Almost every Democrat on the ballot eked out a victory in Waynesboro last Tuesday for the first time in decades. The evidence suggests there may be some bend in the old Iron Cross — or, as some have suggested, the Republican stronghold may not be as red as it once was.
That’s big news for a city that hasn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since Lyndon Johnson in 1964.
Last November, 51.97% of Waynesboro voters cast ballots for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
This year, 52.3% of Waynesboro voters went for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger.
In a historic departure from the norm, Spanberger was removed from her Republican opponent, Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, by roughly 400 votes, or 5 percentage points. It was the first time the city has voted for a Democratic candidate in the governor’s race since 1985.
Waynesboro was not alone last Tuesday.
Fifteen Virginia localities that had backed Republican Glenn Youngkin in 2021 — a mix of big suburbs, a college town, rural counties with large Black populations and small industrial cities — fell to Spanberger.
The largest among them were the cities of Virginia Beach and Chesapeake and Chesterfield and Spotsylvania and Stafford counties.
In nearby Nelson County, Spanberger won with with just over 50% of the vote. The last time Nelson voted for a Democratic candidate for governor was 2013, when Terry McAuliffe secured just under 47% of the votes in the county.
The blue wave swept 13 more Democrats into the House of Delegates, giving the party a comfortable majority with 64 seats in the 100-man chamber. Spanberger’s ticket mates, state Sen. Ghazala Hashmi and former Del. Jay Jones, both won their races for lieutenant governor and attorney general, respectively — in spite of Hashmi’s refusal to attend a debate and Jones’ texting scandal.
Incumbent Attorney General Jason Miyares was one of the few Republicans to carry Waynesboro on Election Day, but with just under 51% of the vote. It’s perhaps unsurprising given the Miyares-Jones race was much closer than originally expected after text messages Jones sent in 2022 threatening to kill then-House Speaker Todd Gilbert, R-Shenandoah, were unearthed.
Even in the local House of Delegates race, Waynesboro voters cast ballots en masse for the Democrat, Makayla Venable. Venable secured 51.1% of the votes in the city. However, she fell to incumbent Republican Ellen Campbell, a Waynesboro resident, after votes from the city of Staunton and counties of Augusta and Rockbridge were tallied.
Even though mail-in and provisional have yet to be counted, Waynesboro Registrar Lisa Jeffers said last Tuesdays results are unlikely to change, as the current winners have a wide enough margin.
Jeffers added that Waynesboro isn’t just voting for different candidates, but also voting in different ways: The number of early votes cast this year nearly doubled compared to 2021.
Waynesboro Democratic Committee Chair Susan Dell told the Daily Progress the results in Waynesboro came from “a lot of hard work” and “a good team.”
She said it helped that the Democratic platform this year was not “anti-Republican” and candidates, typically, refused to “feed into the division.”
“It was a real just coming together community and coalition over issues that affect every single one of us: groceries, seeing folks ripped from family, workplaces,” Dell said. “Conversations had to be about common values and what we were doing.”
As Dell pointed out, it wasn’t necessarily the Republican Party Waynesboro or Virginia voters were pushing back on; it was Trump, the man many blame for rising grocery costs, immigration raids and unemployment.
Virginia political analysts, such as Olusoji Akomolafe at Norfolk State University, have said much the same, crediting the blue wave in the state to “Trump fatigue.”
Waynesboro is far from a blue city now, but last Tuesday’s election have many on tenterhooks to see if the 2025 standard will hold in next year’s midterm elections, when Democratic U.S. Sen. Mark Warner and Republican U.S. Rep. Ben Cline are both up for reelection.
Waynesboro Councilman and Republican Committee Chair Jim Wood told The News Virginian after the 2024 election, in which Waynesboro Democrats lagged behind Republicans by only a handful of points, that the city is changing.
“We do have a lot of new people in the city with the new developments. This could speak to the face of Waynesboro changing,” Wood said at the time.
Source: www.dailyprogress.com
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