Blue on Blue in Virginia

And then Tom Perriello showed up.

Perriello spent a single term in Congress, from 2009 to 2011. Those two years constitute his only experience in Virginia politics. On January 4, Perriello phoned Northam and told him he was going to run against him in the primary.

The timing of the call was ingenious, belying Perriello’s image as a political innocent. A week later, the state legislature would convene for a session certain to last two months. As it happens, the sole constitutional obligation of a lieutenant governor is to preside over the legislature when it’s in session. While Northam was stuck in Richmond, babysitting bellowing lawmakers, Perriello had the rest of the state to himself—popping up at coffee klatches, Rotary Clubs, NARAL meetings, fundraisers large and small.

By the time the legislature shut down at the end of Feburary, Perriello was tied with Northam in the polls. By mid-April, he had copped endorsements from both Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. (In his ringing speech, Sanders called the candidate “Tom Perrioli,” as if he were endorsing a new form of pasta.) The most recent polls show Perriello with a small lead.

And now here they both are, at a joint appearance—the Progressives’ Forum, it’s called—in the bluest county of this newly blue state. Ralph Northam is taking questions, and he is getting an earful.

Most of these Arlington progressives (when can we call them liberals again?) are agitated that Northam has accepted a $25,000 contribution from Dominion, the state’s aptly named power company. When it comes to Virginia politics, Dominion writes everybody a check—Democrats and Republicans, left-wingers and right-wingers—if he looks like he might have a chance to hold political office. Among progressives it is often said that the state government is a wholly owned subsidiary of Dominion.

So when the audience lines up at the microphones, the subject of corporate cash, and Dominion cash in particular, comes first. “Do you support banning corporate contributions?” “Would you support real campaign finance reform?” “Can you tell us what contributions you have turned down on principle?”

“I make my decisions based on what’s in the best interest of Virginia and not what my contributions are,” Northam says, looking slightly peeved. He points out that he had “stood up” to the once-powerful tobacco companies to ban smoking in Virginia restaurants. “So don’t you tell me that contributions from corporations influence my decisions.”

But it is part of the progressive creed that corporations control American politics, and so the audience presses the point until Northam grows exasperated. “I hope you would agree with me that, number one, I’m an honest person. I was on the honor board at VMI [Virginia Military Institute, his alma mater]. It’s very important to me. And number two, I just stood here and told you that I won’t let money or contributions influence my decisions, and I have always been true to my word.”

It was a sensitive moment. Understandably insulted by the insinuation that he’d been bought by a power company (and for only $25,000!), Northam has a collateral problem: His accept­ance of Dominion’s donation marks him as a figure of the establishment—a paragon of politics-as-usual—to a leftish electorate that feels increasingly alienated and isn’t happy about it. Along with most of Virginia’s Democratic hierarchy, Northam supports an oil and gas pipeline that Dominion hopes to build in the western part of the state, despite objections from environmentalists who don’t live in the western part of the state. Thus corporate greed, environmental calamity, and the possibility of political payoffs combine to prime the paranoia of any committed liberal. I mean progressive.

Perriello evidently saw it coming, this estrangement of the base from the party’s upper reaches and its anointed leader-in-waiting. He continues to make a centerpiece of his campaign his own opposition to the pipeline and his disavowal of all corporate contributions, including Dominion’s. He and the lieutenant governor make for a marked contrast. Both raised in Virginia, Northam has a thick drawl and Perriello speaks with a technocrat’s patter. (If elected, Northam would be the first Virginia governor to have a southern accent since the election of John Dalton 40 years ago.) Northam speaks with pride about VMI while Perriello, calling himself a “pragmatic populist,” is less vocal about his undergraduate and law degrees from faraway Yale. Northam is a pediatric neurologist who enlisted in the Army and served for 12 years, rising to the rank of major. Nowadays, in addition to a flourishing private practice, he volunteers as director of a hospice for terminally ill children.

For his part, the 42-year-old Perriello has spent his professional life as a left-wing activist, making his resumé of do-goodery much less impressive. With money from the creepy global financier George Soros, Perriello spent the George W. Bush years launching one nonprofit organization after another. These often reflected his Catholic upbringing. Faithful America had the goal of organizing the religious left against the religious right. Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good was dedicated to advancing a home-cooked version of the church’s social teaching. A global network of activists called Avaaz was a spawn of Soros’s think tank Res Publica. Perriello’s relationship with Soros continues to pay off. According to figures compiled by the Virginia Public Access Project, at least 25 percent of his campaign money comes from Soros, his family, or organizations Soros controls.

In 2008 Perriello moved back to his hometown of Charlottesville to run for Congress. The surge of young Obama voters from the University of Virginia lifted him to victory in the historically conservative district. His win, he has said ever since, proves that he has the power to romance conservative downstate voters. What it really proved was that Barack Obama could get an unprecedented number of college students to vote for him. Two years later, with Obama absent from the head of the ticket, student turnout cratered and he lost his seat by 3.8 points. He returned to Washington to oversee the partisan arm of the liberal think tank Center for American Progress. Eventually Obama gave him a job in the State Department.

No one should doubt Perriello’s liberal bona fides, but Ralph Northam wants Virginians to do so, however implausibly. Perriello’s sins are two. In Congress he voted for the infamous Stupak amendment to Obamacare that aimed to ban federal funding of abortions. Luckily his vestigial Catholicism has taught him the power of penance. The day after he announced his campaign for governor, he made an abject confession on Facebook. “I want to be very clear that I regret my vote,” he wrote. “This vote caused real pain to constituents and other women.” He has since pledged to eradicate “gender-based discrimination” further by exempting feminine hygiene products from sales taxes.

Perriello’s other act of deviationism was his opposition to renewing a federal ban on “assault weapons.” This position helped earn him an A rating from the NRA, which endorsed him for reelection—prompting him to call the group “the epitome of people-powered politics.” Now when he’s asked about the NRA—as he often is, thanks to Northam supporters—he calls it “an extremist nut-job organization.” To show that his reeducation is complete, he uses the phrase “the Resistance” a lot.

Despite his wicked dalliance with Dominion, Northam doesn’t want anyone to doubt his liberal bona fides either. “It’s easy to think he’s more conservative than he is,” says Quentin Kidd, director of the Wason Center for Public Policy at Christopher Newport University. Earlier this year Northam made the mistake of telling a New York Times reporter he had voted for George W. Bush—twice. He now blames this idiocy on his inattention to politics while he built his medical practice. Maybe, but a joke has been going around the Richmond statehouse for years: “The first Democrat Ralph Northam voted for was himself.”

To demonstrate his liberalism, he brutalizes the NRA on the campaign trail and frequently boasts of his lifelong support for abortion rights. This helpfully draws attention to Perriello’s former heresies. Northam likes to call President Trump a “narcissistic maniac.” Of course this doesn’t prove anything: Lots of Republicans call him worse than that. Still, says Kidd: “At his core he’s very progressive, and his record on issues like abortion and health care proves it.”

Before Perriello’s surprise declaration, Northam’s campaign was geared toward a general election against a Republican. It has now been retooled to blow away a rival who is, on all important matters, his ideological twin. Northam controls all the resources of the state party, including most of the left-wing groups that endorsed him before anyone heard a peep from Perriello.

Battalions of these pro-Northam activists showed up at the Progressives’ Forum here, the pro-abortion women wearing purple NARAL T-shirts, the anti-gun women in red. Their target was Perriello. They pestered him repeatedly on their respective issues. He responded by insulting the NRA with ever-greater vehemence. He told the ladies in purple he had supported Roe v. Wade his whole life and had never wavered, not once. “I don’t think you can have economic justice without reproductive justice,” he told them. Even this cutting-edge catchphrase seemed to leave them unappeased.

And so goes Virginia, a state known not so long ago for moderate and even conservative Democrats. Now rival candidates attack each other only from the left, pulling each other in the same direction—away from the more measured past and into the new blue Virginia.

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Perriello had voted against a renewal of a federal proposal to ban assault weapons. There was no vote on this proposal during his time in Congress. Perriello signed a letter to President Obama opposing a reinstatement of the assault weapons ban.