Episode 11: What could happen In Virginia's 7th and 2nd House races?

Both Virginia's 7th and 2nd U.S. House districts voted for Trump in 2016. But then two years later, they flipped in the midterm elections. Democrats Abigail Spanberger in the 7th and Elaine Luria in the 2nd both won by razor thin margins. This fall, these first-term lawmakers will face their yet-to-be-determined Republican challengers. Today, we’re talking about their potential opponents, their chances of re-election, and the consequences of holding onto the seat.

Read the Transcript:

Nathan Moore: This is Bold Dominion, an explainer for state politics in a changing Virginia. I’m Nathan Moore.

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This has been a hell of a week. It’s not just the worst pandemic in 100 years. And it’s not just the worst economic depression in 80 years. Following the police killing of George Floyd in Minnesota, cities across the country have seen a wave of intense protests and police violence; Including Virginia cities like Manassas, Virginia Beach, and Richmond.

But today, we’re looking at the Richmond suburbs and the upcoming election for Virginia’s 7th district in the U.S. House. We’re also looking at Virginia’s 2nd district, over in the Hampton Roads area. Party primaries and conventions for these U.S. House races are taking place in the coming weeks, ahead of November’s general election.

Both the 7th and 2nd U.S. House districts voted for Trump in 2016. But then two years later, they flipped in the midterm elections. Democrats Abigail Spanberger in the 7th and Elaine Luria in the 2nd both won by razor-thin margins. This fall, these first-term lawmakers will face their yet-to-be-determined Republican challengers. Today, we’re talking about their potential opponents, their chances of re-election, and the consequences of holding onto their seat. 

Kyle Kondik is the managing editor of Sabato's Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics. That’s their nonpartisan newsletter on American campaigns.

NM: Kyle Kondik, I want to go back a couple of years to 2018 where Elaine Luria and Spanburger were part of a wave of newly-elected Democratic women here in Virginia and that reflected a trend across the whole country. What led to that wave?

Kyle Kondik: Well, first of all, just generically speaking, midterm elections are very often a backlash vote against the White House; usually the party that holds the presidency loses ground in one or both midterms (if someone gets elected to two terms in the White House). We saw this with Barack Obama, when Democrats lost the House in his first midterm and lost the Senate in the second. George W. Bush, Republicans actually had a rare decent midterm in the aftermath of 9/11 leading up to the Iraq War in 2002, but in 2006 Republicans lost the House and Senate.

So, again, particularly when the president has poor approval rating which President Trump did (it’s not horrible, but his approval is lower than his disapproval), that led to a backlash vote, and you really saw it manifest in districts that were kind of suburban, either had some kind of diversity or had higher levels of 4 year college attainment, and the interesting thing about some of the districts that Democrats flipped in VA (three in total)--like Jennifer Wexton in Northern Virginia’s 10th district, that actually has the highest median income of any district in the country, and is a district that was historically Republican and highly educated, but that district has become so Democratic that Jennifer Wexton doesn’t really seem to have much trouble getting re-elected. But VA02 in Hampton Roads that Elaine Luria won is classically a swing district; although the lines have changed there from time to time, that’s been a competitive district for a long time. And then Virginia’s 7th Congressional district, that used to be held by former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, that's a district that contains growing highly-educated Democratic-trending areas in greater Richmond and also combines it with more rural small town areas in central Virginia. Districts 2 and 7 were carried by Trump in 2016 but Democrats were able to narrowly win those house seats, and as Republicans try to figure out ways to take the house back, it's pretty natural to focus on districts that Trump carried. 2 and 7 stand out in that regard. 

NM: Let’s take a closer look at those races. I spoke with 538 Elections Analyst Geoff Skelley about the 2nd and 7th congressional districts in Virginia.

This year in Abby Spanburger’s district VA07, there are 8 Republicans, trying to get the nomination to face her in that district, which includes the Richmond suburbs and then part of Virginia going north and west from there. What's this race look like?

Geoff Skelley: Well it's kind of hard to say for sure, only because it's not a primary. If it were a primary, we could look at how much money the candidates on the Republican side were raising, we could see television ads and wonder who's getting their message out the best, we might even see internal polling released by different candidates, so that would get us a better idea. But instead because it’s a convention deciding the nomination for the Republicans, you have different factors that are hard to pin down in terms of who really is advantaged or disadvantaged. The candidates have been making their case to delegates at the convention, which will meet on July 18. They just announced their date; it had been pushed back because of the coronavirus pandemic. So they're meeting on July 18th in Caroline County.

NM: The difference between a convention and a primary - primary is what we're used to: we show up at the polls, we show our ID, we go, we mark a piece of paper and we leave. A convention is typically a gathering of the party activists, right? People who are really committed and they all show up in a county and do their thing.

GS: That's precisely right. A primary election is a standard election--your polling place, your precinct is open, you go in, you fill out the ballot, you submit it. That whole process might take you ten minutes once you get there. You might spend more time going to your precinct than actually at the precinct. It also ensures wider participation; at the end of the day, a primary is always going to have more people participating than a caucus/convention system. And so, a convention at the end of the day usually involves the people most committed to the party, the most energized. In this case, thinking about a republican convention, it probably means the people voting at the convention will be more conservative than your average Republican voting in a primary. 

NM: And who do you think are the actually viable contenders in this process?

GS: We have some idea of who the leading candidates are. The leading candidates are likely Nick Freitas, who is a member of the Virginia House of Delegates (VHOD). You may remember him from running for Senate in 2018, he was one of the two Republican candidates, and he lost narrowly in the primary to Corey Stewart. I suspect Freitas would not have lost quite as badly as Stewart did, but 2018 was not a good time to run statewide as a Republican in VA.

Another member of the VHOD John McGuire, is running. He is newer to the House of Delegates by a term, but McGuire, part of his district actually takes in Henrico County (just a part of Henrico, there is a lot of the district that taken parts of Henrico), so he's been making a case that he’s a candidate that can do a better job winning over voters in the suburbs, which was critical to Abigail Spanberger winning in 2018--she ran up huge margins in the part of Henrico that’s in the 7th Congressional District, which is where she's from, and also in Chesterfield Country, to the south of Richmond, and she ran up margins there that helped her win in the end, and overcame the rest of the district that is very rural and very Republican-leaning. So McGuire is trying to make the case that he’s the candidate who can make inroads there, I saw reports that he claimed he had submitted over half the delegates coming from Henrico County. He's making the case that he's got a fair amount of support heading into the convention.

One of the other candidates who’s gotten some attention was the first to enter the race against Spanberger on the Republican side: Tina Ramirez. Basically a conservative activist from Chesterfield County, which is a big county in the district and the most populated part of the district. She's claimed that she's won an “overwhelming victory” in the mass meetings in Chesterfield, so lining up a lot of the delegates that were elected at those mass meetings that are now going to the convention. It sort of seems like those are the three main candidates--I’d expect the winner to come out of that. At the same time there are a lot of other candidates running, and you just don’t know how it will shake out once you’re actually at the convention.

NM: So say I’m a delegate and I’m at the convention. What does the nomination process look like?

GS: The way the convention process usually works for nominations like this is that you'll have a first ballot, and then the candidate who is lowest--they’ll make some sort of ruling on about what threshold you have to meet to advance to a future ballot--but with this many candidates, it will likely take more than one ballot to decide. You could see maneuvering different supporters of different candidates shifting over--someone gets knocked out, they move to someone else--so that's why it’s pretty unpredictable. 

NM: Alright, what about over in the second district? It looks like just a regular old primary there. Which candidate is in the lead?

GS: The leading Republican candidate there is Scott Taylor who represented that district and lost it in 2018 to Elaine Luria. He was initially going to challenge Mark Warner in the US Senate race but then he decided to run for his old seat. The 2nd, mostly Virginia Beach is the biggest part of that district, it's a district with a lot of veterans, former military, so it’s no surprise that Luria, who was in the Navy, won that seat in 2018. But against a former Navy Seal in Taylor who is now trying to win the Republican nomination and is very likely to,  by looking at the fundraising. There’s a primary there for the Republicans, so that’ll help Taylor. 

Scott Taylor and Elaine Luria had a very close race last time around, and who knows exactly how that will play out, but Trump won that seat by about three points in 2016, so it’s a slightly Republican-leaning seat on baseline partisanship--not as much as the 7th, but if the top of the tickets is decent for the Republicans even if Trump is losing statewide, that could help Taylor down ballot.

NM: One thing that has been remarked on a lot is the blue-ing of Virginia from not that many years ago, when it had a Republican governor and Republican majorities in both the House and the Senate--and now it’s exactly the opposite. Looking at the voting patterns of Virginia and around the country, there’s this pattern where urban areas tend to skew very strongly toward Democratic votes, rural areas tend to skew very strongly toward Republican votes, and so the fight really is in the suburbs. At least in Virginia, the last couple election cycles, it seems like a lot of those suburban votes are trending toward Democrats. Why do you think that is?

GS: A couple of reasons. For one thing, VA is a particularly well-educated state, and after race, education has become sort of the next most powerful explanatory factor in why people vote the way that they do. If you look at white voters with a college degree, a four year college degree or more, they vote somewhat more Democratic than Republican. It's been trending that way nationally, to some extent. And so Virgina, being a relatively well-educated state, has a much larger share of its population with a 4 year degree than some of the other states that have been battlegrounds in recent national elections--say like Pennsylvania or Wisconsin or Michigan. Virginia has a higher share of college-educated voters. Given the number of voters who fit that description who live in places like suburban Richmond (Henrico and Chesterfield Counties), DC suburbs (Fairfax, Loudon, and Prince William County), or even parts of the tidewater, down in Hampton Roads in the Southeast (places like Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, Newport News). The college-educated voter shift is definitely part of the story. Virginia is also relatively diverse--a lot of those suburbs have become more diverse. If you look at parts of Chesterfield County, it used to be a very white suburban  exurban county, and it has changed a lot. Same for Henrico, same for much of Northern Virginia. Voters who are nonwhite tend to be more democratic leaning.

NM: What's making VA more highly-educated and more diverse relative to some other states in the area?

GS: There could be a number of explanations for that. One, Virginia has a very good public education system, at least when it comes to the number of public colleges and universities. Also, the fact that Washington, D.C. is right there--particularly for Northern Virginia, there’s this focal point that has attracted a lot of people who are highly-educated to that area of the state. Richmond also has that to some extent; maybe that has to do with the companies that are in Richmond, there are a fair number that are headquartered there. Those are other aspects of it. There could be other economic reasons that go into this; a lot of the states I've mentioned like Pennsylvania, Michigan, or Wisconsin are post-industrial rust belt states where the traditional economic engines of those states--which had impacts on the politics of those states through things like unionization--were areas of heavy industry that don't have the same strength as they used to, or don’t exist at all.

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NM: Geoff Skelley is an Elections Analyst at FiveThirtyEight. Stick around -- we’re diving into redistricting in just a moment.

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NM: And we’re back! This is Bold Dominion, and we’ve got Geoff Skelley, an elections analyst at FiveThirtyEight. A lot of the districts in VA are drawn in such a way--including the 5th district here--are drawn in such a way as to favor one party over another by just enough points to be pretty safe. And so you get an R+6 district here in the 5th, some other districts that were fairly safe at one time until court orders changed it so they had to be a bit more balanced for various reasons. What's the map going to look like after this cycle, looking ahead to the next one?

GS: Well, we've just moved forward with redistricting reform in the state of Virginia. It looks there’s going to be a bipartisan commission--I don’t think you should call it nonpartisan, because much of the membership of the committee drawing the maps are going to be members of the state General Assembly--but it's going to be a process of committee and you're going to need a supermajority agreement on what the lines look like, otherwise the state Supreme Court will draw the lines. This is true for both the General Assembly districts and Congressional districts. So that would seemingly point to less nefarious lines one way or the other, for either party, and probably truer communities of interest being kept together. Now, to be fair, one of the challenges here is that people talk about redistricting and being against gerrymandering, but you can be against gerrymandering because on its face it's bad--and I agree, voters should be picking the representatives, not the other way around--but you do still have geography to deal with. And state lines. And Virginia is kind of a weirdly shaped state, so in some cases you're going to have districts that are long, and skinny in certain places. The sixth district of Virginia right now ranges all the way from Roanoke up to just outside of Wincester. And, you know it's kind of long and you can talk about: “Is Roanoke really in the same community of interest as Harrisonburg, for instance?” They both run along i-81 so maybe, but at the end of the day, there are just going to be some districts that aren’t going to look great because of geography. 

NM: Also, you know, each district has to represent 700k people, so you can’t just draw it only for the far SW counties. There's not enough people. 

GS: Right, and one of the things is going to happen in the next round of redistricting in Virginia is that the 9th Congressional District--that is basically most of southwest Virginia, up to just outside of Roanoke--is going to have to get larger. Because its population is basically zero or has actually shrunk. Because many of the counties in that part of the state have seen very little population growth. But, I guess, at the end of the day, it could still happen that it could get a new seat and that would obviously have an impact on what the lines look like, because it would decrease the number of people that need to be in each district, to some extent. Or, relative to if you have eleven districts.

 But assuming that it stays at eleven, which I think is a reasonable assumption at this point, there are going to have to be adjustments where many of the more rural areas will have to get physically larger in terms of the land area they cover, and districts with suburban and urban areas will get smaller, because that’s where most of the growth has been--in places like Northern Virginia. Like the 10th Congressional district, which takes in all of Loudoun County, parts of Prince William County and runs over to Winchester to the west, that district almost certainly has way too much population because of the growth in Loudon, so it’s going to have to shed voters in some way. So where those voters end up--is it the 6th, is it parts of the 5th?--those are questions that are going to have to be answered and figured out. Some of it will depend on what the members of the General Assembly want, in the end. The fact that they’re not going to be able to just draw districts advantageous to whichever party controls things-- because of the supermajority requirement of this committee, where you basically have to have someone from the other party agree with you--is a situation where you will probably see fairly clean lines. Or as clean as can be drawn, because another thing that’s important to remember is that Virginia, because its population is about one-fifth African-American, will be trying to draw districts that keep the Voting RIghts Acts in mind to some extent or are majority African-American or are plurality African-American, as the current districts, the 3rd and 4th have very large Afrian-American populations and have African-American members of Congress: Bobby Scott in the 3rd, Don McEachin in the 4th. 

NM: Looking ahead, where do you see Virginia going in November?

GS: Well, I think in the presidential race, you’d have to peg Joe Biden as the favorite over Donald Trump in Virginia. Donald Trump did--I think the last time a candidate won a lower percentage of the vote than Trump did in 2016 in Virginia was Richard Nixon in 1968, and that had the added complication of the third party runner George Wallace, so [the race] really is an asterisk and you wouldn’t even really want to compare it to that. The point being that Trump did worse than any Republican in recent memory in Virginia, and I think the president isn't set to do a lot better than that. I don’t want to write it off entirely, because who knows what’s going to happen in the next few months, but you would view Joe Biden as a favorite to win the state’s 13 electoral votes. Odds are Warner is going to sail to a fairly smooth reelection in the Senate race.

NM: Kyle Kondik with UVA’s Center for Politics, what’s your last take here?

KK: I think Luria and Spanburger are mildly favored, but I think those will be competitive races that attract outside spending. Some of it will be determined by who the Republican nominees are and how effective they end up being as candidates, which I think is still an open question. But look, those are competitive districts, that should be competitive races. Again, I would separate out the 3rd district the Democrats pick out in 2018. Jennifer Wexton’s seat, VA10 in Northern Virginia, I think she should be okay because Biden is going to win that district and probably by a significant amount. And that gives her a lot of cover, and I don’t think Republicans are going to strongly contest that district. One other little factor here is that VA10 is covered by the Washington, D.C. media market, which is one of the most expensive markets in the country. And that has ramifications for advertising spending, particularly on network television, whereas VA7 and VA2  are covered by smaller media markets, so it’s less expensive to buy advertising time. If you're a national campaign committee, the barrier for entry is cheaper, smaller, and lower in VA7 and VA2 than they are in VA10. And so that may contribute to VA10 being less competitive. That’s a Clinton district that’s going to vote for Biden, whereas VA2 and VA7 may well vote for Trump again. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Luria and Spanberger can’t win, it’s just that those districts are more competitive and they’re going to have to attract some crossover support to win.

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NM: Kyle Kondik is the managing editor at Sabato’s Crystal Ball at UVA’s Center for Politics. Thanks to him, and our other guest today: FiveThirtyEight’s Elections Analyst, Geoff Skelley. Thanks, as always, to our producer Aaryan Balu and also to our newest producer: Charlie Bruce! I’m really excited to have Charlie joining the team this summer. 

Charlie Bruce: Thanks for the intro, Nathan! I’m really excited to join the team. Kyle’s closing comment in the last segment is coincidentally a theme we will be exploring more this summer: 2010 vs 2020. The census years bookended a BIG decade of change in Virginia. From race to education to politics, we’re going to talk about where we are today, and what the future will look like. I’m really excited.

NM: Thanks, Charlie. My name’s Nathan Moore, and I’m the host of Bold Dominion. Find this show online at BoldDominion.org. Go ahead and subscribe… it’s just a click away.

Keep social distancing, and I’ll talk with you again in two weeks!