It’s World Series time!
… also we’re barely more than a week away from Virginia’s state legislative elections.
Which means pretty soon you won’t have to endure me going on and on about the goings on in the commonwealth.
But, well, we’re not quite there yet.
Campaign Action
Bases Loaded: Far and away the question I’ve been asked most often over the past couple of weeks is, “Hey, so what’s gonna happen in Virginia?”
… which is generally shorthand for either “Are Democrats going to flip the Virginia House and Senate?” or “OMG PLEASE TELL ME DEMOCRATS ARE GOING TO FLIP THE VIRGINIA HOUSE AND SENATE!!1!”
Well, I can meet you halfway.
- I do believe Democrats will flip the Virginia Senate.
- After all, they only need to flip one seat to bring the chamber to a 20-20 tie, and the Democratic lieutenant governor gives them an effective majority with his ability to break tie votes (except on budget stuff).
But flipping just one seat in the Senate is … less than ideal.
- Here’s why.
- Item 1: Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax. He likely won’t resign before the end of his term, but with two women credibly on record as accusing him of sexual assault, he’s not someone Dems are eager to rely on establish effective chamber control.
- Item 2: 2021. Virginia senators serve four-year terms, but the lieutenant governorship is up in just two years. Democrats’ continued dominance in statewide elections is anything but a guarantee, and a GOP LG would hand control back to the Republicans until at least 2023 (when the Senate would next be up again).
- Item 3: Joe freaking Morrissey.
- Or rather, effectively Sen.-elect Joe Morrissey.
- Yup, the extremely not good human I’ve been railing about in this missive for … quite a while now is returning to the Virginia legislature.
- To the Senate, specifically, since he scored a pretty epic upset over Sen. Rosalyn Dance in the June primary, and no Republican is running in SD-16.
- You may be wondering why this is bad.
- Well, a 20-20 tie contingent on a vote from someone like Joe Morrissey isn’t much of a tie at all.
- Rather, it’s an invitation for a chaos Muppet to wreak havoc.
- It gives a man who’s loyal only to himself the opportunity to repeatedly demonstrate that loyalty—his own party be damned.
- It gives someone who clearly believes the rules don’t apply to him the chance to destabilize state government if the mood strikes him.
- And if you think this a harsh characterization of Joe Morrissey, then … well, you don’t know Joe.
- I’ve described his litany misdeeds in this space before, and if you really want to read it all, welp, it’s all right here.
- With receipts.
- But there’s good news! I strongly believe that Democrats will flip two, possibly three seats on Nov. 5.
- Specifically, I strongly believe Del. John Bell will flip Senate District 13.
- It’s highly likely Ghazala Hashmi will flip Senate District 10.
- And Del. Cheryl Turpin is looking increasingly likely to flip Senate District 7.
- Additionally, I consider SD-12 a tossup.
- And since GOP Senate recruitment was basically nonexistent this cycle, I’m not worried about Democrats losing seats.
The House, however, is a different matter.
- House Republicans actually recruited.
- And Democrats left a couple of challenging seats they flipped two years ago open when those incumbents decided to run for the state Senate (HDs 73 and 85, specifically).
- And yes, it’s true that the House of Delegates map became more friendly to Democrats after a court undid some of the GOP’s racial gerrymandering earlier this year.
- But the biggest thing that sets this cycle apart from 2017 is that there’s no statewide race on the ballot to help drive voter turnout.
- Don’t get it twisted—Democrats’ ground game is super strong.
- And Democratic voters are exponentially more enthused than they were four years ago, the last time all of the state’s House and Senate seats were on the ballot.
- And Democrats are keeping pace with—and in many cases outstripping—GOP incumbents in fundraising.
- But as of today, I think Democrats will net at least one seat in the House.
- Which would create a 50-50 chamber, and in the Virginia House, no one is empowered to break tie votes.
- OMG WHAT THEN
- … I’m not even going to pretend I haven’t mulled this academically interesting but politically bananas possibility before.
- You can even read about what might happen, if you like.
- That said, my list of tossups is five seats deep, which creates a pretty big margin to lowball this net gain number.
I’m still poring over data as it comes in, and I may have changed my mind on some of these tossups (which are HDs 40, 66, 83, 84, and 100, by the by) next week. We shall see.
Strike Three: One of the biggest issues in this fall’s elections in Virginia is gun safety.
- It would have been a big one no matter what, but the massacre in Virginia Beach early this summer moved it to the top of most Democratic voters’ minds for the cycle.
- Republicans helped cement that when they abruptly adjourned a special session the governor called not long after to pass new gun legislation after just 90 minutes—without considering a single bill.
- Democratic General Assembly candidates have been devoting significant chunks of their communications budgets to gun safety messaging, but they just got a free assist from none other than the National Rifle Association, which helpfully just dropped this year's candidate scorecards.
- You can check them out yourself here, but I can probably save you a little trouble (you have to actually plug in an address to get the scores of that district’s candidates) by letting you know that all but six Republicans running in Virginia received some variation of an A grade, though a few received no rating.
- But the NRA seemed to have trouble figuring out how to handle its rating of GOP Sen. Glen Sturtevant, an embattled incumbent running for reelection in SD-10, which went for Clinton 53-40 and Northam 57-42.
- But a weird thing happened with Sturtevant’s NRA rating this week.
Yer Out: A long, awkward political saga in Texas seems to finally be drawing to the close with the announced retirement of Republican House Speaker Dennis Bonnen.
- The biggest political scandal to hit the Lone Star State in years reached fever pitch last week when a recording surfaced of an hour-long June meeting between Speaker Bonnen and Michael Quinn Sullivan, the head of Empower Texans, a conservative lobbying organization/news outlet/PAC that’s mostly funded by oil money.
- The group is known for playing heavily in GOP primaries in support of hardline right-wingers.
- In 2018, candidates and PACs reported receiving about $4.7 million from Empower Texans PAC.
- The organization wanted House media credentials for the upcoming session—passes that would give Empower Texans staff the ability to roam the floor and speak directly with lawmakers (passes had previously been denied because of ET’s lobbying activity).
- In this meeting among Sullivan and GOP House leadership, secretly recorded by Sullivan, Bonnen suggested he could get Sullivan’s group those credentials he craved while urging Empower Texans to target 10 fellow Republicans in primary elections.
- Bonnen also said terrible things about some House Democrats, but mostly that’s a day that ends in Y.
- The scandal first emerged in July, when Sullivan began telling folks about the conversation.
- Denial all around, life went on.
- But then in August, The Tape came to light.
- House Republican Caucus Chair Dustin Burrows, who also participated in this conversation, resigned his leadership position when news broke of the existence of a recording of the exchange.
- And finally, Sullivan made the recording itself public.
- Texas Rangers are investigating the quid pro quo discussed on the tape.
- And lo, Bonnen is not only bailing on his speakership, but he’s not even going to run for reelection next year.
- So Texas House GOP leadership is in full disarray.
- And all this with a special election just over a week away!
- If Eliz Markowitz flips House District 28 on Nov. 5, Texas Democrats will be just eight seats away from capturing a majority in the chamber in 2020.
Really, it couldn’t be a better time for Republicans to fall apart.
Bush League: I’ve written in the past few months about how Republican attempts to recall Democratic lawmakers became kind of a hot thing this year—specifically in blue states where Republicans attempted to trigger low-turnout do-over elections for seats/offices they just can’t seem to win the old-fashioned way.
Colorado, especially, became a locus of this sort of activity.
And WOW did Republicans there suck at it.
- In September, GOPers were forced to give up on attempts to recall state Sens. Pete Lee and Brittany Petterson—fails two and three in Colorado Republicans’ recall quest there this year.
- But one GOP recall effort in the Centennial State continued into October.
- The effort to oust Democratic Senate President Leroy Garcia had until Oct. 18 to gather 13,506 signatures.
- Well, the deadline arrived, and recall organizers, well … they came up short.
- Like, really short.
- As in, 13,502 signatures short.
Yup.
Woof.
- Even Garcia’s Republican colleagues seem to have had enough of these recall shenanigans.
- GOP Sen. Jack Tate plans to propose a bill next year to set a higher bar for the process.
- You know, little things like
- Requiring recall petitions to stick to statements of verifiable fact
- Preventing petitioners from filing and circulating recall petitions while lawmakers are in session and busy doing their jobs
- Requiring petitions to disclose the estimated cost of a recall election to taxpayers.
I get the feeling this will be a popular piece of legislation.
Welp, that’s all for this week. You should definitely call it—Friday is game three, after all, and you should rest, get emotionally and victually fortified for the occasion, restock your celebratory/sadness beverages, that kind of thing. Just print this out and show it to your boss—or not, she’s probably headed to the game herself.
