Virginia’s off-year gubernatorial races have historically served as a temperature check for the party controlling the White House. In every gubernatorial election since 1977 (except for 2013), the state has elected a governor from the party opposite the president’s.
In 2017, Democrats in Virginia’s House of Delegates were just two seats shy of flipping the chamber. They captured the majority two years later, and rode a wave of suburban animosity against President Trump to win 55 of 100 seats,.
Now, first-term Speaker Eileen Filler-Corn is trying to retain her party’s slim majority in a post-Trump and post-pandemic election cycle.
Like the U.S. House of Representatives, the Democratic majority in the Virginia legislature is exceedingly thin. Democrat majorities won in the past four years are within single digits of flipping back toward Republican control.
But while House Democrats still have more of President Biden’s agenda to enact and run on for 2022, Virginia’s House of Delegates has completed a full term since it won the majority — while a Democrat was governor.
With both chambers and the governorship under Democrat control, the House of Delegates was able to fulfill most of the progressive agenda Democratic members campaigned on: expanding voting rights through repealing voter ID laws and expanding absentee voting, instituting gun-control laws, raising the minimum wage, abolishing the death penalty and legalizing marijuana.
Part of their pitch this year is that Virginia Republicans would roll it all back.