A report in Politico has former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe considering a run for governor in 2021.
McAuliffe announced last month that he was not going to run in the crowded field of Democrats vying for the party’s 2020 presidential nomination, saying in the announcement that he intended to put his focus on the 2019 state elections in Virginia, which feature races for all 140 seats in the House of Delegates and State Senate.
The Politico report notes that McAuliffe is set to headline more than 60 events for Democratic candidates across Virginia in the coming weeks.
According to the report, McAuliffe has confided to friends that he is considering a run for governor, and Democrats in Richmond consider McAuliffe’s candidacy a done deal.
It would make sense. The Virginia Constitution prohibits governors from running for re-election, so that rules out the sitting governor, Ralph Northam, among the other big thing that rules out Northam, being the sloppy way Northam handled the controversy over blackface photos that emerged earlier this year.
There would have been an expected contest between the other two Democrats elected statewide in 2017, Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax and two-term Attorney General Mark Herring, but then, you may remember that each got caught up in their own controversies in the wake of the Northam blackface scandal.
Fairfax faces accusations of sexual assault from two women. Herring quite oddly volunteered that he performed music in blackface in college.
That would seem to leave the door wide open for a McAuliffe candidacy.
It is not unprecedented for a Virginia governor to run for a second term, with a term off in between. Mills Godwin won two separate terms, in 1965 and 1973.
Story by Chris Graham
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