As he approached another door in Fredericksburg, walking past Halloween decorations and trees starting to lose their autumn leaves, Muhammad Khan prepared his pitch to voters. Over the past several weeks, Khan has spoken to many of his Virginia neighbors, stressing to them that the upcoming legislative elections will determine the future of their state.
Addressing fellow union organizers on Friday morning, Khan said: “We really need to fight, and we need Virginia blue.”
Members of Unite Here, a hospitality workers’ union, have knocked on 230,000 doors on behalf of Democratic candidates in Virginia ahead of Tuesday, when all 140 legislative seats in the battleground state will be up for grabs.
Republicans are looking to maintain their narrow majority in the house of delegates and flip control of the state senate, which would clear the way for the governor, Glenn Youngkin, to enact his policy agenda. But Democrats warn that Republicans would use their legislative trifecta in Richmond to enact a 15-week abortion ban and roll back access to the ballot box.
The results in Virginia carry national implications.
As one of only a handful of states holding elections this year, Virginia will serve as a crucial test of each party’s message to voters before the crucial presidential race next year. Should Republicans win, supporters of Donald Trump will see it as vindication that their party’s rightwing message still resonates. Should Democrats prevail, it will be seen as a boost for Joe Biden, who has lagged in recent polling but will then be able to point to a stronger Democratic performance in actual votes.
In the final days before polls close on Tuesday, Democrats and Republicans in Virginia are working furiously to turn out as many voters as possible in these off-year elections.
On Friday, Khan and his door-knocking partner, Linda Harris, canvassed a neighborhood in Fredericksburg and encouraged voters to support the house delegate candidate Josh Cole and state senate candidate Joel Griffin, whose races will help determine the majority in each chamber of the legislature.
Cole lost his house of delegates seat in 2021, when Republicans secured a narrow majority in the chamber on the back of Youngkin’s success. Just one year after Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump by 10 points in Virginia, Youngkin won the state’s governorship by two points in 2021.
But Cole feels that the political environment in Virginia has shifted since 2021, giving Democrats an opportunity to take back full control of the legislature. Running in a new district after Virginia redrew its legislative maps following the 2020 census, Cole said he was “cautiously optimistic” about Tuesday’s outcome.
“Republicans had momentum [in 2021]. We had just won the presidency; people were frustrated at the administration,” Cole said. “And Glenn Youngkin just came out of nowhere. He was this bright, shining star, and people were attracted to that. And as we fast-forward to two years later, some people are still excited about Youngkin, but people are starting to see that he hasn’t put everything together like he said he would.”
The 2022 midterms suggested that swing voters in Virginia may indeed be drifting back toward Democrats following Youngkin’s election. In 2022, Republicans targeted three congressional seats in Virginia, but they only managed to flip one district while Democrats held the other two.
Despite that setback, Rich Anderson, chair of the Republican party of Virginia, said he believes Youngkin’s leadership has positioned the party for success this year.
“We now are on an arc that was established in 2021,” Anderson said. “So our trajectory, I think, is a very promising one, and we will see if it holds throughout this cycle.”
But the issue of abortion has presented a challenge for Republicans in Virginia and across the country.
Since Roe v Wade was overturned last year, Republican-controlled states have passed a wave of laws banning or strictly limiting access to the procedure. Virginia is now the only state in the US south without severe restrictions on abortion access, and Republicans are pushing for a “reasonable 15-week limit with exceptions for rape, incest and life of the mother”, as Youngkin’s political action committee said in a recent ad. Democrats predict that Republicans’ stance on curtailing abortion access will help Democrats take full control of the Virginia legislature.
“The stakes of this election are so crystal clear,” said Heather Williams, interim president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. “The states have been so incredibly important always, but I think the understanding of how critically important they are has become clear to voters since the fall of [Roe]. And the stakes in Virginia align perfectly with that.”
Polling indicates the election will be very close. According to a Washington Post-Schar School survey conducted last month, 47% of likely Virginia voters indicated they planned to support a Democratic candidate for the house of delegates, while 45% of likely voters said they would back a Republican candidate.
As always, the final results will come down to turnout, and data compiled by the Virginia Public Access Project (VPAP) suggests early voting is down compared with 2021. As of Sunday, 776,931 voters had already cast ballots, while 1,194,185 Virginians had voted by the same point in 2021.
Despite Trump’s false claims about the legitimacy of early and absentee voting, Youngkin has encouraged his supporters to cast their ballots early, and Republicans say that strategy will pay off on Tuesday.
“We don’t have to win the most votes this year early, but we have to take a bigger bite out of the field that the Democrats have previously commanded,” Anderson said. “And in our targeted districts, those numbers are very promising for us.”
With Democrats and Republicans running neck and neck, Unite Here believes their members’ organizing efforts could make a decisive difference in helping voters understand the crucial significance of these elections.
As he has knocked doors in Virginia, Khan has shared his personal story of immigrating from Pakistan and finding good-paying union work to support his family, and he has used that story to make a larger argument about the need to elect pro-union Democrats.
Mario Yedidia, Unite Here’s national field director, said: “Without the kind of personal contact that you get when a working-class person knocks on your door, if you’re a working-class voter in all these districts, you’re much less likely to get out there and vote.”
Harris has similarly used her own personal background to connect with voters, framing her campaign work as a way to ensure a better future for her family. Although she lives in Georgia, Harris traveled to Virginia to help with Unite Here’s campaign efforts there, saying she wants to be able to tell her grandchildren that she did everything she could to protect the right to vote.
“If you don’t use it, you lose it, and right now they’re trying to take it away. So it’s very important that they don’t take it away,” Harris said. “And as long as I’m living and breathing, I’m doing what I can.”
