2017 General Election Elected 54 – 46
Let’s help make Virginia a little Bluer. Help elect Chris Hurst to Virginia’s HD (House of Delegates) 12 — a district in the Roanoke area of Virginia. You can learn more about him at: https://www.hurst4delegate.com /
HD 12 is one of seventeen HDs in Virginia represented by a Republican that was carried by Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. Seventeen, coincidentally, is the number of Republican seats that need to be flipped in order for the Democrats to gain control of the House of Delegates. It is not likely that that many seats can be flipped. But I will be writing about several of them. Let’s see if we can help.
Virginia is one of very few states that have their elections in odd numbered years. In 2017 there are elections for statewide office like Governor as well as for all of the 100 seat House of Delegates. There are no Senate seats up (unless a special election arises) because Senators, elected every four years, will have elections in 2019.
VA HD 12 is west of Roanoke, a city in southwest Virginia — closer to the West Virginia border than it is to Washington, DC. It has been represented by a Republican, but the vote was fairly close in 2013. Chris Hurst is running in 2017 and has a good chance to be elected as a Democrat. (He does not have primary opposition. Until the primary is over, I will write only about those who are the only candidate against a Republican incumbent or, in one case, an open seat formerly held by a Republican.)
Chris Hurst does not have a name recognition problem. A news anchor for the local television station, he had a life changing event in 2015 when his girlfriend and another station employee were shot and killed while the news was being broadcast. Many of you will remember the national reports about this incident — that the couple had just moved in together and were planning their marriage.
Chris Hurst was an all-American boy growing up outside of Philadelphia. He was a member of the Philadelphia Boys Choir and graduated from the Boston area Emerson College, a school focused on media. He was a successful journalist at WDBJ in Roanoke. Among the awards he won were for reporting about the treatment of mental illness.
Chris Hurst stresses that he is not a single issue candidate. A child of a small businessman father and a mother who worked for educational non-profits, he is seeking fairness in education funding and ways to give businesses and start-ups incentives to locate to southwest Virginia. He does have a special interest in developing an intelligent conversation about gun safety. He is and has been a gun owner. He does want, as part of his candidacy and, if he is elected, as part of his time in office “a healthy discussion of where we are with firearms” so that Virginia and the rest of the country can reduce gun violence. Chris Hurst https://www.hurst4delegate.com /is a strong candidate to move the Virginia House of Delegates toward a Democratic majority. Help him do just that.
