One of the few states holding elections this year is Virginia, where the entire state senate and house of delegates will be up for reelection in addition to some local races. I will be doing a series of diaries offering my early assessment of how the races here in Northern Virginia could turn out, and what that could mean for 2012. This diary will cover state senate races, Part II the races in the house of delegates, and Part III the local races for offices like County Supervisor. These races seem very down in the weeds, but in a crucial state for 2012 like VA they can give an idea how strong each party is leading up to the presidential election.
The state senate is controlled by Democrats, who took the senate in the 2007 elections. The state senate is currently the last bastion of Democratic control in VA, so taking it back will certainly be the #1 goal of the VA GOP in 2011. The GOP has a fairly easy path towards taking back the senate; they need to flip three seats in order to regain control (a two-seat gain for the GOP would result in a tie, giving tie-breaking power to republican lt. gov Bill Bolling). The GOP could do this by defeating long-serving blue dog senators in extremely conservative districts in the southern part of the state. Many of these senators have been considered so entrenched that they haven’t faced a serious challenge in a while, but OTOH the GOP has had some success in winning against similar incumbents across the south recently. Regardless of what happens in the south of the state, there will certainly be a lot of contested races up here in NoVA, and that is what I intend to cover. The one caveat here is that we don’t know what redistricting will do to many of these districts. I will try my best to make predictions as to what redistricting could do to these races, but as with many races that is a major unknown here.
One of the resources I will be using heavily here are the great maps provided by the Virginia Public Access Project. They have maps down to the precinct level of all statewide and state legislative elections across Virginia available by county, house district, or senate district, not to mention all the other cool stuff that they have (maps of turnout, detailed info on redistricting, fundraising info, etc). I don’t know of any other state that has such a good resource available.
Let’s start with the easiest districts to predict. The 30th, 31st, and 35th are all highly democratic seats that will not be competitive this year. Safe D
Now on to the more interesting districts.
* 32nd District
Areas: McLean, Great Falls, Reston, Herndon
Senator: Janet Howell (D)
2009 Gov: 53% Deeds, 47% McDonnell
2008 Pres: 60% Obama, 39% McCain
2007 State Senate: Uncontested