20176 General Elected 52 – 48
One of the projects of these Political Notes has been to help make Virginia a bluer state than it is already. With a Democratic Governor and Lt. Governor and Attorney General and two Democratic US Senators, Virginia has become pretty blue. Democrats are not far from controlling the Virginia Senate, with 19 out of 40 Senators. But Democrats need to win seventeen seats currently held by Republicans to gain control of the House of Delegates. Coincidentally, Hillary Clinton carried seventeen districts in Virginia that now have Republican delegates.
Virginia’s system is a little different. It elects officials in odd years. State Senators won‘t be elected until 2019. Candidates for Governor and Lt. Governor and Attorney General are competing in 2017 as are candidates for all 100 seats of the House of Delegates. It is promising to focus on candidates for Delegate seats that are among the seventeen carried by Hillary and for whom the contest with a Republican has already begun. It is prudent to focus on the candidates we know will be the Democratic candidate against a Republican.
The Primary election in Virginia is scheduled for June 13. Multiple Democratic candidates will be sorted out then. For at least one district, the sorting has already happened. Richmond area HD 73 is one of the districts with a Republican Delegate that Hillary carried. In HD 73, Democrats had a caucus instead of voting in the June primary. They have chosen Debra Rodman https://www.rodmanfordelegate.comandhttps://www.facebook.com/rodmanfordelegate/ as their candidate.
Almost 600 people showed up for a firehouse caucus. That was about half the number of people who voted in the 2013 Democratic primary — an enormous number for this very different way of choosing a candidate.
Debra Rodman is forty-four years old and married to Darryl Lowery. Sheis the mother of two boys, has long been a local leader, and was named as one of Richmond’s Top 40 under 40. In a statement about her values as a candidate, she begins by saying: Nothing else matters if you can’t find a job. She proposes to make progress towards more job training programs in the belief that more knowledgeable prospective employees will attract businesses to the area.
Rodman is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of Women’s Studies at Randolph-Macon College. She is a former Fulbright Scholar and serves an expert witness in U.S. Federal Immigration courts assisting migrants seeking political asylum. She describes herself as committed to diversity and inclusion, economic development, reproductive rights, and affordable healthcare. She is also a member of the North Carolina-based Lumbee tribe of Native Americans.
In the past, Virginia Democrats had been abandoning the effort to compete for many seats in the House of Delegates, but no longer. Rodman’s opponent, who replaced Eric Cantor when he was elected to Congress, is facing a challenger for only the second time in his seventeen years as a delegate. There is a reason for us to be encouraged about Debra Rodman‘s challenge. In 2016, Hillary Clinton carried HD 73 by more than 3,000 votes out of 40,000 total votes.
Debra Rodman‘s Facebook posts are a clue to the positions she would take as Delegate. She condemned the US House of Representatives passing the American Health Care Act (Trumpcare). A fluent Spanish speaker, she announced her plans to attend the local QuePasa festival in Spanish. She took care to thank and support the three candidates who competed against her for the nomination. Rodman is an advocate for Virginia adopting Medicaid expansion under the ACA (assuming that will be possible when she takes office) and decries Republican attacks on schools and the budget cuts that accompany those attacks. She insists that she will never waver from her conviction that a woman should always be able to make her own decisions about her health care and describes her campaign as a continuation of a 15-year mission to speak out and take action against prejudice and discrimination to ensure that all Virginians are treated equally and fairly under the law.
Debra Rodman can be supported at her website https://www.rodmanfordelegate.comor directly at Act Bluehttps://secure.actblue.com/contribute/page/rodman-for-house-73-1.
She is an essential part of the shift of Virginia in becoming a genuinely blue state.
