Election 2019: Virginia's 'off-off-year' elections were once sleepy. And then came Trump.
RICHMOND — Sarabeth Spasojevich voted faithfully for president every four years but, like many Virginia Democrats, skipped the elections in between. Then Donald Trump won the White House, and her voting habits were transformed.
She went to the polls in 2017, part of an anti-Trump tsunami that put a Democrat in the governor’s mansion and flipped 15 seats in the House of Delegates. In 2018, she not only voted but campaigned, helping Democrat Abigail Spanberger unseat Rep. Dave Brat (R). She’s at it again this year for state House and Senate hopefuls.
“The genie’s out of the bottle,” Spasojevich, 41, said at a campaign event in suburban Richmond that drew 200 activists despite the fact it was a torrid Sunday afternoon in August. “We will never skip an election or ignore candidates for the rest of our lives.”
Consider it one more norm smashed by an iconoclastic presidency: This “off-off” election year in Virginia is surprisingly on.
Virginia holds elections every year, and the “off-off” year — with just state legislative races and no presidential or statewide contest — is the most easily ignored by voters. The campaign cycle is much shorter than for federal or statewide contests, television ads are scarce, and turnout historically hovers around 30 percent.
Republicans tend to vote in those quieter elections, while Democrats “get a little sleepy” in nonpresidential years, as former president Barack Obama put it at a 2017 rally for now-Gov. Ralph Northam (D).
But after Trump’s election, Democratic turnout surged in the two statewide elections that followed. The biggest test could come in November, with all 140 state House and Senate seats on the ballot but no statewide contests to otherwise drive turnout.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/virginias-off-off-year-elections-were-once-sleepy-and-then-came-trump/2019/09/14/860570da-cff0-11e9-b29b-a528dc82154a_story.html?arc404=true
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Let's hope they do.
