Team Coverage | Mike Signer visits Waynesboro

Democratic Party lieutenant-governor nomination candidate Mike Signer was in Waynesboro on Friday for a walking tour of Downtown Waynesboro and a visit with local Democrats in advance of the Tuesday, June 9, Democratic Party primary. AFP editor Chris Graham caught up with Signer to talk about the nomination race and later captured Signer’s talk with Waynesboro Democrats at a downtown restaurant on video.

Story: The radical centrist progressive

Watch this Mike Signer kid. And I can call him a kid, because I graduated from college a year before he did.

“I’m a progressive Democrat. No apologies, no excuses. I believe that the party is best when it’s about social justice and economic fairness,” said Signer, a candidate for the Democratic Party lieutenant-governor nomination, and like me a Mark Warner acolyte, in Signer’s case dating back to his work on Warner’s first run for the U.S. Senate back in 1996.

Signer is a progressive with a footing in Warner-style radical centrism, with his focus on jobs and economic growth as the way to get Virginia moving forward. He sounds to me a lot like Warner, and like former lieutenant governor Don Beyer, another Northern Virginia pol on whom Signer is trying to model his approach to taking on the otherwise undefined LG job.

“I think the office of lieutenant governor should be not just a placeholder or a steppingstone. It should be a people’s advocate in Richmond, someone who should every day be taking on systems that are failing and trying to spotlight the problems we’ve been ignoring for too long,” said Signer, who feels the current lieutenant governor, Bill Bolling, has sold Virginia short by treating the lieutenant governor job as a part-time gig.

But first things first. Signer is running behind former Mark Warner and Tim Kaine staffer Jody Wagner in the polls, though the polls have more than 60 percent of the electorate still undecided heading into the Tuesday, June 9 primary.

“I have led at every stage on policy and ideas,” Signer said of the Democratic Party race. “I was the last candidate in the race, and the first and still the only one with a jobs plan. Same thing with the environment, same thing with veterans, same thing with human rights. In every one of those areas, I’ve been at the forefront of driving the discussion of what we’ll actually do.”

 

Video: Signer talks with Waynesboro Democrats

 

 

– Story and video by Chris Graham