Schapiro: For Levar Stoney, do more opponents mean more opportunities? (2024)

The day after announcing that the city of Richmond had, for the first time, received Wall Street’s highest-possible credit rating — triple-A, a distinction that speaks to the strength of the local economy and could save taxpayers millions of dollars in interest on debt-backed bonds for a glittery replacement to the Diamond baseball park — Mayor Levar Stoney traveled to Bristol, in the rural southwestern corner of Virginia, where jobs are scarce and Democrats scarcer.

Appearing with a political pal, former Mayor Neal Osborne, the trip was an exercise in self-promotion by Stoney, who — concluding that he would lose a one-on-one fight for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination to U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger — is now running for lieutenant governor, facing at least three opponents in a 2025 primary that could be more favorable to Stoney’s quest for long-term statewide relevance.

Read: the governorship.

Stoney knows something about running in a crowded field.

There are opportunities in that for him — and for his rivals: state Sens. Ghazala Hashmi of Chesterfield and Aaron Rouse of Virginia Beach and Babur Lateef, an ophthalmologist and chair of the Prince William County School Board who was the first major-party candidate to declare for lieutenant governor this cycle.

Some of these opportunities are geographic; some may be demographic. Others can be financial. In a cluttered contest, issues can have a big impact on small groups of voters. Their influence can be disproportionate in a campaign in which a plurality — rather than a majority — is all that’s necessary to win.

Put another way: A nomination could be decided by a little bit here, a little bit there, ideally combined with a strong home-base performance.

Lateef is the only Northern Virginian in the Democratic race, giving him an introductory edge in that deep-blue vote trove over several of his opponents. Hashmi is the only woman in the race — and speaks frequently on women’s issues. Lateef is of Pakistani descent; Hashmi, Indian. Stoney and Rouse are Black men who came up from poverty in Hampton Roads and whose first elective offices were local.

All four are a reminder of dramatic change in Virginia. Heavily rural into the 1960s and, as a consequence, strongly conservative, the state is suburban-dominated with a fast-growing Asian and Hispanic presence that, with its historic Black population, has fueled the Democratic Party ascendancy and pushed Virginia’s politics to the center-left.

Stoney was twice elected mayor — in 2016, over seven other declared candidates, of whom only three were still active on Election Day; and in 2020, against five challengers, three of whom were viable that November. Stoney pulled 36% of the citywide vote the first time; 38% in his second go.

And in both campaigns, lifted by a strong turnout for the Democratic candidates in the concurrent presidential elections, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, respectively, Stoney avoided a mandatory runoff by winning what, in effect, is Richmond’s mini-electoral college, carrying the required minimum number of districts — five of nine.

They included districts that embody Richmond’s enduring difficulties: grinding, heavily Black poverty that Stoney says his administration has reduced by 22% and downtown walking neighborhoods popular with younger people who, because many are Asian and Hispanic, ensure that a city that was once majority-Black remains majority-minority.

In Stoney’s first campaign, his opponents included two City Council members — Jon Baliles and Michelle Mosby, who’s running again for mayor this year — and Jack Berry, a former suburban county administrator, head of a Richmond booster organization and darling of the white business establishment.

Stoney also faced Joe Morrissey, the enfant terrible of city politics and a former prosecutor who’s been in and out of the legislature.

In 2020, despite criticism of his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, post-George Floyd violence and his support of a doomed downtown redevelopment proposal, Stoney turned back another City Council member, Kim Gray, and a youthful late entry, Alexsis Rodgers, a labor organizer and a member of the state Democratic Party leadership as chair in the 4th Congressional District, which includes Richmond.

That Rodgers these days is front and center for Hashmi — a poetry-quoting former college instructor and administrator, two-term senator and the first Muslim woman elected to the General Assembly — is a reminder that Stoney’s rivals are helped by hostility for the mayor, much of it rooted these days in his push for a casino twice rejected by voters.

Rodgers fired up the crowd at Hashmi’s recent kickoff at a mansion on Monument Avenue, where once stood the Confederate statues that Stoney, as he often reminds us on social media, directed be razed. Also in attendance: three members of the city’s House of Delegates delegation — Michael Jones, Rae Cousins and Betsy Carr — and Danny Avula, a pediatrician and the state’s former COVID-19 czar, who is running to succeed Stoney.

This signals that Stoney will have to fight for his share of the central Virginia vote, which was essential to the rise of an earlier Richmond mayor, Tim Kaine. Kaine was nominated for lieutenant governor in a three-way Democratic primary in 2001 over two candidates from Hampton Roads, Dels. Alan Diamonstein of Newport News and Jerrauld Jones of Norfolk, now a circuit judge.

Jones is the father of a former Norfolk delegate, Jay Jones, readying for a second run for the Democratic attorney general nomination, possibly this time facing Shannon Taylor, elected in 2019 to her third term as Henrico County prosecutor. She’s expected to disclose her plans in June.

Hashmi will have an especially strong issue with which to mobilize women, who make up the majority of the electorate. She was the Senate sponsor of legislation vetoed by Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin that would guarantee Virginians’ access to contraception. Youngkin doesn’t need to be reminded of the power of reproductive rights. His proposed ban on most abortions after 15 weeks cost his party control of the General Assembly in 2023.

Rouse, a former university and pro football player who barely two years ago was a member of the Virginia Beach City Council, rocketed into the upper ranks of the Senate because of retirements — voluntary and involuntary. The chairman of the Senate’s elections committee, Rouse has been a leading voice in debates over commercial sales of marijuana and legalization of electronic gambling machines.

Virginia Beach is the largest city in the state and tends to swing between the parties, depending on the election. That the Democratic ticket in 2025 might include one of Virginia Beach’s own could keep the city in play, allowing the party to be competitive; perhaps even tipping it blue.

Rouse and Lateef have something that used to be Stoney’s alone: prized endorsem*nts from high-profile Democrats.

In ceding the gubernatorial nomination to Spanberger, Stoney put close allies in an awkward position. That’s because they had endorsed him for governor and others — now his rivals — for lieutenant governor.

Former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, Stoney’s political rabbi, had already pledged to Lateef when Stoney quit for governor. McAuliffe, in the oddest of pivots, then announced that he was supporting Lateef and Stoney. Senate budget chair Louise Lucas of Portsmouth, likely the most powerful Black female politician in the state, was an early supporter of Stoney’s gubernatorial ambitions — and Rouse’s designs on the lieutenant governorship. Lucas has made it clear she’s sticking with Rouse for the No. 2 spot.

No wonder Stoney — for whom that pre-holiday gift from Wall Street could open the doors of big-dollar donors, corporate and professional — started the Memorial Day weekend in Bristol.

Jeff E. Schapiro (804) 649-6814