Home Q and A: Erik Curren and the 20th
Virginia News

Q and A: Erik Curren and the 20th

Contributors

It started for me when I got the e-mail from the Erik Curren House campaign last week pushing back a self-imposed campaign-fundraising deadline.
The questions. The Curren camp had wanted to raise $20,000 following the announcement that Republican incumbent Chris Saxman was dropping out of the race to show viability and support at the home base and momentum. So much for the momentum.

Then came the call from a local Democratic Party leader who wanted to know what I thought of Curren’s choice of a campaign manager – his then-fiancee, Lindsay Howerton. (Lindsay and Erik married in a private ceremony last week.) Other local Democratic leaders had raised questions about having someone that close to the candidate in the role of campaign manager back when Curren was first making the rounds of the 20th District as the nominee in late April. My wife and 2008 Waynesboro City Council campaign manager, Crystal Graham, met with Curren and Howerton to discuss our experiences and how we worked through the campaign season together, but that seems like ages ago now.

A City Council campaign is a pressure cooker, but not the pressure cooker that a General Assembly campaign is. And Howerton, according to the person on the phone with me last week, didn’t seem to be responding to it well, injecting herself into debates involving Curren on local blogs to a point “where people are starting to wonder who’s running, Lindsay or Erik, and they’re going to have to pick one and move on with it,” as my Democratic Party leader friend put it to me.

One last bit of criticism came from another party leader friend who had not met or dealt with Curren prior to his appearance at a candidates forum on health care in Waynesboro last month. “He’s way, way too liberal for this area, and I consider myself a liberal, as you know,” the friend related to me. “I just don’t see how he’ll translate to voters here.”

So I’ve got myself quite the dilemma here, don’t I? Because I consider Erik and Lindsay to be personal friends. I’ve known Erik since he first contacted me several years ago to see if I would be interested in having him write an environment column on the AFP website. Lindsay, meanwhile, has written, sold and even delivered The New Dominion Magazine for us as a part-time staffer before she left in the spring to take on the House of Delegates campaign full time.

There’s all of that on the one hand, and my news instincts telling me that there’s something worth examining here in the near-manic criticisms of every step being taken by the Curren campaign on the other.

The news side won out, of course, as it always does. I gave Curren a call today to talk politics and have him address the critics head on.

To his credit, Curren isn’t taking the criticisms personally. “I know that this race has changed. Now that Chris Saxman is out of it, a lot more people have a lot more invested in it than before. I understand that people think, Wow, we need to ramp up our level of campaign activity, because this is the only open-seat race in the Shenandoah Valley north of Roanoke, and in a lot of ways is the most competitive race in our area,” Curren told me.

And he’s ramping up, it seems to me, about as much as could be expected. The campaign has had to extend the fundraising deadline, but it’s not for lack of trying and making contacts and calling the 21 Democratic Party members of the State Senate and the Democrats in the House who are not facing re-election challenges this fall and the executive director of Tim Kaine’s Moving Virginia Forward PAC and several others to see what he can get together.

Curren told me that the campaign is looking to maybe add a fundraising consultant to the staff in the coming days and also is considering adding a field-director position to the top staff to lead the get-out-the-vote efforts this fall.

“I feel like we run a pretty open campaign. We’re always getting advice from folks, and we’re always open to suggestions. We really appreciate the folks who have signed on and joined our team, and we’re getting offers from people to join our team all the time. We’re building the infrastructure we need to have the strongest team we can have,” Curren said.

We didn’t talk specifics in terms of numbers regarding how fundraising is going in the here and now. Curren broached the topic generally and left it vague, and I took that as a hint that there’s still some work to do to hit the post-Saxman dropout goal. “We’re making good progress” is where Curren left that part of the discussion involving money, as did I.

A little more in terms of specifics, but not much more, came when I asked Curren his bottom-line fundraising goal. “We’re looking at a very broad range – somewhere between fifty and a hundred to run a credible and aggressive campaign,” he said.

I’ll inject myself here – I’m afraid that won’t be nearly enough for the Curren camp to build name recognition and get its message out to voters in the 20th. The 20th is a strange beast in terms of it being a rural media market with two TV markets (Harrisonburg and Charlottesville) overlapping in the district and three daily newspapers (The News Virginian, The News Leader and The Daily News-Record) all claiming a readership base.

Next to the liberal thing. Curren doesn’t feel the label is a fit for him at all. “There are some positions that I take that seem really conservative,” Curren said, highlighting his conservative approach to road-building that emanates from his smart-growth approach. “I look at VDOT like a lot of my friends on the other side of the aisle do. I think there’s a lot of inefficiency there, and I’d like to take a serious look-through of all the projects that they have planned and see if they’re spending our tax dollars wisely. Particularly this plan to widen I-81 all along the corridor. To me, that seems fiscally irresponsible, and I think it’s just going to backfire and bring us more traffic.”

I’ll give him that – as long as he promises to never again wear that green construction hat that I’ve seen him don a couple of times on the campaign trail that makes me think Michael Dukakis on a tank every time I see it.

Last, to the missus running the campaign. And let me just say, give Lindsay credit. She’s a small businesswoman and all-around smart cookie. “And let’s be honest here. A lot of managing a campaign is pretty unglamorous stuff – like posting filings with the State Board of Elections, like keeping Excel spreadsheets of donors, like putting together my schedule. And so in some ways Lindsay is better qualified to do that than anybody because she spends more time with me than anybody,” Curren said.
“I also feel she’s going to fight a lot harder for me than somebody who’s just being paid a salary. Because she’s got so much skin in the game,” Curren said.

Maybe too much. Her exchange with blogger Myron Rhodes on the Internet a couple of weeks ago was a bit too much to take for the Democratic leader friend who called me to vent his frustrations, but it’s hard to fault a campaign manager too much for playing defense like she did.

The bottom line to me – the Erik and Lindsay that I know are among the smartest and hardest-working people that I know, and while there’s no guarantee that they’re going to pull this thing off in November, I can’t think of another campaign team in the 20th that could do them any better.

I say this having been made privy to internal polling done by the Saxman campaign before the incumbent’s departure from the race that had Curren running about even with undecided.

OK, I’ll bite. Wasn’t Tom Perriello 35 points back in late August last year to Virgil Goode before he started to make his move? Congressman Tom Perriello, that is?

It could happen, is what I’m saying.

 

– Column by Chris Graham

Contributors

Contributors

Have a guest column, letter to the editor, story idea or a news tip? Email editor Chris Graham at [email protected]. Subscribe to AFP podcasts on Apple PodcastsSpotifyPandora and YouTube.