominated elections as recently as the 1990s. But in Virginia, the tables are turned, and the state’s Republican Party has suffered a cruel decade of delirium and decline. The Virginia Democratic Party has produced a remarkably strong series of candidates, including Kaine; his predecessor, Jim Webb; and his fellow senator, Mark Warner. Even the less successful Democrats have sabotaged the state’s leading Republican politicians; the former representative Tom Perriello, very narrowly upset the high-profile Republican representative Virgil Goode in 2008, thus terminating Goode’s political career before losing his own reelection campaign two years later. The state’s major Republican candidates have proved defective. George Allen lost his Senate seat to Webb and then failed in his expensive bid to reclaim it six years later. The former governor Bob McDonnell spent the final months of his term under investigation for corruption; a federal grand jury indicted McDonnell and his wife two weeks after the governor concluded his term. The Virginia Republican bench is largely destroyed. The collapse has stuck Virginia Republicans with Stewart, who will lose to Kaine and further demoralize Virginia Republicans in the process.
Trumpism has only inflamed the Republican agony in Virginia. Last year, the former Republican chairman Ed Gillespie led an unsuccessful campaign for governor of Virginia; Gillespie struggled to reconcile his Beltway Republican bona fides with his reactionary posturing about immigrant gangs and Confederate monuments—posturing that Gillespie adopted not only from Trump, but also from Stewart’s primary campaign against him.
There have been a handful of convulsions. The former House majority leader Eric Cantor represented Virginia’s 7th Congressional District until the Tea Party challenger, Dave Brat, upset Cantor in the 2014 Republican primaries. But just four years after he defeated Cantor, Brat could lose his House seat to Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, in November. The Tea Party has done the Virginia Republicans few lasting favors, and Trump’s model of conservatism seems to have doomed statewide Republican candidates for the foreseeable future. If George Allen once represented Virginia’s pivotal role in the national Republican project, then Stewart represents blight. For Democrats, Virginia stands as a partisan reversal that has otherwise stalled throughout the South. Tim Kaine didn’t transform Virginia into a Democratic stronghold overnight, and neither did Obama. It took two state parties two decades to turn Virginia blue. For Stewart, it appears, there’s no turning it back.
