Well, we knew things had evolved in Virginia, state of my forebears, when in November 2006 Jim Webb ousted George Allen from the Senate and crushed in its infancy Allen’s “frontrunning” 2008 presidential campaign. And we knew when the popular former Democratic governor of Virginia, Mark Warner, decided to run for Senate in 2008, that he would be a favorite to defeat whoever the state’s Republicans chose to try to hold onto the seat. But the state of the GOP in the Old Dominion is so dire that Warner might as well be sworn into office early. On Saturday, Jim Gilmore, another former governor, won his party’s nomination at the state GOP convention by all of 63 votes over Bob Marshall, the Virginia General Assembly’s most ardent foe of abortion and gay marriage. A few days earlier, Tom Davis, the retiring moderate GOP congressman from northern Virginia, unloaded to the Richmond Times-Dispatch about the sorry state of the state party. Davis might have mounted a credible challenge to Warner for the Senate, but he declined to run after the state party decided to hold a nominating convention rather than a primary — thereby guaranteeing a selection process dominated by conservative activists. The party, says Davis, “gave me the middle finger.”
Thanks in part to the open Senate seat and Mark Warner’s popularity, as well as the state’s evolution from solid red to a kind of rosy purple, Virginia could be pivotal in the presidential election. Can Obama, with Warner’s help and the mobilization of the state’s large African-American population, make Virginia go blue for the first time since LBJ’s 1964 landslide? It won’t be easy, not least because John McCain will appeal to the large military and veteran constituencies in the Tidewater area. But given the disarray and infighting among state Republicans, it’s certainly possible.