Meet Debra Gardner, running for our House of Delegates in the 27th district. This is another Biden district, providing him with a margin of over eight percent last year. Gardner has a Masters in Public Administration, so she is possibly over-qualified. On the other hand, the legislature needs all the help it can get. Throw her some change here.
There is some extra urgency in Virginia to ensuring the legislature stays blue, and gets bluer, since the noodle-brained Republican candidate for governor says he likes what he sees in Florida, where the anti-vaccine Governor DeSantis is causing deaths and hospitalizations left and right. Over 50,000 deaths, in fact. Imagine if foreign terrorists racked up that body count.
Gardner’s campaign is going well, raising about twice as much as her opponent, but in elections it always pays to run scared. Winning is good, but burying your opponent is, as Arnold said, “what is best in life.”
Gardner is running against one Roxann Robinson, an optometrist. To her office Robinson brings professional expertise on a par with that of Rand Paul. In Paul’s appalling exchanges with Tony Fauci, we know how that’s going. Robinson narrowly won her election two years ago, squeaking by with a margin of 191 votes.
In looking askance at Robinson’s policy chops, am I being unkind? Judge for yourself. In 2018, Ms Robinson opined that if Medicaid was expanded, the state would “quickly go bankrupt.” Virginia did expand Medicaid in 2019, and now the state has a budget surplus. D’oh!
Robinson’s district is affluent and moderate, pro-Biden as mentioned above. So the incumbent is at some pains to adopt a moderate face, even though she is bound at the hip with loopy, Trump-endorsed gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin. One of her notable lapses was to support the Equal Rights Amendment, then vote against it when it counted. Not a big winner for the Richmond suburbs.
