Ralph Northam Isn’t Going Anywhere

Curt Mills

Politics, Americas

In the Old Dominion state, race and sex scandals have engulfed the governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, and Senate majority leader.

RICHMOND — It takes a lot to overshadow Donald Trump’s Washington, but in the last seven days the Commonwealth of Virginia has done just that.

Quadruple scandals have consumed the political careers of four of the state’s leading politicians: Gov. Ralph Northam, Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, Attorney General Mark Herring, and Richmond’s kingmaker, longtime Senate Majority Leader Tommy Norment.

Misery loves company, and the fact that Northam’s transgressions are no longer in isolation is seen by many as helpful to keeping him in the governor’s mansion, according to several Virginia lawmakers and longtime political hands.

Northam and Herring have admitted to blackface scandals; Fairfax is fighting an allegation of rape. All three are Democrats, and won on the statewide ticket that romped in 2017. Norment, a Republican, is facing allegations that he oversaw the compilation of a college yearbook in 1970s that was littered with offensive racial humor.

The Virginian capitol was swarmed this week by national political reporters, which was unusual for the old Confederate stronghold, even during the intense winter months of “Session,” as it’s called, when the Virginia General Assembly meets during January and February, before adjourning for the year. “Really hard to believe,” a longtime Virginian political figure told me this week. “Especially in staid, non-go-go Virginia.”

If Northam, Fairfax and Herring were all to resign, then the governorship would go to Kirk Cox, House speaker and a Republican, who won his job on a coin toss after a deadlock for control of the House of Delegates in 2017. The last week, longtime observers of the state say, has been a disaster on two fronts: for the rehabilitation of the image of state from its racist past, and for the power of the Virginia Democratic Party, which looked unstoppable following the 2017 election as the state became “blue.”

“Yes, Virginia, this is chaos,” says Larry J. Sabato, the state’s longtime, leading political commentator, and Kyle Kondik of the University of Virginia. Says legendary Richmond Times-Dispatch columnist Jeff Schapiro: the Virginia Democrats’ crisis “is becoming a suicide pact.”