Are Democrats sleeping on a political disaster in Virginia?

Virginia's state races are a bellwether for 2022. Why are Democrats ignoring them?

A donkey.
(Image credit: Illustrated | iStock)

Virginia is having an election next month, not that you'd know it from how Democratic leadership is behaving.

General elections in Virginia happen on odd years, and this year, Virginians will elect a new governor and determine who controls the state's House of Delegates. The last two presidential elections might suggest this is a solid state for Democrats — Hillary Clinton won Virginia by over five points in 2016, and President Biden won it by 10 points in 2020. But key state races are much closer. In the 2019 election, Democrats outpaced Republicans by about 200,000 votes in House of Delegates races — but the races that decided control of the House had a combined margin of only a few thousand. This year's margins could be similarly narrow.

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Ryan Cooper

Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.