The Wall Street Journal has a favorable piece on the upcoming Virginia Tea Party Convention and how it could have a wide and deep influence on state politics. That’s probably true, but there are also a number of enormous challenges Virginia tea partiers face if they want their movement to remain something other than an appendage of the state’s Republican establishment.
Unlike in Alaska, Colorado, Delaware or Nevada, Virginia tea party candidates have found no success at the ballot box. In big congressional primaries in the 2nd and 5th districts, it was the establishment candidates who won – and have earned either the open or tacit backing of the local tea party groups. The GOP couldn’t be happier:
Bill Stanley, the Fifth District’s new GOP chairman, helped broker the peace. The tea-party movement and the Republican establishment, he said, are essentially following the same tune, “but both sides are not yet dancing the same dance.”
The real question is “who is calling the tune, the tea party or the GOP?”
And it’s a question that gains added significance when looking forward to the 2011 legislative elections. All 140 seats in the General Assembly will be on the ballot. If the tea parties seek to fundamentally change the political landscape, 2011 is their golden opportunity to do so. Except 2011 also happens to be the year all the district boundaries will be redrawn, and according to the Washington Post, the incumbents are already working hard to protect themselves:
Sen. Janet Howell (D-Fairfax), who chairs a committee that will lead the process in the Senate, said the legislature’s best hope for smooth redistricting is an informal agreement to accept the other’s formula.
“We will draw Senate lines. The House will draw their lines,” she said. “And the expectation is that we won’t meddle in each other’s lines.”
That sounds awfully like an agreement between scoundrels to divide the spoils. But even if the legislature is able to hammer-out an accord and get the Justice Department to approve it, the problem for challengers then becomes the clock:
Detailed census population figures that are the basis for the new lines come out in February, and Virginia’s filing deadline for state legislative candidates is just two months later.
That’s not nearly enough time for a challenger — tea party-inspired or otherwise — to run an effective, well-financed campaign. Worse, there’s the very real possibility that, if a challenger announced their candidacy before the lines are set, the worthies may decide to tweak those lines just a bit to place said challenger in an entirely different district.
And if that doesn’t deter tea party challengers, here’s something that might: sources tell me that all of the current Senate Republican incumbents intend to run for re-election next year. That’s a change, as it was widely expected that at least Sens. Tommy Norment and Walter Stosch would retire. Norment and Stosch are particularly nettlesome Republicans as each has a long history of supporting tax hikes (as each did by backing Mark Warner’s 2004 increase and the ill-fated 2007 tax hike for roads). Earlier this year, it was discovered that Sen. Norment was feasting at the public trough, which raised hopes that he would take his pension and run. As for Sen. Stosch, his last re-election bid in 2007 against conservative Joe Blackburn was a costly, close-run thing. Stosch, then Senate Majority leader, spend more than $1.1 million in the primary, but beat Blackburn by only 266 votes. Surely he wouldn’t try to imitate Pyrrhus again in 2011…
But now it looks like he will. And if the Senate decides to fiddle with the redistricting lines just long enough to shut-out any real challengers to its incumbents, 2011 could go down as the year the political establishment had the last laugh.
