The polls have been open in the two Virginia Democratic Party primaries, for lieutenant governor and attorney general, since May 2, so tomorrow being Primary Day really means it’s just the last day you can vote, and the day all of the votes finally get counted.
I’m several weeks late and, apparently, hundreds of thousands of dollars short in terms of what I have to write about the two races having any impact.
According to the Virginia Public Access Project, there were 189,087 early votes cast in the primaries; the Virginia Department of Elections tell us that, in 2021, there were 494,932 votes cast in that year’s Democratic primary for governor, which you’d expect to get more run from the voting public.
I’ll assume we’re at least halfway there, then, in terms of who has voted already, and who will vote tomorrow.
I’m hemming and hawing my way around telling you who I’m going to vote for.
Problem being: I don’t necessarily like any of the people on the ballot.
I wrote a piece last week about the two AG candidates, Shannon Taylor, the Commonwealth’s attorney in Henrico County, and Jay Jones, a former state delegate from Norfolk, which focused on how Taylor has the backing of Dominion Energy, which is a big no-no to me, and Jones has received gobs of campaign money from Clean Virginia.
I want to like Jones, because I’m there with Clean Virginia – we need to get Dominion out of our politics.
I don’t know that I’m comfortable, though, with Jones getting $1.5 million of the $2.7 million that he’s raised for his campaign from one source, even if it’s one that I like.
If my problem with Taylor is the $800,000 that she’s gotten this cycle from Dominion, and that’s a problem for me, the biggest part of the problem is, what are they paying for?
I’m not naïve enough to think it’s just the goodness of their pea-pickin’ hearts.
Then, to the LG race, and we have obvious issues.
The campaign of Levar Stoney, the former Richmond mayor, and Terry McAuliffe acolyte, called politics reporters across the state to set up interviews and follow-ups with their guy – this I learned from a story by my good friend Bob Stuart at The News Virginian in Waynesboro that was published today.
The issue here: I don’t know why this is, but the Stoney people called up literally everybody else in Virginia politics media but me.
Oversight? Hardly.
I don’t know what the problem on their side is, but it’s obviously something.
I didn’t have a problem with Levar Stoney before, but as you can guess, I do now.
Seriously, f–k the guy.
If he wins the nomination, he can still kiss my ass.
Moving on, I wanted to like Aaron Rouse, a state senator from Hampton Roads, but when I explore his finances – why is the Greater PA Carpenters PAC, which, if you couldn’t already tell, is based in Pennsylvania, giving him $100,000?
There’s a real-estate developer from Bristol, Tenn., named Steven Johnson who has given him $50,000 – this Steven Johnson guy’s political-giving past includes Republicans like Tim Hugo, Tommy Norment, Buddy Fowler, Todd Pillion and Ben Chafin.
I’m guessing that our Steven Johnson friend likes Aaron Rouse because he thinks Rouse is at least somewhat in line with the Republicans that he likes to give money to.
The least distasteful of the candidates is Ghazala Hashmi, a Richmond-area state senator whose TV spots you’ve no doubt seen running ad nauseam, funded in large part by another big donor, Charlottesville billionaire Sonjia Smith, the driving force behind the Clean Virginia outfit mentioned above.
Again, I like the aims with this Clean Virginia outfit, but when one person is giving you, in Hashmi’s case, a quarter of your budget, what are they buying?
When you look at the two primary fields from 30,000 feet up, it feels like you’ve got a billionaire do-gooder, a utility company and two out-of-state business interests trying to buy their way into our state government.
It all feels … so icky.
I’ll go with Hashmi for LG and Jones for AG, but I already feel like I need a shower.
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Chris Graham
