Coming into the November election the Republicans held a narrow majority in the Virginia House of Delegates.
You’ll remember that we supported 2 candidates in Virginia. We chose the closest of the close races. The ones that weren’t drawing the same money and attention as other races in the wealthier Northern Virginia DC suburbs. Our candidates challenged two first-term white Republican forced-birth-loving incumbents in the House of Delegates.
One candidate was Michael Feggans, who won the 51st seat – literally! – in the 100-member House of Delegates that gave Democrats the majority.
As a local television station put it: “With Feggans win, Democrats officially flipped [the House].”
We also supported “Good Kim” in HD-82. (aka Kimberly Pope Adams) When all the votes were counted, Bad Kim was ahead by 78 votes, and she declared victory on election night. But Good Kim was only down by 1/4 of one percent of the vote, so she requested a recount.
I will allow the process to take the full time and effort necessary to ensure that every valid vote is counted. While I am hopeful of the outcome, I will respect the results.” (Blue Virginia)
Tuesday was the Official Recount in the Virginia House of Delegates Race for HD-82 – the closest election in this year’s Virginia Legislative election cycle!
Good Kim – our Kim – gained ground in the recount, but in the end lost by 53 votes, out of 29,000 votes cast. So the gun-loving, abortion-denying woman who ran a fake abortion clinic won, and our Kim lost. Heartbreaking!
These races were right up our (targeted fundraising) alley on balloon Juice! I think we chose well, and we made a difference. And Good Kim nearly won! If we are winning all the races we support, all the time, then we aren’t choosing very well.
The message here isn’t woe is us, our great candidate lost, and the shitty forced-birth candidate won.
Instead, this is a reminder that every vote counts. That our work matters. A reminder that we chose well, and that we made a difference.
And Dems now have a slim majority in both chambers in Virginia, and that is a big Joe Biden deal. Well done, BJ peeps!
After the holidays, we’ll get back to work. The races won’t all go our way, but our actions can, and do, make a difference. So get ready, we’re gonna need to work our butts off in 2024.
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
Jeffro
Great post/reminder, WG!
Serve up that elephant anytime GOP, we’re ready!!
Alison Rose
You’re not gonna win ’em all, but that doesn’t mean you stop trying to win ’em at all.
Bill Arnold
Got email from bluesky saying that they are opening up a bit. Some profiles can be viewed without logging in. (There is said to be an opt-out process, or similar.)
eg. https://bsky.app/profile/tomlevenson.bsky.social
Still no embed, though there are separate pulldown options for copying post text and copying post url
ETA haven’t been using bsky (have an account, wcarnold.bsky.social), but may start shifting now.
Almost Retired
That’s a heartbreaker, especially since she was such a superior candidate! Makes me wish I’d boarded a plane to Richmond and dragged 53 non-voting Democrats out of their easy chairs on election day!
Juju
@Almost Retired: you actually have had to drag 54 voters out of their easy chairs.
Almost Retired
For some reason, this statement from Bad Kim’s premature victory speech in November, cracks me up:
“I am proud of my record in Richmond, fighting to rebuild Petersburg, expand rural broadband, combat human trafficking, secure millions of dollars for our communities, and tear down the ugly Ramada Inn.”
I assume the ugly Ramada Inn was being used by sex traffickers.
WaterGirl
@Juju: Yes! No more coin flips for who has the majority in VA. Didn’t that happen in one election? Stupidest thing I have ever seen.
*Probably not a factual statement, now that I think about it.
WaterGirl
@Almost Retired: Maybe the Ramada Inn was where she met her first husband?
japa21
Thanks to an election in Wisconsin earlier this year, the GOP gerrymandered district map was tossed by the state Supreme Court.
Alison Rose
@Almost Retired: Ramada Inn, watching the speech while eating Cherry Garcia straight from the tub: “Takes one to know one, you TJ-Maxx-shopping bitch”
H.E.Wolf
Three cheers for Good Kim – maybe we’ll be able to support her in a future campaign! I think she has a bright path ahead of her, regardless. And congratulations again to Michael Feggans.
The smallest of efforts can make a difference. Thank you to WaterGirl for the timely reminder, right as we’ve passed the winter solstice and the return of the light begins.
FastEdD
You can’t win ’em all, and sometimes it takes years and years and several election cycles. When you finally do win, it sure is sweet, but it doesn’t happen overnight. I remember one victory party on election night for a candidate who won for the House. We wore campaign T shirts for the other candidates who ran for that seat in the past and didn’t make it. They did the groundwork for the winner to succeed.
Juju
@WaterGirl: Yes, they did have a coin flip decision one year, after Republicans were pulling out random ballots for reconsideration after they had been rejected for whatever reason. The reconsidered ballots were accepted until there was a tie, then the coin flip. That’s what I recall. I live in NC so it was sort of local news here.
Juju
@WaterGirl: you made me spit coffee on my iPad with that comment.
David ⛄ 🎅The Establishment🎄 🦌 🕎 Koch
@Almost Retired:
but, but…. free market
H.E.Wolf
I saw two items this week:
1. Florida is purging its voter rolls and seems to be purging a disproportionately high number of Democratic voters.
2. PostcardsToVoters.org is continuing to write to FL Democrats to remind them to sign up (or renew) for Vote By Mail in 2024.
Item 1 has convinced me to get going on Item 2, early in January. Gonna do it for all our FL jackals. :)
Juju
@David ⛄ 🎅The Establishment🎄 🦌 🕎 Koch: Are there actually any Ramada Inns that aren’t ugly?
Almost Retired
First they came for the Ramada Inns and I said nothing…..
H.E.Wolf
@FastEdD:
What a great idea! Such a wonderful tribute to the candidates who paved the way.
twbrandt
You can’t win them all, but you do lose every race you don’t contest.
Uncle Jeffy
You eat an elephant one bite at a time, true. But I think it needs to be dead first. And that’s still not happened.
SuzieC
Yay for BJ! Can’t wait to get started in 2024.
Almost Retired
@twbrandt: Exactly! Which is why narrowing the margin is a worthy goal for candidate recruitment and voter enthusiasm in the next cycle. I’m surprised at how many races in the South go uncontested by the Democrats (I know…futility and all that. But still!)
WaterGirl
@Juju: Then my work is done here!
Better than a laptop, at least there were no keys to get messed up!
Mousebumples
Not sure if anyone’s heard the news, but Justice Protasewicz and her fellow liberal Wisconsin Supreme Court justices have issued a decision that Wisconsin will have new (state only?) legislative maps for the 2024 elections! (possibly also for the gerrymandered House districts, though the reporting I’ve read so far has been unclear)
Thank you to everyone for donating, volunteering, and postcarding for Wisconsin! 🧀
Eta – don’t have an NYT sub but here’s a link – https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/22/us/wisconsin-redistricting-maps-gerrymander.html
Nelle
It’s a mild day in Iowa and we just walked around the block. We ran into the son of the neighbor who had a very serious stroke 14 months ago. He won’t ever get out of long-term care, but his son says he is still following politics avidly. So, since every vote counts, I’m going to make sure that he is re-registered where he lives now in care and see what I can do to see how he can vote in 2024.
The rightwing pastor who hates public schools (all his kids are homeschooled or in private schools) lost his race to be on the school board of the small town next to us by 12 votes (my neighbor and I worked against him – her son goes to that school district). In 2020, one of the Congresswomen from Iowa “won” by six votes – there were at least 25 unexamined votes. But she went to Congress on the strength of six votes. So, I use that as a pitch – you go vote and take five or six friends.
WaterGirl
@Mousebumples: If I had heard the news, we would have already had a post! :-)
Mousebumples
@WaterGirl: I figured as much, but I’m behind I’m the blog since today was my grandma’s funeral. As an unapologetic liberal in deep red Wisconsin, I’m thinking her spirit is here, cheering on this decision.
Geminid
@Juju: The coinflip* was 2017, when Democrats broke through the Republican gerrymander and went from down 65-35 in the House of Delegates to down 51-49. The tied district was in Tidewater, and if it had gone Democratic it would have tied the House of Delegates at 50-50
Besides the gerrymander breakdown, one thing that stood out about that election was that Ralph Northam and many of the other successful Democratic candidates included gun control initiatives in their platforms. Democrats here used to be afraid of the gun control issue. It worked for them again in 2019 and with a majority in both houses they were able to pass six gun safety intitatives in 2020.
Northam and the others also centered Medicaid Expansion in their 2017 campaigns. In the session that followed, 10 Republican Delegates and three Senators crossed over to help put Expansion through. That saved a lot of lives, because when the pandemic hit two years later Virginia had added 400,000 people to its Medicaid rolls.
* It may have been a drawing of a film canister out of a hat or bucket, and not a coinflip.
SiubhanDuinne
Tear them down! Tear them down! — Bad Kim’s rally chant, probably
WaterGirl
@H.E.Wolf: I saw that! Something like 75% of the purged voters were either Democratic or whatever FL calls the people who haven’t formally chosen a party.
Juju
@Geminid: I don’t remember the film canister, but that doesn’t mean anything. I do remember the gun control issues in the election had to do with the mass shootings at the university and the shooting that occurred on air from a news station based in Roanoke.
NotMax
@SiubhanDuinne
“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that Ramada Inn!”
//
Juju
@SiubhanDuinne: Mr Youngkin, tear down those walls.
Dangerman
I’m thinking Coleslaw as a side dish (by order of the Blog Master, i.e. Cole’s Law).
Another Scott
Excellent follow-up.
I’m reminded of the aphorism / joke / story:
“We all know that the person who graduates at the top of their class is called the ‘valedictorian’. But what does one call the person who graduates at the bottom of their med-school class?
Doctor.”
;-)
It’s not the margin in the race that matters. It’s doing the work to fight for the seat.
Thanks WG and everyone here who is doing their part to fight for every seat.
Cheers,
Scott.
Geminid
Now that Democrats control both Virginia General Assembly houses, they can pass more progressive legislation. Bills will still have to be signed by Founkin’ Youngkin, but we’ll at least get that asshole on record on a lot of important issues.
And Democrats can set up some good issues to run on in 2025.
Geminid
@Juju: I thought it was a coin flip too, but I read something recently about a drawing.
Baud
@Another Scott:
Doctor Nick.
New Deal democrat
@Geminid: Exactly correct.
Apropos of this post, the Democrat was Shelly Simonds of Newport News. She ran again two years later and decisively beat the GOPer who had won the coin flip (or drawing, I forget) With redistributing, her seat has now turned safe.
Which is why “Good Kim” should run again in two years, now that she has name recognition.
Another Scott
@WaterGirl: It was even worse than that.
The Democrat won by 10 votes, then they did a recount and she won by 1 vote, then the GQP found a single excluded ballot that helped their case (and over-vote) and 3 judges stepped in and said it had to be counted. (While not ruling that all the other excluded ballots be given the same increased attention.)
There was another instance in the same election in 2017 where the ballots were wrong for part of a district.
It was a messy election and could have gone the other way. Close elections invite all kinds of distrust when mistakes and slanted judgement calls are made. It’s really, really important that we do everything we can to get this stuff right.
Grr…,
Scott.
WaterGirl
@Another Scott: Cheating in plain sight.
Redshift
Our we could have a big elephant feast! Just spitballing…
Scout211
I posted this upstairs but it fits here:
Since the thread is open, this is really good news
Elections have consequences.
rekoob
Poor Petersburg, Virginia. In the first half of the 19th century, it was an important port, with warehouses and all the attendant services of such a city. The former Ramada Inn, which sits prominently above Interstate 95, has been decaying for the better part of a generation. The city has been struggling with a declining population/tax base with plenty of blame to go around. I hope Good Kim runs again (or endorses whoever wins the Democratic primary) and helps put Petersburg on a better path. It deserves more than Bad Kim.
WaterGirl
@Scout211: Wisconsin has been liberated!
WaterGirl
@rekoob: I don’t recall, do you live in Virginia?
edit: Boo on Bad Kim. Maybe she’ll have a scandal and there will have to be a special election.
Geminid
@WaterGirl: One thing I keep in mind about this Delegate district is that, geographically st least, it extends far beyond the portion of Petersburg it includes. If it were a Petersburg district the good Dawn would have won it. It also includes parts or all of Dinwiddie, Prince George, and Surry Counties.
These areas are rural, and economically stagnant. As with most Southside Virginia counties, they have a large Black minority, but the larger white majority delivered the votes that barely put the bad Dawn over the 50% mark.
Geminid
@Geminid: According to Virginia Public Access Project figures, the 82nd House Districts’s registered voters are distributed as follows:
Petersburg City 23,733 (37%)
Dinwiddie County 18,622 (29%)
Prince George County 15,949 (25%)
Surry County 5,668 (9%)
In 2022, Rep. Jennifer McClellan (D-4th) won 50.5% of the district votes and the Republican won 49.4%, while in 2021 current Governor Youngkin won 50.6% and McAuliffe won 48.5%.