In an extremely unexpected development on Thursday, former Rep. Tom Perriello announced his entry into Virginia's gubernatorial race, a contest where Democrats had long ago thought they'd cleared the field for Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam. The news, which was first reported by the New York Times on Wednesday night, came as a particular surprise because there'd previously been no suggestion that Perriello, who served a single term in Congress and has been out of office since losing re-election in 2010, was even looking at the race. Indeed, he'd spent the last two years in Africa as a special envoy and expressed no interest in trying to reclaim his old House seat when it came open in 2016.
But now Perriello is back, and Virginia Democrats will face a contested primary with some unusual contours. Northam, a former state senator, has the backing of almost the entire Democratic establishment in the state, including Gov. Terry McAuliffe and both Sens. Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, and he's identified himself as a "moderate." He also was reportedly the target of a GOP effort in 2009 to get him to switch parties and hand power to Republicans in the closely divided Senate, though this never came to pass.
But Northam's shown some real moxie, too. Democrats credited him with drawing national attention to a GOP attempt five years ago to force women to undergo an ultrasound before having an abortion—an insultingly invasive process that Northam, a physician, made a point of identifying by its true nature, making the first person to say the word "transvaginal" on the floor of the state Senate. (Republicans wound up dropping that provision.)
Perriello's politics are even harder to pin down. During his lone term in the House from 2009 to 2010, Perriello compiled the 15th-most conservative voting record among Democrats according to DW-Nominate, a widely respected measure of lawmaker ideology, but he also represented a conservative seat that John McCain had won, so he was in-step with his district.
But Perriello was also unusually vocal in his support for big-ticket legislation that the Democrats passed that session, including the Affordable Care Act and cap-and-trade—bills that many Democrats tried to hide from. At the same time, though, he was an NRA supporter and voted for the Stupak amendment, which sough to prohibit the use of federal funds to pay for abortions.
While many pundits were quick to try to portray this newly engaged battle as some sort of stereotypical fight between the party's establishment and progressive wings, this race defies easy categorization. Perhaps more importantly, we have no idea how serious a campaign Perriello will be capable of running. Northam declared for this race all the way back in February of 2015 and had $1.4 million in his campaign account as of the middle of last year. Perriello is starting from scratch and has just a little over five months until the June 13 primary. And while neither has much name recognition, Northam has the advantage of having run statewide once before while Perriello has been out of politics for six years.
It's possible the race could produce a stronger Democratic nominee in the end, especially if it stays clean. But many primaries leave the eventual winner wounded and penniless, something Democrats badly hope won't happen here. Republicans, though, still have a three-way showdown of their own between former RNC chair Ed Gillespie, state Sen. Frank Wagner, and Prince William County Supervisor Corey Stewart, who was at one point Donald Trump's state campaign chair. That means there's a good chance both sides will wind up starting from scratch in the general election, which will be 2017's marquee contest.
