If the last public poll was any indicator, Virginia Democrats still have lots of homework to do before making their picks in the primary for lieutenant governor.

A Christopher Newport University poll conducted in mid-April found 64 percent of likely primary voters undecided in the race, with Del. Sam Rasoul, D-Roanoke, the apparent leader with 12 percent support.

“We’re glad to see the way things are trending,” Rasoul said in an interview, attributing his leading status to a “values-based campaign” focused on in-person trips to cities and counties throughout Virginia, including areas where voters “feel forgotten.”

The numbers suggest there’s still lots of room for movement in an open field that once stood at eight candidates but has shrunk to six heading into the final month before the June 8 primary.

As lawmakers prepare to study the prospects for campaign finance reform in Virginia, the sheer size of some checks flowing to Democratic candidates for statewide office has renewed debate about the boosts offered by a wealthy Charlottesville couple topping charts as the biggest donors in state politics.

Though they backed opposing candidates in the 2017 Democratic primary for governor, donations connected to Michael Bills, a hedge fund manager and primary backer of the advocacy group Clean Virginia, and Sonjia Smith, a philanthropist and former lawyer married to Bills, are working in tandem this year in a big way.

Smith and Clean Virginia have given a combined $1.1 million, $600,000 from Clean Virginia and $500,000 from Smith, to former delegate Jennifer Carroll Foy, whom they believe has the best shot at challenging former Gov. Terry McAuliffe in a five-person Democratic primary field. That’s almost a third of the roughly $3.6 million in cash contributions Carroll Foy reported raising as of March 31.

Dimmerling is among thousands of Virginians who have lived for months with the daily panic of impending financial doom because of the Virginia Employment Commission’s lagging performance in dealing with contested pandemic unemployment claims within the 21 days as prescribed by federal law.

According to data from the U.S. Department of Labor, for each full quarter since the pandemic began Virginia has ranked at or near the bottom against other states in the percentage of “nonmonetary determinations of claimants” within the required three weeks.

That’s bureaucratic jargon that means people whose unemployment insurance claims have been called into question or have prompted other concerns. For instance, employees who quit without good cause or are fired for misconduct are generally ineligible for benefits. Those separated because of layoffs — particularly in the pandemic — are eligible. Sometimes, employers will object to a former employee’s claim, and specialists known as “deputy adjudicators” decide who’s right.

The Food and Drug Administration expanded emergency use authorization of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine to include adolescents 12 to 15 years of age on May 10. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention followed with recommendations endorsing use in this age group after their advisory group meeting on May 12. The American Academy of Pediatrics also supports this decision.

Dr. Debbie-Ann Shirley is an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Virginia specializing in pediatric infectious diseases. Here she addresses some of the concerns parents may have about their teen or preteen getting the COVID-19 vaccine.

1. Does the vaccine work in adolescents?
Yes, recently released data from Pfizer-BioNTech shows that the COVID-19 vaccine seems to work really well in this age group. The COVID-19 vaccine was found to be 100 percent efficacious in preventing symptomatic COVID-19 in an ongoing clinical trial of children in the U.S. aged 12 to 15. Adolescents made high levels of antibody in response to the vaccine, and their immune response was just as strong as what has been seen in older teens and young adults 16-25 years of age.

Despite the early efforts to paint the Republicans’ 2021 ticket as an overwhelming lurch to the right, the slate isn’t nearly as extreme as it might’ve been. Instead of Chase, a self-described “Trump in heels,” becoming the party’s standard-bearer in a state former President Donald Trump lost twice, she logged off and went to the beach.

After failing to win a statewide election since 2009, some Republicans say they feel surprisingly good about where the party stands coming out of a chaotic unassembled convention marked by procedural confusion, mysterious attack ads and infighting.

“I think some of the ebullience you see in Republicans right now is that this could’ve been very bad. And it turned into the exact opposite,” said Shaun Kenney, a former Republican Party of Virginia executive director who has criticized fringe elements in the party. “But it’s more than just a sigh of relief. It’s like we finally know where we’re headed.”

As he tries to become Virginia’s first Black attorney general, Del. Jay Jones made clear on the debate stage Wednesday night that he wasn’t going to tiptoe around the topic of race.

Facing off against incumbent Attorney General Mark Herring in the first televised debate of the Democratic primary, Jones introduced himself as the descendant of slaves and the grandson of civil rights activists, going on to make several references to the perspective gained from his “lived experience as a Black man.”

Perhaps the most remarkable experience Jones recounted on the debate stage was being in the room in early 2019 when Herring met with the Virginia Legislative Black Caucus to deliver a pre-emptive apology for wearing blackface while in college at the University of Virginia.

The Republican Party of Virginia has a chance this year to reestablish itself as a competitive force in statewide elections.

After a dozen years without a statewide victory, the GOP leadership needed to take a careful look within to understand why voters have turned their backs on the once dominant political party in Virginia. It appears that party leaders decided that with the right method of nominating candidates for statewide office, they can change their fortunes.

Republican Party leaders   generally have favored conventions as a means of selecting nominees for statewide offices. The closed process, open only to the most inside of GOP insiders and dominated by some of its most conservative voices, has had a mixed record of success.

The firestorm caused by the Windsor police officer who pepper sprayed an African-American Army officer may end up changing the relationship between money and policing in Virginia.

Delegate Betsy Carr of Richmond says this incident reveals why police departments and sheriff’s offices should be de-incentivized from making traffic stops.  “Police are incentivized if they’re going to get money from it just to make more traffic stops, and a lot of time Black and brown folks are the people who are bearing the brunt of this.”

But Dana Schrad at the police chiefs association says local governments get that money, not police.  “The financial incentive is not on the part of the police department,” Schrad argues. “It might be on the part of the locality. But the locality has always expressed that their chief concern is that speeding on that route that goes through their community presents risks for the business owners and presents risks for the residents, and they want to see speeding laws enforced.”

Former state Del. Jennifer Carroll Foy’s supporters say she is best-positioned to challenge the former governor, but she has yet to gain broad name recognition.

In Virginia, 2021 was the best chance yet to elect a Black politician — and possibly the first Black woman in any state — to the governor’s mansion.

But with five weeks until the commonwealth’s Democratic primary, Terry McAuliffe, its white male former governor, is on track to secure the nomination easily.

A COVID-19 vaccine mandate is not being ruled out in Virginia but it won’t happen in the near future, if at all. That’s according to the state’s Vaccine Coordinator Dr. Danny Avula, who spoke to 8News via Zoom on Thursday.

In the meantime, Dr. Avula said the use of so-called “vaccine passports” or certifications are a more likely solution for skepticism.

“If our ability to move forward as a society, to open back up businesses, to open back up schools, is contingent on this, then I think we find every way we can to incentivize it and potentially even get to a point where we require it, but I think we’re a long way from that,” Dr. Avula said.

The Virginia Mercury took nine first-place awards and one of its journalists earned a top individual honor in the 2020 Virginia Press Association competition.

Mercury reporter Ned Oliver was named the year’s outstanding journalist for his work covering how the COVID-19 pandemic affected Virginia’s most vulnerable people. That included stories about prisoners, workers who lost jobs or were forced to come back as safety protocols were in flux, those who struggled with Virginia’s problem-plagued administration of unemployment benefits and renters who faced eviction, among other stories.

“In a year when nearly every journalist was writing about COVID-19, the judge said that Oliver’s work stands out. His reporting held officials accountable, and he kept an eye on the pandemic’s impact on those who could not speak for themselves,” the VPA said in a news release.

The first of three minimum wage increases approved by Virginia lawmakers will take effect Saturday, guaranteeing the state’s lowest paid workers an hourly rate of $9.50 an hour.

While some businesses warned the hikes will force them to layoff workers and cut hours, low-wage employees celebrated the coming raises.

“I just feel like we deserve it,” said Jenee Long, who until recently was paid just over the current minimum of $7.25 an hour making sandwiches at a Subway franchise in Richmond. “Luckily, I had family to take care of me, because how would I pay rent?”

The last minimum wage increase in Virginia came courtesy of the federal government more than a decade ago in 2009, when Congress raised the wage floor to $7.25.

The Virginia GOP says 53,524 delegates have registered to vote in the party’s nominating convention next week, in which Republicans will select their candidates for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general.

Republican Party of Virginia Chairman Rich Anderson announced the number at a candidate forum on Tuesday evening, predicting the event would be “the largest state party convention ever in American history.”

The convention is set for Saturday, May 8, and, unlike a traditional convention held at a single location, will take place at voting locations set up around the state to comply with COVID-19 safety rules.

A minor political furor erupted in Virginia last week — over math.

It started with a Fox News story declaring that the state Department of Education was moving to eliminate all accelerated math classes before 11th grade, “effectively keeping higher-achieving students from advancing as they usually would in the school system.”

Republican leaders soon joined a chorus of dissenters. House Minority Leader Todd Gilbert criticized the department’s “plan to lower standards,” stating that “Virginians have had enough of the insatiable agenda to eliminate opportunities for students to excel in the quest to achieve mediocrity for all.” Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin slammed the decision in another statement, saying families across the state were “up in arms.”

When Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam looks back at his tenure, the inflection point between being a run-of-the-mill executive and the progressive leader he has become is a painful one.

The scandal — born of the discovery of a decades-old yearbook photo that featured someone in blackface — was an existential crisis for Northam and his administration. After initially saying the person in question was him, he denied it but admitted to darkening his skin as part of a Michael Jackson dance contest in 1984. Almost every Virginia Democrat called for his ouster as the state examined its racist past. Those closest to Northam said he was close to resigning.

How the governor survived was a surprise even to his most ardent supporters. The man who was nearly thrown out of office by his own party has, in the two years since, become a progressive champion, working with the same Democrats who called for his resignation to tighten gun laws in the commonwealth, restore the voting rights to nearly 70,000 felons, approve voting rights legislation and abolish the death penalty in the state. And just this week Northam signed legislation that would legalize marijuana this summer, the first Southern state to do so.

When she was sworn in as the first woman to serve as speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates, Eileen Filler-Corn said she was struck by the diversity of the new Democratic majority looking back at her.

A year later, she was standing in a mostly empty room, speaking to “squares on a computer” as the oldest continuous legislative body in the Western Hemisphere tried lawmaking via Zoom.

It’s not yet clear when the House will return to normal. But after two years in power, Filler-Corn says she’s confident Virginia voters still want Democrats in charge.

“We heard the issues that were important to Virginians,” Filler-Corn said in a recent interview with The Virginia Mercury. “We campaigned saying we were going to do X, Y and Z. We were very upfront about it. Very bold. And there is no doubt about it that we followed through.”

Virginia universities plan a return to campuses in the fall, but there are questions if the COVID-19 vaccine can be mandated.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration only authorized the vaccine for emergency purposes, according to Lisa Lee, professor of public health at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. The vaccine does not yet have full FDA approval.

The vaccine was authorized for emergency use, so people have to be given the choice to take it and be informed of the consequences if they don’t, Lee said.

“Many legal scholars have interpreted that as saying that people cannot be required to take a vaccine that is under an emergency use authorization,” Lee said. “They can be when it has full approval, so that’s where the hitch is.”

Starting May 15, Virginia will significantly relax capacity restrictions on social gatherings and entertainment venues as COVID-19 numbers plateau across much of the state.

Gov. Ralph Northam announced the latest rollback in a video message on Thursday, citing the state’s continued progress in vaccinations. Data from the Virginia Department of Health indicates that more than 40 percent of the population has received at least one shot and more than 26 percent are fully vaccinated. Every Virginian 16 and older became eligible for the vaccine on Sunday.

“Vaccination numbers are up, and our COVID case numbers are substantially lower than they were earlier this year,” Northam said in a statement. “So, we have been able to begin easing some mitigation measures.”

A bill allowing the public access to limited criminal investigation records will go into effect in July, along with a handful of other bills related to government transparency.

Del. Chris Hurst, D-Blacksburg, a former television reporter, introduced House Bill 2004. The bill requires files related to non-ongoing criminal investigations be released under Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act law.

“I’d been a journalist for 10 years, and I frequently saw that access to police records was very difficult,” Hurst said. “In denying those records, accountability and transparency were lost.”

Hurst said he hopes the bill will give the public reasonable access to criminal investigation files.

In many Virginia courtrooms, commonwealth’s attorneys charged with prosecuting crimes continue to earn significantly more than the government employees responsible for defending the accused.

It’s an imbalance that bakes inequity into the criminal justice system, say public defenders, whose state-funded offices represent poor defendants who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford an attorney.

They say it’s not uncommon to spend years training a new hire only to lose them to a higher paying job, often in prosecutors offices.

“They literally just go across the street to make a significantly increased salary to prosecute people instead of defend them,” said Ashley Shapiro, a senior assistant public defender in Richmond, where lawyers on staff learned they were almost all making less than the highest-paid administrative assistant in the prosecutor’s office.

Writing this column in a Richmond suburb, I expect instant responses to data inquiries from across the Internet. And, far more often than not, I get them.

Fiber-optic digital access (which ain’t cheap) also allows me to stream movies, shop the virtual marketplace, conduct business videoconferences and correspond at light speed with anyone in the world via email or social media.

By the time you read this, I will have used this fast connection to communicate with sources whom I have interviewed for this piece, downloaded all sorts of data and collaborated with The Virginia Mercury’s editors to get it ready for your consumption.

Over the last month, state and federal officials have directed thousands of COVID-19 vaccines to large-scale clinics in vulnerable communities with high rates of coronavirus cases — all in areas with significant or majority Black and Latino populations.

The sites have been touted by leaders as a core strategy in expanding access to vaccines among communities of color, where immunization rates are consistently lower than they are for White Virginians. “We have done a very good job in the commonwealth in addressing this issue,” state Health Commissioner Dr. Norman Oliver said at a news briefing last month in response to questions over vaccine equity.

“We have brought on staff in our emergency support team that is doing outreach in these communities,” he added. “We’ve put boots on the ground in all 35 of our health districts and those teams are doing your basic sort of community organizing — door to door, working with faith leaders, community-based organizations to bring people from these vulnerable populations to our vaccination sites.”

When top aides to Gov. Ralph Northam sat down last summer to meet with the state inspector general, whose office had just issued a critical watchdog report on the Virginia Parole Board, Northam Chief of Staff Clark Mercer opened by saying he wanted to hear what was being done to prevent future reports from “getting forwarded to the Associated Press again.” 

Republican General Assembly leaders had just given media outlets an unredacted copy of a report accusing the Parole Board of mishandling the release of Vincent Martin, who was convicted of the 1979 killing of a Richmond police officer but won praise as a model inmate. Before that, the inspector general had only released an unreadable version with virtually every sentence blacked-out, citing an interpretation of confidentiality laws disputed by open-government advocates.

Mercer said he was hoping for a “collegial” discussion of what had happened and the aspects of the report that were in dispute.

Joe Biden wants a carbon-free electric grid by 2035. What does that look like in Virginia?

Virginia’s General Assembly made history in 2020 by becoming the first state in the South to pass a law requiring the full decarbonization of its electric sector. The Virginia Clean Economy Act requires our two largest utilities, Dominion Energy and Appalachian Power, to close all Virginia carbon-emitting power plants by 2045. As of 2050, the state will not issue carbon allowances to any other power plants in the commonwealth, including those owned by electric cooperatives and independent generators.

Less than a year later, President Joe Biden wants to move up the date for a carbon-free electric grid nationwide to 2035. Biden is also targeting a net-zero carbon economy by 2050. On that, Virginia is actually more ambitious, at least on paper, since the Commonwealth Energy Policy sets a goal for a net-zero economy by 2045.

Standing across from the gas station where an Army lieutenant became another viral example of aggressive policing directed at a person of color, members of the Virginia NAACP called Monday for lawmakers to hold a special session on an unfinished piece of the police reform agenda.

Though the Democratic-controlled General Assembly twice failed to approve legislation rolling back qualified immunity, some say what happened to Black and Latino Army Lt. Caron Nazario in this small town demands that policymakers try again.

“To tell us that a Black Army second lieutenant in uniform can have that type of treatment imposed upon him, imagine what happens when the body cameras are off,” said NAACP Executive Director Da’Quan Marcell Love. “Imagine what happens on dark roads across the length and breadth of this commonwealth.”

For the first time in six years, Virginia’s largest utility, which serves two-thirds of Virginia’s residential customers, will submit to a review of its base rates. Dominion Energy’s “triennial review,” coming after years of regulators reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in company overearnings, will likely be the powerful utility’s biggest battle of the year.

The outcome will determine whether the base rates it charges have been reasonable, how much it’s earned over the past four years and what profits shareholders will be allowed to reap as the company embarks on an ambitious Democrat-driven mission to transform the foundation of Virginia’s electric grid from fossil fuels to renewables.

But instead of playing out in political skirmishes in the General Assembly, this contest will unfold before the State Corporation Commission, one of the most powerful and little-known of Virginia’s government bodies which since 1902 has had the authority under the state Constitution to regulate utilities.

Virginia owes much to a smokable weed.

Look no farther than the ceiling of the state Capitol Rotunda to see painted representations of garlands of the golden-brown leaf that was essential to Virginia’s founding 400 years ago.

The Virginia Company of London, chartered as a joint stock company, encountered lean times in the early years after it established a foothold at Jamestown. Tobacco was one of its few success stories. The crop flourished in the fertile loam and sunny summers along the James River. Across the Atlantic, demand became insatiable for what was called the “joviall weed,” the “precious stink” and the “chopping herbe of hell,” according to “Virginia: The New Dominion” by historian and editor Virginius Dabney. It remained a leading cash crop in Virginia through the 20th century.

On July 1, another smokable weed, once damned by the establishment, is expected to become legal for adult recreational use. And 2½ years later, the legal commercial cultivation, processing and sale of marijuana would begin in Virginia.

The final say on that comes Wednesday when the Virginia General Assembly is expected to adopt amendments Gov. Ralph Northam made to a bill passed during the winter legislative session that at long last legalized ganja in the Old Dominion.

When the General Assembly created the Transit Rider Incentive Program (TRIP) as part of Gov. Ralph Northam’s 2020 transportation omnibus, the lion’s share of the funding was allocated to support new regional bus routes. With COVID’s cancellation of much commuter service across the commonwealth, those dollars are now being dedicated to TRIP’s secondary goal: fare free transit pilot projects.

With large localities like Lynchburg, Roanoke, Alexandria, Richmond, Charlottesville, and Fairfax County now expressing interest in eliminating bus fares for at least three years, could the shift to zero fares in Virginia become permanent?

Nearly every transit system in the commonwealth dropped fares last year as a public health measure in response to COVID, but until recently none had announced intentions to make that move to protect riders and operators more permanent. Based on the responses to a request for ideas DRPT issued to transit providers last fall, the list of bus systems seeking to stay fare free beyond the pandemic could soon grow substantially longer.

Gov. Ralph Northam announced Thursday that the state will expand vaccine eligibility to all Virginians 16 and older by April 18.

The news puts Virginia nearly two weeks ahead of the May 1 deadline set by President Joe Biden earlier this month. In a news release, the administration said that nearly every high-risk Virginian who pre-registered for a vaccine has already received a shot, allowing the state to expand eligibility sooner than expected. Those still on the state’s pre-registration list will receive an appointment invitation within the next two weeks.

“Expanding vaccine eligibility to all adults marks an important milestone in our ongoing efforts to put this pandemic behind us,” Northam said in a statement. “I thank all of the public health staff, health care workers, vaccinators, and volunteers who have helped make this possible.”

Apparently fed up with paperwork coming in late, Virginia’s State Board of Elections has refused to extend a key campaign filing deadline this year, potentially affecting eight candidates running for the House of Delegates.

Three are Democrats looking to challenge incumbent lawmakers, meaning, if the decision stands, Dels. Luke Torian, D-Prince William, Betsy Carr, D-Richmond, and Patrick Hope, D-Arlington, may not face primary challengers after all. Because they represent strongly Democratic districts, their primary opponents being disqualified on technical grounds all but guarantees the incumbents will win re-election.

The decision to insist on meaningful deadlines comes after years of officials wrestling with how to handle paperwork errors, reflecting a growing feeling on the board that candidates must take responsibility for their own campaigns and follow through to ensure their documents get to the right place.

The geography of Mathews County was carved by catastrophe.

Thirty-five million years ago, a meteorite or comet tore through the Earth’s atmosphere and slammed into its surface somewhere between the county and what is now called Cape Charles. In the ruin it left behind, the Chesapeake Bay would form. Mathews, at the very tip of Virginia’s Middle Peninsula, remains one of the state’s lowest-lying areas, surrounded on three sides by the Chesapeake Bay and the waters that flow into it. 

“We’re flat as a pancake,” said Thomas Jenkins, the county’s planning, zoning and wetlands director. “Much of the county is close to sea level.” 

Today a far slower but perhaps no less catastrophic force is reshaping Mathews. As climate change drives seas upward, the county is struggling to keep its waterfront properties above the tides. 

statewide audit of Virginia’s 2020 election results verified President Joe Biden’s victory in the state, finding only a 0.00000065117 percent chance the state’s voting system could have produced an inaccurate outcome.

“Election officials are over 99 percent confident in the reported outcome,” Karen Hoyt-Stewart, voting technology manager at the Virginia Department of Elections, told the State Board of Elections as she presented the audit report Wednesday.

The only way to reach 100 percent certainty would be for officials to manually review every ballot cast in the state. In other words, the audit found there’s almost zero chance a full recount would show a different outcome.

The risk-limiting audit, more of a mathematical exercise than an expansive investigation into how ballots were cast and counted, involved checking a random sample of paper ballots against the results reported by scanner machines.

It’s already too late for Virginia to redraw political districts in time for the 2021 House of Delegates races, but the U.S. Census Bureau’s decision to speed up its delivery of new population data means Virginia lawmakers could be voting on future maps right before the November elections.

Census officials had told states to expect to get the data by late September, but Virginia officials say they now expect to receive it by the second week of August.

Under the newly created Virginia Redistricting Commission’s constitutional timeline, receipt of the data starts a 45-day clock for the commission to submit new legislative maps to the General Assembly for an up-or-down vote. Once the legislature received the proposed maps, it has 15 days to vote on them.

Virginians could be harvesting their first legal crops of home-grown marijuana later this year under legislative amendments Gov. Ralph Northam says he’s sending to the General Assembly.

Northam said Wednesday he is proposing changes to the marijuana legalization bill passed by the General Assembly last month that would end the state’s prohibition on the drug beginning July 1 — up from a 2024 date proposed by lawmakers. He says he also wants to allow limited home cultivation to begin at the same time.

“Virginia will become the 15th state to legalize marijuana — and these changes will ensure we do it with a focus on public safety, public health and social justice,” he said in a statement.

Last month, Virginia lawmakers quietly passed one of the most restrictive bans in the country on the use of facial recognition technology.

The legislation, which won unusually broad bipartisan support, prohibits all local law enforcement agencies and campus police departments from purchasing or using facial recognition technology unless it is expressly authorized by the state legislature.

But now, some law enforcement officials are asking Gov. Ralph Northam to put the brakes on the legislation, arguing that it is overly broad and hasn’t been thoroughly vetted.

Makya Little was helping her fourth-grade daughter review for the Virginia Studies SOL, a standardized test on state history, when she found herself taken aback by one of the questions on the study guide.

“She gets to this one question that says ‘What’s the status of the early African?’” said Little, who lives in Prince William County. The correct answer, according to the class materials, was “unknown. They were either servants or enslaved.”

“I got really, really upset,” Little said. While historians widely agree that the first Africans to arrive at the Jamestown settlement were enslaved, there’s been contentious discussion on the topic — some of the state’s own study materials also state that it’s “unknown” whether they arrived as slaves or indentured servants. The school division didn’t provide any of that context, and Little said multiple thoughts flashed through her head. The information was “misleading,” she added, and seemed designed to “soften how early Americans treated Black and Indigenous people” (another prompt on the study guide stated that native people and English settlers had a “trade relationship”).

Low-income students in Virginia will soon be getting financial help with all the costs of getting an education.

Gov. Ralph Northam on Monday signed into law the “Get Skilled, Get a Job, Give Back” program, which will provide full tuition for community college for low-income students in certain majors, as well as incidental expenses such as food and transportation.

The bill, which passed the legislature overwhelmingly last month, budgets $36 million a year over the next two years.

The bill covers education that leads to in-demand jobs in fields such as technology, skilled labor and health care. Officials gathered at Northern Virginia Community College for the signing Monday said the bill would open doors to people who were considering higher education.

“I am so incredibly proud of this initiative,” said House Speaker Eileen Filler-Corn. “This has been something that we’ve been working on for a number of years.” She said there was a lot of bipartisan support for the bill even before COVID-19, but with a lot of lower-skill jobs disappearing because of the pandemic, “It’s more important now than ever.”

Democratic leaders in the House of Delegates say they now support legalizing marijuana on July 1, joining the Senate in backing amendments to a legalization bill lawmakers passed last month.

They also went a step further, endorsing the legalization of personal cultivation at the same time.

“The time is now for us to act,” wrote speaker Eileen Filler-Corn in a statement.

The General Assembly voted at the end of February to legalize marijuana, but not until Jan. 1, 2024, when the state’s first legal marijuana businesses would open. The decision to tie legalization to commercial sales disappointed activists, who argued that waiting three years would needlessly prolong the racial disparities in policing that lawmakers said they were trying to address.

After centuries of carrying out executions, Virginia on Wednesday became the 23rd state to abolish the death penalty after Gov. Ralph Northam signed historic legislation into law that ends capital punishment in the commonwealth.

“We can’t give out the ultimate punishment without being 100% sure that we’re right. And we can’t sentence people to that ultimate punishment knowing that the system doesn’t work the same for everyone,” Northam, a Democrat, said ahead of signing the legislation at the Greensville Correctional Center, which houses Virginia’s death chamber.

With Northam’s signature, Virginia became the first Southern state to repeal the death penalty since the US Supreme Court reinstated the punishment in 1976. The new law, set to go into effect in July, comes as a major shift for Virginia, which has put to death more people in its history than any other state.

What was expected to be a pretty predictable special election in Southwest Virginia has turned into a surprisingly intense fight in its closing days.

Voters in Virginia’s 38th Senate District will elect a new state senator through 2023 on Tuesday. Incumbent Ben Chafin died on Jan. 1 from complications related to COVID-19.

The district includes Bland, Buchanan, Dickenson, Pulaski, Russell and Tazewell counties, the cities of Norton and Radford, and portions of Montgomery, Smyth and Wise counties. 

Metro is finally catching a break, and it’s a plus for workers in the Maryland and Virginia suburbs poised to start heading back to the office once they’re vaccinated.

The $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package signed by President Joe Biden last week ends — for now — the prospect that the bus and subway operator in the D.C. area officially known as the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, would have to resort to deep service cuts to stay solvent.

Metro, hammered when commuters abandoned the system beginning a year ago to work from home, had proposed the shutdown of more than 20 of its train stations across the region’s far-flung system, ranging from College Park-University of Maryland to Smithsonian to Arlington Cemetery to Clarendon.

The $43 million was “in the state’s hot little hands,” Mike Dowd told the group.

So what next?

That was the question facing not only Dowd, director of the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality’s Air Division, but also a collection of developers, state officials and environmental and low-income advocacy groups who had gathered over Zoom on Monday.

All were focused on the best uses of that $43 million in carbon money, the first round of funds Virginia had received through its participation in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, an 11-state agreement that puts a price on the carbon emissions that are driving climate change, requires power plants to pay that price and then channels the proceeds back to the states.

Most of that funding will eventually be paid for by customers of the state’s electric utilities, which are allowed under state law to pass on the costs of carbon allowances to customers, with no extra returns for investors. State officials had conservatively projected annual proceeds from RGGI’s carbon auctions to be in the range of $106 to $109 million. But with allowances trading at $7.60 per short ton of emissions at this March’s quarterly auction, actual revenues now look to be much higher, amounting to perhaps as much as $174 million annually if prices hold.

Thousands of Virginia workers would gain the option of automatically putting away part of their paychecks for retirement under legislation the General Assembly passed last month to help private-sector employees who lack access to a savings plan through their employer.

The bill, awaiting action by Gov. Ralph Northam, establishes a state-administered program that would offer IRA accounts to workers with no other retirement plan options, particularly employees of small businesses, self-employed people and gig workers. 

The accounts would be optional, but workers would be enrolled by default and would have to opt out if they want to keep their whole paycheck. The plans would be portable, meaning workers could keep putting money into the same account even if they switch jobs.

Covered businesses would have to help interested workers participate in the program, mainly by setting up their accounting systems to allow payroll deductions to be made, but they wouldn’t have to contribute funds of their own.

After giving so-called skill games another year to operate in Virginia late in the 2020 General Assembly session, legislators seemed to decide the time has come to pull the plug on thousands of slots-like gambling machines that have proliferated in convenience stores, restaurants and truck stops all over the state.

But some statehouse watchers think lawmakers may have actually voted to do the opposite.

Confusion recently spread among gambling lobbyists over a little-noticed provision attached to a bill that, on its face, makes it easier for officials to crack down on unregulated gambling.

When the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down an air permit last year for a compressor station Dominion Energy wanted to site in the majority-Black community of Union Hill as part of the 600-mile Atlantic Coast Pipeline, the judges admonished state officials that “environmental justice is not merely a box to be checked.”

In the wake of the ruling, newly ascendant Democrats in the General Assembly looked to legislation as a fix. Environmental justice — the idea that no group should bear a disproportionate share of negative environmental consequences and that communities impacted should have “meaningful involvement” in the decision-making process — was added to state code and its promotion became declared state policy.

But as the 2021 session drew to a close, Democrats split over what to do next.

“I’m sorry to say we are very far apart on environmental justice issues with the other body,” Del. Shelly Simonds, D-Newport News, told colleagues in a late-night floor speech in the House of Delegates on the last day of the session. “I think that we are a long way off from where we need to be in having consensus on the need for environmental justice.”

From numbers that had dwindled to around 1,000 at midcentury, Virginia’s black bears have been making a comeback.

For the past few decades, thanks to reforestation and state management, the black bear has become more and more common in the commonwealth. And while population estimates aren’t an exact science, relying as they do on factors like hunting data and human-bear interactions, one Virginia wildlife official puts the current count at between 18,000 and 20,000.

“Surveys show bears are very popular. Citizens like bears. They want to have bears,” said Nelson Lafon, the Forest Wildlife Program manager for the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources.

A senior investigator in Virginia’s watchdog agency has filed a lawsuit claiming she was wrongfully suspended from her job last week after giving General Assembly leaders documents dealing with her investigation into wrongdoing by the Virginia Parole Board.

Jennifer Moschetti, an employee of the Office of the State Inspector General, filed the suit Monday in Richmond, claiming she had been subjected to “retaliatory actions” for conduct protected under the state’s whistleblower law.

The lawsuit is the latest explosive development in a controversy over how the Parole Board handled several high-profile cases last year and whether other state officials sought to conceal the extent of OSIG’s findings detailing numerous violations of Parole Board policies and state law.

 Executives from five COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers told Congress Tuesday that they expect to significantly boost the number of shots delivered to states in the coming weeks.

Pfizer will increase weekly shipments to more than 13 million doses by mid-March, an increase from the 4 to 5 million doses shipped weekly in early February, the company’s chief business officer, John Young, told a U.S. House panel.

Moderna, the other vaccine that has received federal authorization for emergency use, expects to double its monthly vaccine deliveries by April to more than 40 million doses per month.

Fairfax County is ranked as one of the wealthiest communities in Virginia. It’s also one of the healthiest.

As of 2020, Fairfax led the state in measures including length of life, access to exercise opportunities and low rates of poor health indicators such as smoking and adult obesity, according to annual rankings by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. From 2015 to 2019, the county’s median household income was $124,831 (nationally, it’s around $68,703, according to the U.S. Census Bureau).

Currently, Fairfax County is also leading Virginia in vaccine distribution. In late January, health officials shifted the state’s strategy, routing doses through local health districts based on their percentage of the state’s population. As Virginia’s largest locality with more than 1.1 million residents, that left Fairfax with the largest share.

Even before then, the Fairfax County Health Department had requested — and received — more than eight times as many shots as other local health districts, according to data from the Virginia Department of Health. From Dec. 22 to Jan. 23, Fairfax received a total of 74,625 doses. Over the same time period, the Richmond-Henrico Health District, received a total of 19,550 doses for both localities, which have a combined population of nearly 560,000.

Government spending and programs are not the only answer to some of the nation’s most persistent needs.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t enact more federal relief for people who’ve been financially wrecked by no fault of their own during the coronavirus pandemic. We should, and soon! But target the spending to those whose livelihoods and economic security have been crushed, their families left homeless and queued in long lines outside food pantries. Put the cash where it’s needed, not with those who’ve fared well.

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t spend — and mightily — on our crumbling national infrastructure, on America’s vulnerable electrical grid and information technology networks. The past month’s headlines prove the dire urgency of it and there is ready bipartisan concurrence on those needs, yet somehow nothing gets done.

When Virginia senators passed a bill requiring local school divisions to provide in-person instruction by the summer, some anticipated the legislation would face an uphill battle in the House.

Nearly a month later, though, the same legislation is now on the verge of passing both chambers after several rounds of revisions — and mounting pressure to return children to school buildings.

Just a few days after the Senate vote, Gov. Ralph Northam directed Virginia’s 132 local divisions to begin offering in-person classes by March 15, saying that months of remote learning was “taking a toll on our children and our families.” Northam’s announcement followed a pledge from President Joe Biden to reopen schools within his first 100 days of office, and new guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on safely reopening schools and mitigating the spread of COVID-19 in buildings.

Virginia lawmakers gave final passage to legislation abolishing the death penalty Monday, sending the bill to Gov. Ralph Northam, who has said he’ll sign it.

Northam’s signature would make Virginia the first state in the South and the 23rd in the nation to end capital punishment.

“This legislation says a lot about who we are as a commonwealth, what kind of values we have as a commonwealth,” said Sen. Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax, who sponsored the legislation in the Senate. “It says a lot about how we value human life. It says a lot about how our commonwealth is going to move past some of our darkest moments in terms of how this punishment was applied and who it was applied to. This vote also says a lot about justice.”

When the General Assembly voted last year to ramp up Virginia’s minimum wage to $12, agricultural employees were among a handful of groups excluded from the increase — an exemption that traces its roots to Jim Crow-era segregation.

Lawmakers in the Senate said Monday they stand by that decision, voting down legislation passed by the House of Delegates that would have extended the state’s employment laws to farmworkers for the first time.

“I understand the exuberance and I understand the need to move forward, but we just had a robust discussion on this last year,” said Sen. Lynwood Lewis, D-Accomack, one of 10 lawmakers on the Senate’s Commerce and Labor Committee who opposed the legislation.

The Senate Commerce and Labor Committee on Monday swiftly killed the last of more than half a dozen bills this session that aimed to reform Virginia’s system of electric utility rate review, which is seen by Wall Street investors as favorable to the utilities and by critics as an example of legislative capture by companies with an outsize influence over the General Assembly.

The move angered the growing number of groups and lawmakers of both parties in Virginia that over the past few years have been lobbying to roll back regulations seen as enabling excessive profits for the state’s two largest electric monopolies, Dominion Energy and Appalachian Power.

“It’s a shame that the committee decided that it should not be the policy of the commonwealth that monopoly utility rates should be just and reasonable,” said Will Cleveland, an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center who frequently argues against the utilities before the State Corporation Commission. “It was clear that the Senate committee had no intention of debating the merits or the policy of the bills today.”

Fifteen years ago, more than 1.3 million Virginians said marriage should only mean a union between a man and a woman and same-sex couples shouldn’t be entitled to similar status that would give them the same rights under the law as straight couples.

That was the view of 57 percent of Virginians who voted in 2006, more than enough to put a same-sex marriage ban in the state Constitution.

Much has changed since then. And Democratic lawmakers want to give a new generation of Virginians an opportunity to make a different statement in 2022.

A bill that would let millions of electric customers in Virginia again begin purchasing renewable energy from companies other than the utility that controls their territory cleared the House of Delegates last week but now faces a Senate committee that struck the proposal down in 2020.

“The Senate oftentimes is a higher hurdle to get over,” said Del. Jeff Bourne, D-Richmond, the sponsor of House Bill 2048. “I think we’ve got a puncher’s chance, right? So we’re going to go in and give it all we got.”

Bourne’s bill targets a provision of state code that allows licensed third-party suppliers to sell “100 percent renewable energy” to customers in utility territory as long as the utility isn’t offering the same product. On the books since 2007, the law was rarely used until relatively recently, when renewables prices began to fall and more Americans began to shy away from carbon-emitting fossil fuels.

Virginia is, famously, a state that prides itself on being business-friendly. That makes it all the more interesting that a number of bills favoring consumers have made it through the House. Democrats have led the charge, but several of the bills earned bipartisan support even in the face of utility opposition.

This doesn’t guarantee their luck will hold. Democrats aren’t just more numerous in the House, they are also younger and more independent-minded than the old guard Democrats in control of the Senate. The second half of the session is going to be a lot more challenging for pro-consumer legislation.

The action will be especially hot in the coming days around five bills dealing with utility reform and a customer’s “right to shop” for renewable energy (HB2048). All these bills passed the House with at least some Republican support. But they are headed to Senate Commerce and Labor, which, though dominated by Democrats, has a long history of protecting utilities.

Democrats pushing to create incentives for drivers to buy electric vehicles as part of a broader goal of weaning Virginia’s transportation sector off fossil fuels are running into a roadblock: too little state money in a budget constrained by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We have more priorities now than we do funding,” said Del. David Reid, D-Loudoun, who this session is carrying a bill to create an electric vehicle rebate program. “This would be a really tough priority to be able to fund right now.”

Slowing climate change through decarbonization has been a major priority of Virginia Democrats since they won majorities in both chambers of the legislature in 2019, handing them control of state government. Last year they passed the Virginia Clean Economy Act, a marquee environmental law that committed the state’s electric grid to being carbon-free by 2050. This year they are focusing on transportation, which according to federal calculations is responsible for nearly half of Virginia’s carbon emissions.

The right-to-work law, which dates back to 1947 in Virginia, prevents unions from forcing workers to pay union dues as a condition of their employment, which effectively weakens organized labor.

Carter is running as a staunch progressive in Democratic gubernatorial field that also includes former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, Sen. Jennifer McClellan, D-Richmond and former Del. Jennifer Carroll Foy.

Simon, a co-sponsor of the legislation to repeal right-to-work, said that even if Carter got his bill onto the House floor it would not pass. He also called his motion to reject the maneuver a “purely procedural vote.”

Lawmakers in the Virginia Senate voted Wednesday to abolish the death penalty, setting the state on a course to become the first in the South to end capital punishment.

“If we look back 50 years from now, the electric chair, the lethal injection table — they’re going to be sitting in a museum,” said Sen. Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax, who sponsored the bill. “This thing is going to be a museum piece and people are going to look back and wonder how it ever was we used these things.”

The legislation passed on a party-line vote, with all 21 of the Democrats in the chamber supporting it. One Republican, Sen. Bill Stanley, R-Franklin, abstained. The bill would commute the sentences of the two men currently on Virginia’s death row to life sentences with no possibility of parole.

State lawmakers are angling to pass legislation before the session ends Feb. 11.

In the past year, the state has ended criminal penalties for minor marijuana offenses and established a medical marijuana program. Now, Virginia lawmakers are scrambling to pass full legalization before their 30-day legislative session wraps up in less than two weeks.

If signed into law, the move would represent weed’s deepest incursion into the southeast, where only a handful of states have even embraced medical marijuana and still have some of the nation’s harshest punishments over the drug.

Legalization still faces pushback from many Republicans, cops and substance abuse treatment professionals, who argue the state is moving way too fast on an issue with huge public health ramifications.

More than three years after Amazon announced that it was expanding beyond its current Seattle headquarters, construction at the Virginia site — located across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. — is now well underway. Dubbed PenPlace, the newly unveiled proposal for the project’s second phase will provide a further 2.8 million square feet of office space across three 22-story buildings.

The site’s focal point will be The Helix, a tree-covered glass structure where a series of “alternative work environments” will be set amid indoor gardens and greenery from the nearby area, tended to by a team of horticulturalists. According to the architecture firm behind the project, NBBJ, a spiral “hill climb” will meanwhile allow employees and visitors to ascend the outside of the structure.

Virginia Republicans appear to be sticking with their plans to hold a convention to select their nominees for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general.

The decision has not come easily. The party’s central committee has been divided for weeks, leading to procedural deadlock, convoluted parliamentary maneuvers and increasingly heated debate that on Saturday left members exasperated.

“We have had cursing on this call; the last meeting devolved into people yelling,” said Willie Deutsch, a committee member representing the state’s 1st Congressional District. “There comes a time when we have to come together as a party and stop the vicious incivility and attacks.”

The central committee, which governs the operations of the state party and includes 80 members from around the state, had already decided to hold a convention at a meeting in December.

The company that operates Virginia’s only private prison doled out campaign contributions to 29 Virginia lawmakers ahead of a push to pass legislation banishing the for-profit corrections industry from the state, according to campaign finance records compiled by the Virginia Public Access Project.

And when the bill came before a Senate panel last week for its first hearing, it died a quick and sudden death, with some of the legislators who received the donations speaking most forcefully against it.

Lawmakers, who almost always maintain that there is no connection between campaign contributions and their legislative decision making, called it a coincidence.

“Did not even realize they made a contribution,” said Sen. Joe Morrissey, D-Richmond, who received $500 from the company and spoke against the bill at length during last week’s committee hearing. He attributed his opposition to a convincing phone call from a lobbyist and the fact that it would not address other prison contractors he views as more problematic, such as the companies that charge inmates inflated prices for phone calls and packs of ramen.

Former Gov. Terry McAuliffe entered 2021 with more money in the bank than all other candidates for governor combined, according to year-end campaign finance reports that were due Friday.

McAuliffe, who was expected to have a strong money advantage given his background in political fundraising and ties to national Democrats, began the year with more than $5.5 million on hand.

Former Del. Jennifer Carroll Foy reported almost $1.3 million on hand, state Sen. Jennifer McClellan, D-Richmond reported about $633,000 and Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax reported nearly $80,000.

Del. Lee Carter, D-Manassas, who just officially entered the field Jan. 1, reported about $7,000 on hand in his House of Delegates re-election account.

Democrats agree their ticket can’t be three white guys and it shouldn’t be overweighted to the party’s anchor, Northern Virginia. The backlash to Donald Trump, the fury over George Floyd and the aftershocks of Ralph Northam’s blackface moment — all factors in the ballooning field — demand a ticket that looks like the New Virginia.

If only Democrats, mindful of demographic and geographic balance, could assemble it the old-fashioned way, the un-democratic way in which the whims of grandees carried disproportionate weight. This worked when the party was a white segregationist cabal and, because of laws limiting access to the polls, only a sliver of eligible population voted.

Modern Democrats acknowledge that synching up slates of candidates ahead of the June primary is perilous and would fuel resentments that would weaken the party. That doesn’t mean they don’t consider the possibility — as an abstract exercise. Put another way: Democrats can dream.

Defining issues for Democrats are those on which there are deep divisions within the majority party. That will become clear as the General Assembly lurches toward adjournment in late February, relying on a parliamentary sleight of hand to bypass one by Republicans that threatened to squeeze the session to 30 days from the usual 46.

These issues include taxes, marijuana, paid sick leave, police reform, civil and voting rights, campaign finance, gambling and reopening public schools during the pandemic. Differences on policy are exacerbated by differences in personality, especially House Speaker Eileen Filler-Corn and Senate Majority Leader Dick Saslaw, both of Fairfax.

Virginians got a taste of both during the interminable special session that, over nearly 85 days, pivoted from repairs to the COVID-19-wracked budget and post-George Floyd police reform to an all-you-can-eat legislative buffet that restyled the General Assembly as a mini-Congress.

“I understand the desire for someone to come back and have a sequel, second chapter,” said one Virginia Democrat. “But times change, and new leaders evolve.”

Terry McAuliffe has long signaled he wants his old job back as Virginia governor. But a slew of political groups focused on women and Black voters have a message before he jumps in the race: It’s not your time.

McAuliffe’s 2021 run — he is planning to announce on Wednesday, POLITICO confirmed — has rankled a number of groups across the commonwealth and country. They argue he shouldn’t be trying to reclaim the post he vacated three years ago when there are already two Black female candidates in the field— state Sen. Jennifer McClellan and state Del. Jennifer Carroll Foy.

“We’ve never elected a Black woman governor in this country’s history,” said Glynda Carr, CEO of the Higher Heights PAC, which supports Black women running for political office.

The State Board of Elections in Virginia voted Wednesday to certify the state’s election results, two days later than expected because of a COVID-19 outbreak in the city of Richmond’s voter registration office.

The board’s 3-0 vote certified results for president, U.S. Senate, U.S. House elections and state constitutional amendments in a 10-minute meeting without comment, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported. Virginia’s certification comes as former Vice President Joe Biden prepares to assume the presidency and President Donald Trump continues to sow doubt about the national election.

The Associated Press on Sunday projected that U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger will be reelected to her seat in Virginia’s 7th District after a dayslong count of votes that was prolonged by mail-in votes in the midst of the pandemic.

Spanberger, a Democrat, is nearly 8,000 votes ahead of Republican Del. Nick Freitas in the strip-shaped district in central Virginia that includes Culpeper, Chesterfield, Henrico and Nottoway counties and skirts to the west of Richmond.

Spanberger’s apparent result means that the only non-incumbent to win a seat in Congress from Virginia was a member of the incumbent’s own party. The partisan breakdown remains seven Democrats to four Republicans.

The apparently comfortable margins of victory for both former vice president Joe Biden and Sen. Mark R. Warner (D) in Virginia on Tuesday extended an 11-year record of dominance for Democrats in statewide races and cemented the commonwealth’s status as reliably blue.

But at the local and regional level, a different dynamic holds — as evidenced by Republican strength in three close congressional contests driven by rural and military voters energized by support for President Trump.

The results suggest how much the state mirrors the nation as a whole, becoming more polarized and less attuned to the old “Virginia way” of consensus politics, said Mark Rozell, dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University.

“This was an intensified partisan vote,” Rozell said.

Democratic U.S. Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia has won a third term to office.
Warner defeated Republican challenger Daniel Gade on Tuesday in a low-key race whose outcome was never in doubt.

Democrats have not lost a statewide election in Virginia since 2009. Warner is a former governor and current vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. He had a massive cash advantage and scared off well-known Republicans from running against him.

All of Virginia’s U.S. House seats were up for re-election, as well as one critical U.S. Senate seat. Virginia also voted on whether or not to create a commission to re-draw lines of congressional districts.

In District 8, Donald Beyer, Jr., the Democratic incumbent, is the projected winner according to the Associated Press. Beyer has held this office since 2015.

At the headquarters of the Fauquier County Republican Committee in Warrenton, Virginia, a cardboard cutout of John Wayne gripping a rifle leans against a wall. Chair Gregory Schumacher says Wayne was “the great American Western hero,” and he says Republicans who held the Fifth District in Congress for all but two of the last 20 years will keep it in their hands this November.

Although the populous counties of Northern Virginia have powered the state’s drift into Democratic control, Schumacher says he sits on the political boundary. “When you come out from the Beltway, Fauquier County’s the first one that goes red,” Schumacher said.

But there are signs that this year could be different as Republican contender Bob Good faces Democratic challenger Cameron Webb in what political prediction site FiveThirtyEight calls the most competitive House race in the country. Webb has outraised Good fourfold and held a slight lead in the last three polls. Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia and The Cook Political Report call the congressional race a toss-up. If Democrats can win this seat, they will continue a blue wave that flipped three House seats in 2018.

When she was sworn in as the first woman to serve as speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates, Eileen Filler-Corn said she was struck by the diversity of the new Democratic majority looking back at her.

A year later, she was standing in a mostly empty room, speaking to “squares on a computer” as the oldest continuous legislative body in the Western Hemisphere tried lawmaking via Zoom.

It’s not yet clear when the House will return to normal. But after two years in power, Filler-Corn says she’s confident Virginia voters still want Democrats in charge.

“We heard the issues that were important to Virginians,” Filler-Corn said in a recent interview with The Virginia Mercury. “We campaigned saying we were going to do X, Y and Z. We were very upfront about it. Very bold. And there is no doubt about it that we followed through.”

The General Assembly approved legislation Wednesday that will make marijuana legal on July 1.

The votes make Virginia the 16th state to legalize the drug and the first in the South to take the step, though retail sales won’t begin until Jan. 1, 2024.

“The time has come for our state to legalize marijuana,” said House Majority Charniele Herring, D-Alexandria, who sponsored the bill, arguing the revised legislation ensures “that while we’re doing the complicated work of standing up a commercial market, we aren’t delaying immediate reforms that will make our commonwealth more equitable for all Virginians.”

The product of months of negotiation and last-minute amendments, the final legislation is complex and, in some key areas, ambiguous about what will and won’t be allowed.

The Virginia General Assembly voted Wednesday to tighten some Virginia Parole Board procedures at issue in a series of critical watchdog reports last year, while approving funding for an outside investigation into how one of those reports was prepared and edited.

Disagreement over the direction of that investigation led to fiery speeches from Republican legislators, who denounced it as a “sham” and said its limited scope fell far short of Gov. Ralph Northam’s calls to clear up the controversy surrounding a Parole Board run by Democratic appointees under fire for violating state law and its own procedures in releasing inmates.

“This is the final act of a cover-up,” said House Minority Leader Todd Gilbert, R-Shenandoah.

Democrats said Republicans were trying to stir up an election-year controversy and wouldn’t be satisfied with any investigation that doesn’t confirm their suspicions.

Personal possession and home cultivation would be legal starting in July.

The Virginia Legislature voted Wednesday to accelerate its timeline for marijuana legalization to July 1 instead of January 2024.

Personal possession and home cultivation would be legal starting in July. Marijuana sales still wouldn’t start until 2024, giving the government time to set up a cannabis regulatory agency to oversee the new industry.

The House voted 53-44 and the Senate voted 21-20 to adopt changes requested by Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam after lawmakers sent a legalization bill to his desk in February. Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax cast the deciding vote in the Senate.

Other changes: The governor requested accelerating the record-sealing and expungement provisions for past marijuana offenses and stronger labor protections for marijuana industry workers. He also proposed two budget amendments that would fund public health campaigns and training for law enforcement officers to recognize impaired driving.

When Virginia’s General Assembly first took up legislation billed as a major step toward giving regular people more control over their data in an increasingly online world, some of the first testimony lawmakers heard came from tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon.

Both companies said they were in full support of Virginia’s effort to become just the second state in America to pass its own data privacy bill, an early marker in a debate still unfolding in other states and at the national level.

Supporters of Virginia’s Consumer Data Protection Act, approved by the General Assembly this year and already signed by Gov. Ralph Northam, say the fact that Virginia was able to pass such significant legislation without a major fight is a testament to the quality of the bill, which lays out new consumer protections while largely shielding companies from a flood of data-related lawsuits.

Noting that an estimated 70 percent of internet traffic flows through servers in Virginia, Sen. Dave Marsden, D-Fairfax, said Virginia’s legislation could be “a good starting place for a national privacy bill.”

Virginia Mercury editors Ned Oliver Sarah Vogelsong Graham Moomaw|Kate Masters have done the best publicly available summary of what’s the Democrats have accomplished with control over Virginia’s three branches. Below are the first paragraphs of their coverage on key issues.

Elections and voting

Making it easier to vote was a top priority when Democrats took control, and the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the pace of change to Virginia’s once-strict election laws.

Climate change

Before Democrats regained power, the state had passed no significant laws aimed at addressing climate change. In short order, policies began bubbling up just as surely as tidal floods in a Hampton Roads storm sewer.

Education

When Democrats took control of the General Assembly, they pledged to increase funding for education — touting it as a priority for the 2020 session.

Health

Virginia expanded Medicaid before Democrats took control of the General Assembly, allowing hundreds of thousands of previously ineligible Virginians to gain coverage. But in the two years since, they’ve made significant changes to the state health care exchange in an effort to stabilize enrollment and lower the prices on premiums..

Minimum wage

Democrats voted to raise the state’s minimum wage to $12 an hour over the next three years — the first increase the state has seen since 2009, when the federal minimum went up to $7.25 an hour.

Guns

Before winning their majorities, Democrats made it clear they wanted to pass tighter laws to prevent potentially dangerous people from having access to guns and allow firearm bans in more public places. They mostly delivered on that front, but they’ve stopped short of outlawing specific types of weaponry.

Criminal justice

From abolishing the death penalty to legalizing marijuana, Democrats enacted sweeping reforms touching all aspects of the state’s criminal justice system.

Civil rights

The party has taken both concrete and symbolic steps on matters of freedom and equality. After his yearbook blackface scandal, Northam led an effort to repeal nearly 100 outdated, discriminatory laws still on the books. This year Democrats extended that symbolic step to LGBTQ rights, voting to repeal a ban on gay marriage still in the state Constitution, which was invalidated by a 2015 Supreme Court ruling.

Utility reform 

Democrats have remained deeply divided on electric utility reform over the past two years, with many House members joining with a cadre of Republicans in that chamber to push for a set of changes to state code that would restore much of the authority of Virginia’s public utility regulators, the State Corporation Commission, to regulate rates and earnings. Powerful members of the Senate however, with longstanding ties to the utilities, and particularly Dominion Energy, have been reluctant to relinquish legislative control, even amid regular reports of excessive profits by the monopolies.

Campaign finance

In his 2007 autobiography, former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a prolific Democratic fundraiser, said his father taught him “money in politics was neither evil nor good.”

Taxes

Though the Democratic majorities have rewritten swathes of state policy to make Virginia more culturally progressive, they’ve shown less appetite for addressing economic disparities by changing the tax code.

Yes, Virginia, we have a budget!

This year I was thrilled to be appointed again by the Speaker as a conferee to work out differences between the House and Senate budgets. This evening, we adopted the final report. I believe it is a budget Virginians can be proud of.

While individual bills often get the most attention, the budget is arguably the most important reflection of our values. This year’s budget process has been a roller coaster ride. After adopting an initial budget in March 2020, we had to cut $2.8 billion as a result of a COVID-driven revenue shortfall. Going into session, we anticipated a revenue rebound of $1.2 billion. Finally, a mid-session re-forecast provided an additional $730 million. That rebound was great news – but it still means we have about a billion dollars less in revenue from just a year ago.

Here are just a few of the budget highlights:

• Income Tax Relief – $221M revenue reduction in order to fund income tax relief to individuals and businesses related to conformity with the federal CARES Act.
• State Employee Pay Raises – 5% pay raise for state employees beginning July 1, 2021.
• Virginia Retirement System – $100M deposit to the VRS to reduce unfunded liabilities. This is a key investment that will help to stabilize the system for the long-term.
• PreK-12 Education – $443M to hold public school funding steady from the original 2020 appropriation; $40M for schools to address COVID-related learning loss; and, $76M to support increases in school counselors, social workers, psychologists, and behavioral analysts.
• Teacher Pay Raises – State share of 5% pay raises for teachers. The Governor originally proposed a 2% bonus.
• Preschool – $11.1M for increased investment in the Virginia Preschool Initiative.
• Northern Virginia Cost-to-Compete – $14.6M more in supplemental funding to Northern Virginia in recognition of the higher cost of living for our region.
• Higher Education – $149M to our institutions of higher learning to maintain affordable access through tuition stabilization and need-based financial assistance.
• Human Resources – $173M in new spending for human resources, with a focus on long-term care, maternal and child health, and behavioral and developmental services. This includes $14.2M to add 435 Developmental Disability waiver slots in FY22, bringing the total for FY22 to 985 slots.
• Vaccinations – $89M for mass vaccination efforts to maximize new federal dollars.
• Water Quality – An additional $155M to meet our Chesapeake Bay restoration targets, including investments in wastewater treatment, stormwater management, and agricultural best management practices.
• Broadband – Additional funding of $99M for broadband deployment in unserved areas.
• Virginia Employment Commission – $10M to increase customer service levels and $5M to finish modernizing VEC’s IT systems to enable more efficient service delivery.
• Voter Registration – $16.7M to replace and strengthen the state’s voter registration system.
• Transportation – $83.5M to improve commuter rail service on the VRE Manassas Line and $32.4M to support and stabilize Metro.
• Reserves – An additional $250M to the Revenue Reserve Fund. This brings combined balances in reserves to $2.16 billion, or about 9% of general fund revenues.

That last bullet deserves additional comment. Something we are proud of in Virginia is that we have maintained a AAA bond rating since 1938 – longer than any other state. This saves Virginia considerable amounts of money and reflects a commitment to keeping our budget structurally sound. While states are currently the beneficiaries of large amounts of federal assistance, it would be irresponsible to think that this will continue in perpetuity. Building up our reserves will ensure that Virginia can successfully transition once federal COVID-19 funding goes away.

Like most members, I introduced my own budget amendments and was pleased to see many of them incorporated into the final budget. These included funding for Northern Virginia Family Services, Brain Injury Services, Chesapeake Bay restoration, the Virginia International Trade Plan, Virginia Tech Cooperative Extension, and our regional planning district commissions.

You can find a more detailed overview of the budget here and a list of my amendments here.

In-Person Learning

Few issues have garnered more constituent communication than SB1303, which deals with bringing our children back into the classroom. This is a personal issue for my family as well, as our 12 year old attempts to navigate his first year of middle school. While he is continuing to learn, and his teachers have done an amazing job, the learning loss is definitely real.

When SB1303 came over from the Senate, it simply mandated in-person learning. What came out of the House, and was eventually passed by the Senate, takes us to full in-person learning, but has guardrails to ensure safety. This includes incorporating CDC and VDH guidelines to the maximum extent practical and the ability of a school board to move specific schools back to virtual learning based on transmission metrics. Importantly, the bill allows parents to choose a virtual approach for their students based on family situations. All teachers must be offered the vaccine prior to in-person learning (which is occurring now under Phase 1b) and the bill maintains the current process for teachers to work virtually through a reasonable ADA accommodation.

The bill passed with a strong bi-partisan vote of 88Y-9N in the House and 36Y-3N in the Senate. I voted aye.

Standards of Learning

The dreaded SOL tests! It is a topic of much consternation when I speak with parents, students, and teachers alike. The Code of Virginia simply establishes that there will be SOL assessments, the purpose of which is to ensure that educational progress can be compared across Virginia. That is a laudable goal. Unfortunately, many of these tests have turned into high-stakes end-of-the-year tests that can promote rote memorization over critical thinking and applying what has been learned to the real world.

This year we passed changes to the SOL assessments that I am genuinely excited about. HB2027 replaces end-of-the-year tests with a through-assessment model where students take a series of three lower stakes tests throughout the year. That way teachers have a better sense of where a student is starting out, can make mid-year adjustments, and then see how the student has progressed at the end of the year. While the bill applies only to SOL tests from grades three through eight, if it is successful, it could be applied to all levels.

Legislation to classify chemical recycling as manufacturing rather than solid waste management is on its way to the governor despite early resistance from the House of Delegates.

The hotly contested bill, which supporters say will encourage the repurposing of plastic waste while creating jobs and opponents say will allow the fledgling industry to sidestep regulation, passed the House Monday on a 90-8 vote.

Key to its success was a move by lawmakers to yoke the advanced recycling bill to a proposal from Del. Betsy Carr, D-Richmond, that would ban all food vendors from using plastic foam food containers starting in 2025.

A proposal to make it illegal for Virginia politicians to use campaign funds to enrich themselves failed in the state Senate Tuesday, the latest sign of the legislature’s continuing wariness on campaign finance reform.

Several senators said they agreed with the proposal generally, but insisted policymakers should take more time to study it before imposing new rules on candidates running in Virginia’s wide-open fundraising system.

“The critical component here is to actually get it right,” said Sen. Jill Vogel, R-Fauquier, an election lawyer who noted that she sponsored a similar bill in the past and wants it to be wrapped into an upcoming study on comprehensive campaign finance reform.

Under Virginia’s existing laws, political candidates are free to take as much money as they can get from any willing individual donor or corporation. But they don’t have to use it for their campaign.

When Virginia senators passed a bill requiring local school divisions to provide in-person instruction by the summer, some anticipated the legislation would face an uphill battle in the House.

Nearly a month later, though, the same legislation is now on the verge of passing both chambers after several rounds of revisions — and mounting pressure to return children to school buildings.

Just a few days after the Senate vote, Gov. Ralph Northam directed Virginia’s 132 local divisions to begin offering in-person classes by March 15, saying that months of remote learning was “taking a toll on our children and our families.” Northam’s announcement followed a pledge from President Joe Biden to reopen schools within his first 100 days of office, and new guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on safely reopening schools and mitigating the spread of COVID-19 in buildings.

Virginia lawmakers gave final passage to legislation abolishing the death penalty Monday, sending the bill to Gov. Ralph Northam, who has said he’ll sign it.

Northam’s signature would make Virginia the first state in the South and the 23rd in the nation to end capital punishment.

“This legislation says a lot about who we are as a commonwealth, what kind of values we have as a commonwealth,” said Sen. Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax, who sponsored the legislation in the Senate. “It says a lot about how we value human life. It says a lot about how our commonwealth is going to move past some of our darkest moments in terms of how this punishment was applied and who it was applied to. This vote also says a lot about justice.”

When the General Assembly voted last year to ramp up Virginia’s minimum wage to $12, agricultural employees were among a handful of groups excluded from the increase — an exemption that traces its roots to Jim Crow-era segregation.

Lawmakers in the Senate said Monday they stand by that decision, voting down legislation passed by the House of Delegates that would have extended the state’s employment laws to farmworkers for the first time.

“I understand the exuberance and I understand the need to move forward, but we just had a robust discussion on this last year,” said Sen. Lynwood Lewis, D-Accomack, one of 10 lawmakers on the Senate’s Commerce and Labor Committee who opposed the legislation.

The Senate Commerce and Labor Committee on Monday swiftly killed the last of more than half a dozen bills this session that aimed to reform Virginia’s system of electric utility rate review, which is seen by Wall Street investors as favorable to the utilities and by critics as an example of legislative capture by companies with an outsize influence over the General Assembly.

The move angered the growing number of groups and lawmakers of both parties in Virginia that over the past few years have been lobbying to roll back regulations seen as enabling excessive profits for the state’s two largest electric monopolies, Dominion Energy and Appalachian Power.

“It’s a shame that the committee decided that it should not be the policy of the commonwealth that monopoly utility rates should be just and reasonable,” said Will Cleveland, an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center who frequently argues against the utilities before the State Corporation Commission. “It was clear that the Senate committee had no intention of debating the merits or the policy of the bills today.”

Fifteen years ago, more than 1.3 million Virginians said marriage should only mean a union between a man and a woman and same-sex couples shouldn’t be entitled to similar status that would give them the same rights under the law as straight couples.

That was the view of 57 percent of Virginians who voted in 2006, more than enough to put a same-sex marriage ban in the state Constitution.

Much has changed since then. And Democratic lawmakers want to give a new generation of Virginians an opportunity to make a different statement in 2022.

Virginia is, famously, a state that prides itself on being business-friendly. That makes it all the more interesting that a number of bills favoring consumers have made it through the House. Democrats have led the charge, but several of the bills earned bipartisan support even in the face of utility opposition.

This doesn’t guarantee their luck will hold. Democrats aren’t just more numerous in the House, they are also younger and more independent-minded than the old guard Democrats in control of the Senate. The second half of the session is going to be a lot more challenging for pro-consumer legislation.

The action will be especially hot in the coming days around five bills dealing with utility reform and a customer’s “right to shop” for renewable energy (HB2048). All these bills passed the House with at least some Republican support. But they are headed to Senate Commerce and Labor, which, though dominated by Democrats, has a long history of protecting utilities.

But progressive priorities like reforming campaign finance appear dead for the year.

As Gov. Ralph Northam tacked on an extra two weeks to the Virginia legislative session, lawmakers reached Crossover Day on Friday. The deadline for a bill to be approved by at least one chamber offered a glimpse into broad changes Democrats hope to make in criminal justice, beginning with legalizing marijuana and abolishing the death penalty. It also showed the tension between moderates and progressives in the party on questions of resuming school and worker rights.

Criminal justice reform advocates said lawmakers were effecting a sea change that extended beyond marijuana and capital punishment to include sentencing, probation and parole. Republicans, in the minority of both chambers of the General Assembly, say the sweeping approach would result in Virginia becoming too easy on criminals.

Political commentator Bob Holsworth recalled that Democrats once supported Republican Gov. George Allen’s push in the 1990s to crack down on crime, including eliminating parole. Now the party, in its second year in power in the state legislature, is driving the change.

As lawmakers prepare to study the prospects for campaign finance reform in Virginia, the sheer size of some checks flowing to Democratic candidates for statewide office has renewed debate about the boosts offered by a wealthy Charlottesville couple topping charts as the biggest donors in state politics.

Though they backed opposing candidates in the 2017 Democratic primary for governor, donations connected to Michael Bills, a hedge fund manager and primary backer of the advocacy group Clean Virginia, and Sonjia Smith, a philanthropist and former lawyer married to Bills, are working in tandem this year in a big way.

Smith and Clean Virginia have given a combined $1.1 million, $600,000 from Clean Virginia and $500,000 from Smith, to former delegate Jennifer Carroll Foy, whom they believe has the best shot at challenging former Gov. Terry McAuliffe in a five-person Democratic primary field. That’s almost a third of the roughly $3.6 million in cash contributions Carroll Foy reported raising as of March 31.

Despite the early efforts to paint the Republicans’ 2021 ticket as an overwhelming lurch to the right, the slate isn’t nearly as extreme as it might’ve been. Instead of Chase, a self-described “Trump in heels,” becoming the party’s standard-bearer in a state former President Donald Trump lost twice, she logged off and went to the beach.

After failing to win a statewide election since 2009, some Republicans say they feel surprisingly good about where the party stands coming out of a chaotic unassembled convention marked by procedural confusion, mysterious attack ads and infighting.

“I think some of the ebullience you see in Republicans right now is that this could’ve been very bad. And it turned into the exact opposite,” said Shaun Kenney, a former Republican Party of Virginia executive director who has criticized fringe elements in the party. “But it’s more than just a sigh of relief. It’s like we finally know where we’re headed.”

Virginia voters in a recent poll ranked themselves as moderate, with a slightly conservative lean, but indicated support of more progressive legislation.

The poll, released last week by Christopher Newport’s Wason Center for Civic Leadership, could be a thermometer for the upcoming November election.

Virginia voters ranked themselves an average of 5.83 on a zero to 10 scale (liberal to conservative). Republicans ranked themselves 8.11 on average, while Democrats rated themselves 3.57 on average. Independents ranked themselves 5.72.

“In this upcoming election, it is especially possible that it could be competitive,” said Rebecca Bromley-Trujillo, research director at the Wason Center.

Those surveyed support Democrat proposals on health care, immigration, environmental policy and the economy. The policy proposal with the strongest support was Medicare for all with 76 percent support among voters. A majority of Virginians support providing a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants (73 percent). Almost all Virginians support a pathway to citizenship for children brought to this country illegally by their parents (94 percent).

More than half of Virginians agree with implementing an environmentally friendly redesign of the state’s economy and infrastructure (65 percent); that the economic system favors the wealthy (61 percent); and that the federal minimum wage should be $15 per hour (53 percent).

To hear some candidates tell it, a decision last week by the State Board of Elections is heavy-handed and reeks of political chicanery. The board’s move prevents a few Democratic Party challengers from getting on the primary ballot in contests for the House of Delegates this year.

The three-member board, these candidates claim, won’t provide the usual extension it has allowed previously to people who file late or incomplete reports. Three Black candidates, all facing Democratic incumbents in the primary, are the people most affected. They say the board won’t give them a “do-over” customarily granted to politicos in the past.

Two of the Democratic incumbents benefiting from this ruling are White, and one is Black.

(Five other candidates with paperwork problems — Democrats and Republicans alike — are the only people seeking their party’s nominations in their district, allowing them to be nominated for the November ballot.)

Apparently fed up with paperwork coming in late, Virginia’s State Board of Elections has refused to extend a key campaign filing deadline this year, potentially affecting eight candidates running for the House of Delegates.

Three are Democrats looking to challenge incumbent lawmakers, meaning, if the decision stands, Dels. Luke Torian, D-Prince William, Betsy Carr, D-Richmond, and Patrick Hope, D-Arlington, may not face primary challengers after all. Because they represent strongly Democratic districts, their primary opponents being disqualified on technical grounds all but guarantees the incumbents will win re-election.

The decision to insist on meaningful deadlines comes after years of officials wrestling with how to handle paperwork errors, reflecting a growing feeling on the board that candidates must take responsibility for their own campaigns and follow through to ensure their documents get to the right place.

statewide audit of Virginia’s 2020 election results verified President Joe Biden’s victory in the state, finding only a 0.00000065117 percent chance the state’s voting system could have produced an inaccurate outcome.

“Election officials are over 99 percent confident in the reported outcome,” Karen Hoyt-Stewart, voting technology manager at the Virginia Department of Elections, told the State Board of Elections as she presented the audit report Wednesday.

The only way to reach 100 percent certainty would be for officials to manually review every ballot cast in the state. In other words, the audit found there’s almost zero chance a full recount would show a different outcome.

The risk-limiting audit, more of a mathematical exercise than an expansive investigation into how ballots were cast and counted, involved checking a random sample of paper ballots against the results reported by scanner machines.

It’s already too late for Virginia to redraw political districts in time for the 2021 House of Delegates races, but the U.S. Census Bureau’s decision to speed up its delivery of new population data means Virginia lawmakers could be voting on future maps right before the November elections.

Census officials had told states to expect to get the data by late September, but Virginia officials say they now expect to receive it by the second week of August.

Under the newly created Virginia Redistricting Commission’s constitutional timeline, receipt of the data starts a 45-day clock for the commission to submit new legislative maps to the General Assembly for an up-or-down vote. Once the legislature received the proposed maps, it has 15 days to vote on them.

When the federal Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, Virginia was one of nine states that drew special attention due to its history of racist election laws. That burden was lifted in 2013, when the U.S. Supreme Court decided enough time had passed that Virginia and other states could stop following an old rule requiring federal permission for changes that might affect minority voters.

With the future of federal voting protections now in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority, Democrats in the General Assembly have passed their own version of a voting rights act, making Virginia the first state in the South to do so.

The proposed law, now awaiting Gov. Ralph Northam’s signature, creates broad new protections against voter discrimination based on race, color or language. With Republicans in dozens of states looking to restrict voting access after former President Donald Trump’s loss, supporters of the Virginia legislation see it as a decisive move in the other direction.

Despite the early efforts to paint the Republicans’ 2021 ticket as an overwhelming lurch to the right, the slate isn’t nearly as extreme as it might’ve been. Instead of Chase, a self-described “Trump in heels,” becoming the party’s standard-bearer in a state former President Donald Trump lost twice, she logged off and went to the beach.

After failing to win a statewide election since 2009, some Republicans say they feel surprisingly good about where the party stands coming out of a chaotic unassembled convention marked by procedural confusion, mysterious attack ads and infighting.

“I think some of the ebullience you see in Republicans right now is that this could’ve been very bad. And it turned into the exact opposite,” said Shaun Kenney, a former Republican Party of Virginia executive director who has criticized fringe elements in the party. “But it’s more than just a sigh of relief. It’s like we finally know where we’re headed.”

In the GOP field of gubernatorial candidates, only one was ever willing to call Joe Biden the legitimate winner of the 2020 presidential election.

It was not Glenn Youngkin, who won the Republican nomination this week.

That changed pretty quickly this week as he began his pivot to the general election.

His campaign emailed reporters Wednesday a clip from an appearance on a radio show earlier in the day, where he was asked, “When you’re asked the question, flat out, was the election of 2020 legitimate or not, what are you going to say?”

Youngkin responded, “I’m saying, of course. He’s our president. He slept in the White House last night. He’s addressed a Joint Session of Congress. He’s signing executive orders that I wish he wasn’t signing.”

GALAX, Virginia — Republican gubernatorial candidate Kirk Cox was several minutes into a wonky election security answer at a diner when January 6 came up again.

Did President Joe Biden win the election? Cox avoided directly answering the question at this recent event, though he had previously acknowledged that reality, the one GOP frontrunner willing to do so.

Instead, he refocused on proposals like voter ID requirements, which are popular with lots of voters. But now Lin, a Trump supporter who had posed the Biden question, had another one. She wanted to know whether he agreed with the Virginia Senate censuring one of its members, Amanda Chase, after she called the people who stormed the US Capitol that day in January “patriots.”

He’s ultra-rich, enjoys tubing and shotguns and, until a few months ago, was virtually unknown in Virginia political circles.

Glenn Youngkin emerged as the Virginia GOP’s nominee for governor on Monday after a relatively drama-free day of vote counting that saw the 54-year-old former CEO of the Carlyle Group maintain a comfortable lead through successive rounds of vote counting in the ranked-choice contest.

“I am prepared to lead, excited to serve and profoundly humbled by the trust the people have placed in me,” Youngkin wrote in a tweet. “Virginians have made it clear that they are ready for a political outsider with proven business experience to bring real change in Richmond.”

The first statewide Republican nominating contest since former President Donald Trump left office has added a new issue to the top tier of traditional GOP campaign messages: “election integrity.”

All four of the leading Republican candidates for this weekend’s “unassembled convention,” where Republican delegates will vote for their nominee at 39 sites around the state, are talking about election and voting rules on the trail and in ads, with some putting forth detailed plans for how they would change Virginia’s election rules.

The proposals are an unmistakable response to Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, which quickly became a cause on the right. “Election integrity” is far from the only thing Republicans are discussing on the trail, with guns, abortion and pandemic policies all playing key roles, too. But the renewed focus on voting laws by four candidates trying to appeal to convention delegates underscores how much this issue is on the minds of Republican voters — and that Republicans who win state office in Virginia and elsewhere are poised to count changing voting laws among their top priorities.

Several Democratic candidates for governor took shots at frontrunner Terry McAuliffe during the second televised debate of the campaign Thursday night, leaving the former governor defending his record on policing, luring Amazon to Virginia and assisting impoverished, majority-Black communities like Petersburg.

But there didn’t appear to be a single, standout moment that might dramatically alter the dynamics of the race one month out from the June 8 primary. In his closing statement, McAuliffe, a former governor seeking a rare second term in office, signaled he’s already looking ahead to the general election and the coming fight against whomever Republicans nominate for governor at their convention this weekend.

“You look at the Republicans, who they’ll nominate in two days. They’re fawning all over Donald Trump. They’re trying to bring their Trump politics here to Virginia,” McAuliffe said. “We can’t allow it. We’ve got to stop them.”

FALLS CHURCH, Va. (AP) — Being a voter’s second choice is usually a recipe for disaster for a political candidate, but in this year’s chaotic GOP gubernatorial race in Virginia, second-place status could be a winning ticket.

Seven candidates are vying for the Republican nomination at what the GOP is calling an “unassembled convention” this Saturday.

None of the four top-tier candidates — Pete Snyder, Amanda Chase, Kirk Cox and Glenn Youngkin — have established themselves as a clear front-runner. As a result, under the ranked-choice voting system the GOP is using, the winner will almost certainly need to be the second choice of numerous voters, and perhaps even the third choice, to secure the nomination.

Republicans around Virginia streamed into voting sites Saturday to choose their nominee for governor, and in Caroline County, Don Denton was first in line.

He said he was backing Amanda Chase, a state senator who ran a hard-right campaign and pitched herself as “Trump in heels” despite the former president’s overwhelming losses in Virginia, which has grown progressively bluer in the 11 years since a Republican last won a statewide election.

A 73-year-old former Marine sergeant, Denton compared Chase’s tactics — which have made her a pariah to many mainstream Republicans and a populist champion for those who prefer more combative politics — to military leaders ordering soldiers to take a hill knowing “a certain percentage of them” will die.

The Republican Party of Virginia has a chance this year to reestablish itself as a competitive force in statewide elections.

After a dozen years without a statewide victory, the GOP leadership needed to take a careful look within to understand why voters have turned their backs on the once dominant political party in Virginia. It appears that party leaders decided that with the right method of nominating candidates for statewide office, they can change their fortunes.

Republican Party leaders   generally have favored conventions as a means of selecting nominees for statewide offices. The closed process, open only to the most inside of GOP insiders and dominated by some of its most conservative voices, has had a mixed record of success.

There’s no clear front runner.

There are four obvious leaders in the seven-person field, but beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess who’s most likely to win.

“It’s the most difficult race to handicap imaginable,” said veteran political commentator Bob Holsworth, pointing to the GOP’s plan to employ ranked-choice voting and a system that weights delegates’ votes based on the partisan leanings of their home locality.

Former state Del. Jennifer Carroll Foy’s supporters say she is best-positioned to challenge the former governor, but she has yet to gain broad name recognition.

In Virginia, 2021 was the best chance yet to elect a Black politician — and possibly the first Black woman in any state — to the governor’s mansion.

But with five weeks until the commonwealth’s Democratic primary, Terry McAuliffe, its white male former governor, is on track to secure the nomination easily.

The Virginia GOP says 53,524 delegates have registered to vote in the party’s nominating convention next week, in which Republicans will select their candidates for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general.

Republican Party of Virginia Chairman Rich Anderson announced the number at a candidate forum on Tuesday evening, predicting the event would be “the largest state party convention ever in American history.”

The convention is set for Saturday, May 8, and, unlike a traditional convention held at a single location, will take place at voting locations set up around the state to comply with COVID-19 safety rules.

In Virginia Cornerstone PAC’s video ads, Glenn Youngkin is an out-of-touch elitist whose global investment firm did business in China and paid Hillary Clinton $200,000 in speaking fees.

In mailers sent out by the Commonwealth Conservative Fund, Pete Snyder, aka “Sneaky Pete,” is a RINO who once said Donald Trump sounded like a “racist jerk.”

On the First Principles Fund website, Kirk Cox is a career politician, phony conservative and a “lead architect” of Medicaid expansion in Virginia.

Tragically, every day many Virginians continue to feel the heartache caused by gun violence. In the last 15 years alone, Virginians have had to witness mass shootings at Virginia Tech, Virginia Beach, and in Alexandria during a congressional baseball game. We made great strides to curb gun violence in this past legislative session, thanks to the leadership of Gov. Ralph Northam and the Democratic majorities in the General Assembly. Virginia finally passed crucial gun violence prevention measures, but we need to make sure our next governor continues to push our Commonwealth forward.

We need a leader who has the vision to roll out bold, comprehensive gun violence prevention plans, and I believe Terry McAuliffe is that leader. Terry is not afraid to stand up against extremist groups like the NRA, and in fact was the first southern governor to be elected after running with an “F” rating from the NRA. As Virginia’s 72nd governor, he fought the gun lobby and vetoed numerous radical Republican proposals that would have made our Commonwealth less safe. And as Virginia’s next governor, I know he won’t tinker around the edges. He’s going to go big when it comes to gun violence prevention. Terry recently released his gun violence prevention plan which includes a number of much-needed reforms.

With early voting beginning later this month in the gubernatorial primary, candidates for Virginia’s highest political office are already off to the races. As candidates work to carve out a niche for themselves among the crowded field, they are turning to climate change to make their boldest proposals.

A few weeks ago, my organization, Food & Water Watch, was proud to co-sponsor one of the first debates between candidates, the Virginia People’s Debates. All Democratic candidates for the role, save one, came to speak candidly on their policies, using the opportunity to speak to engaged constituents about the greatest converging existential threats of our time: climate change and environmental justice.

In a refreshing departure from previous administrations, all the candidates that came to the event pledged not to accept any campaign donations (direct or indirect) from Dominion Energy or any other state regulated corporations. All candidates also pledged to support a moratorium on new fossil fuel infrastructure and to halt new permits for pending fossil fuel projects.

Northam endorses McAuliffe in the race to succeed him, handing his predecessor one of the contest’s most coveted endorsements.

Northam, who under Virginia law cannot seek a consecutive term in office, said McAuliffe’s accomplishments during his previous term in the governor’s mansion show he is the right person for the job.

“Terry’s strong record of delivering for Virginians is exactly why we need him as our next governor,” Northam said in a statement shared with The Associated Press ahead of the formal announcement. “We will need bold leadership ready to build a more equitable post-COVID economy that creates jobs, invests in workers, ensures equitable access to quality affordable health care, and rebuilds Virginia’s thriving network of small businesses.”

The first televised debate of Virginia’s Democratic gubernatorial primary started out tame Tuesday evening, with almost 25 minutes of civil discussion about how the five candidates onstage plan to lead the state out of it.

The second half took a sharper turn, with several attacks against former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, veering into a more pointed discussions of race, guns police tactics and government accountability.

Running as a quasi-incumbent, McAuliffe is considered the frontrunner in a field that includes Sen. Jennifer McClellan, D-Richmond, former delegate Jennifer Carroll Foy, Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, and Del. Lee Carter, D-Manassas.

The GOP candidates for governor had just finished introducing themselves to members of the Princess Anne Republican Women’s Club when the forum’s moderator realized she had misplaced her list of questions.

Not a problem, she said: “I do remember one off the top of my head, so we’ll go with the elephant in the room. … The elephant in the room is election integrity.”

Not even Donald Trump alleged voter fraud contributed to his 10-point loss in Virginia last November. But the former president’s baseless post-election allegations have nonetheless dominated debate among Virginia Republicans as they prepare to select their nominee for governor in this year’s election.

The advocacy group Clean Virginia is endorsing Democrat Jennifer Carroll Foy for governor, support that comes with an eye-popping $500,000 PAC donation to the former state delegate’s campaign.

Founded and financed by wealthy Charlottesville investor Michael Bills, Clean Virginia had already given $100,000 to both Carroll Foy and Sen. Jennifer McClellan, D-Richmond, signaling initial approval of both candidates without going all in behind one challenger to former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, the early frontrunner to win the nomination.

Coming just before the first televised Democratic debate, the group’s formal endorsement of Carroll Foy and accompanying cash infusion could give her a significant lift in the five-person field.

Billing itself as an anti-corruption group, Clean Virginia was formed in 2018 to combat the influence of Dominion Energy, the state-regulated utility many progressives see as exerting undue control over the General Assembly and its energy policy decisions. Bills, a former Goldman Sachs executive who has become one of the top individual donors to Virginia Democrats, has said his goal was to use his own money to counter Dominion’s political donations.

Crowded, colorful and novel, the campaign for the commonwealth’s top elected position is one to watch

This year’s race for Virginia governor is more crowded than any other in modern history, perhaps ever, with 13 declared candidates in the running: seven Republicans, five Democrats and one independent. The race is notable for another novelty: a former governor, Terry McAuliffe (D), is seeking a comeback. Since the Civil War, only one person has twice occupied the Executive Mansion: Mills Godwin, who served from 1966 to 1970 as a Democrat and from 1974 to 1978 as a Republican.

The candidates span the political spectrum, from a self-described socialist to a flamboyant Donald Trump ally who has marched through Richmond with an assault rifle. They are vying to replace Gov. Ralph Northam (D), who is prohibited by the state constitution from serving back-to-back terms.

Over the past two decades, Virginia has transformed from a Republican-leaning state to one that usually votes Democratic statewide. Nevertheless, the GOP hopes to win back Virginia’s governorship this November, and having held full control over the state legislature from 2014 until the 2019 election, that’s not an outlandish goal in a state with such a purplish-blue electoral bent.

As such, the two parties are currently duking it out over who their nominee should be, with many of the same trends we see nationally playing out at the state level. For Republicans, that means a debate over how best to pick a nominee as the candidates’ rhetoric demonstrates the lasting pull of former President Trump as well as the new priorities of the GOP more broadly. And with the candidacy of former Gov. Terry McAuliffe in the Democratic race, that in part mirrors the Democratic Party’s 2020 presidential primary, in which an older white man and establishment heavy-hitter faced multiple women and people of color; ultimately in 2020, Biden won partly because of fears primary voters had around “electability” and who could defeat Trump, or in this case, “Trumpism.”

Virginia’s recent political leanings may give Democrats the upper hand, but Republicans might benefit from a friendlier electoral environment because of the potential for a backlash against President Biden and the Democrats. After all, there’s a history of that. From 1977 to 2017, there was only one election — 2013 — in which the party in the White House won Virginia’s governorship. So national Republicans will certainly hope anti-Democratic sentiments show themselves in Virginia this November and act as a harbinger of things to come in 2022.

Supporter says Jennifer McClellan is ‘voice that Virginia needs to hear’

Sen. Jennifer McClellan is one of 13 candidates vying to become Virginia’s next governor; the commonwealth has never elected a woman to the top post.
McClellan, D-Richmond, has helped shape Virginia’s changing political landscape for 15 years as a state legislator. She departed her 11-year post as a delegate representing Charles City County and parts of Richmond City and Henrico and Hanover counties when she won a senate seat in a 2017 special election.
McClellan now looks to the executive mansion.

“We need a governor who can rebuild our economy, our health care, our economic safety net, and help us move forward post-COVID in a way that addresses inequity and brings people that are impacted by these crises together to be a part of that solution,” McClellan said. “I’ve got the experience and perspective to do that.”

When Jennifer Carroll Foy was first thinking of running for office in 2017, she says she sensed she wasn’t the favorite of party leaders. Two years earlier, Democrat Josh King had already come close to flipping the Prince William-area House of Delegates seat she had her eyes on, and several elected Democrats were backing his better-funded campaign in a targeted swing district.

“There was a sentiment of people saying you need to wait your turn and you need to wait your time,” Carroll Foy said in a recent interview. “People believed that you had to be tapped on the shoulder to be able to run.”

She ran anyway and won the primary by a dozen votes. Four years later, she’s trying to build a national profile as she runs for governor, part of a wave of new faces taking their shots the top jobs in state politics.

For Virginia Democrats, the explosion of candidates up and down the ticket in 2021 represents a shift from the orderly, top-down process that once determined whose turn it was to rise to higher office.

Virginia’s Republicans could find opportunities in this year’s elections to end a dozen years in the wilderness if not for their own dysfunction.

In Richmond, a Democratic administration is trying to extricate itself from the quicksand of a Parole Board scandal in which inmates serving life terms for murder were freed without proper notice or explanation followed by efforts to keep results of investigations into the board’s actions from public view.

A newly Democratic General Assembly swiftly enacted a remarkably progressive agenda by Virginia standards that includes elimination of the death penalty. Too much too soon? The election will tell.

The Republican Party of Virginia’s governing body voted Friday to choose its nominee for governor and two other statewide offices in a May 8 convention spread out at 37 sites across the commonwealth.

RPV’s State Central Committee, meeting via videoconference, overwhelmingly adopted a convention call that apportions a different number of sites for each of the state’s 11 congressional districts, accounting for each district’s geography and difficulty of travel.

They range from as many as six polling locations in southwestern Virginia’s sprawling and mountainous 9th District to just one apiece in Northern Virginia’s compact, suburban (and Democratic-voting) 8th, 10th and 11th districts.

The “unassembled convention” plan does not specify cities or locations of polling sites. Districts will have until April 12 to select them and as late as April 24 to amend them.

Four of the five candidates seeking the Democratic nomination for Virginia governor in this year’s race met for an online debate Tuesday night that was largely cordial and absent a frontrunning ex-governor.

Del. Lee Carter, former Del. Jennifer Carroll Foy, state Sen. Jennifer McClellan and Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax took part in the event, which was hosted by political, racial justice, climate and other advocacy groups.

Former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, whose name recognition, broad support among many sitting lawmakers and fundraising prowess have vaunted him to Democratic frontrunner status, declined to participate.

The event was among the first opportunities of the campaign season for the public to hear from most of the Democratic field in a race considered the country’s marquee political contest of the year.

“Trump in heels,” said at a campaign event that a fellow state senator seeking the Democratic nod in the race would not “be a governor that supports everyone” because of her leadership in the legislative Black caucus.

The remarks about state Sen. Jennifer McClellan came during a campaign event, which Chase said took place Monday night. A video clip was circulated online by Democratic super PAC American Bridge 21st Century.

“I support equal rights not special rights. You know, Sen. McClellan, she is the vice chairman of the Legislative Black Caucus. … And I said she will not be a governor that supports everyone,” Chase said in an apparent reference to a similar attack on McClellan last year.

With multiple women and people of color in the Democratic primary, groups that typically support those candidates are mostly sitting out the race so far.

The field of Democratic hopefuls for governor in Virginia is historically diverse. But that very diversity and its crowded size are causing a conflict.

That’s because the outside groups formed to support women and candidates of color are still mostly on the sidelines. And it’s leaving former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a white man and longtime Democratic insider, as the overriding frontrunner with less than three months until the primary.

Normally, these groups, which include well-funded political action committees in Democratic politics, would throw all their support and money behind candidates like Jennifer Carroll Foy or Jennifer McClellan, two African American legislators who would bring diversity to an office that has never been occupied by a woman, and only once by a Black man.

The former Virginia governor, who’s running for another term, spoke with Johnson Feb. 27 over Facebook Live.  The two discussed how the pandemic impacted the restaurant industry and black-owned businesses in particular.

Black-owned companies experienced the brunt the COVID-19 pandemic has had on small businesses. An H & R Block survey from February found 53% of Black business owners saw revenue drop by half. Only 37% of White business owners reported the same.

McAuliffe believes part of the solution is offering more state assistance to small businesses, and specifically minority businesses.

Richmond, Virginia
A 16-year political shift has transformed the Commonwealth of Virginia from a solidly red state to a blue one.

Democrats in the state now control all levers of power — the Governor’s mansion, and both chambers of the state legislature — for the first time in a generation. And they are leading in an unapologetically progressive direction.

The story of Virginia politics in 2021 is a tale of two political parties. Democrats are riding a wave of demographic change and suburban revolt away from the GOP to political power. And Republicans are searching for a way forward, while trying to placate a base increasingly loyal to Trump and motivated by conspiratorial views.

As Republicans search for a path forward following Donald Trump’s defeat and the party’s loss of power in Washington, many are looking across the Potomac River to Virginia, where voters will select a new governor this November.

Well before the 2022 midterms or 2024 presidential primaries, the Virginia governor’s race will be a first real test for a post-Trump GOP — not only of whether Republicans can start to win back a state they once reliably held, but in who the party picks as its nominee.

With just three months before the state party’s planned nominating convention, attention has fallen to Amanda Chase, a pro-Trump state senator who spoke at the “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington on January 6. She later called those who stormed the Capitol “patriots” and has insisted the 2020 election was stolen.

On Wednesday, former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe officially announced he’s running for a second term, launching a rare comeback bid pundits and political strategists say will be difficult, but not impossible, for other gubernatorial hopefuls to stop.

“Certainly he comes into the race in a very formidable position,” said veteran political commentator Bob Holsworth. “He’s a popular former governor. He has tons of resources. And he loves to campaign. At the same time, the open question in this campaign is whether he is the person for the moment.”

Long an open secret in state politics, McAuliffe made his 2021 campaign official in an appearance at a Richmond elementary school, where he was joined by a group of Black leaders. Among them were Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney, House Majority Leader Charniele Herring, D-Alexandria, and Sen. Louise Lucas, D-Portsmouth, who will serve as co-chairs of McAuliffe’s campaign.

We’re about to see how serious Virginia is when it comes to advancing women in the highest elective offices in the commonwealth, and that’s particularly true for Democrats.

After the briefest respite, Virginia politics revs back up and enters the national spotlight when we elect our 74th governor next year.

Not one of the first 73 — and we’ve been doing this since Patrick Henry in 1776 — has been a woman. It’s one of the longest-running perpetual fraternities in American politics. With female candidates — declared, undeclared and still mulling it over — queueing up for both parties’ nomination sweepstakes, 2021 could be the year when that changes.

A total of 44 women have served as governors in 32 U.S. states and territories dating to 1925 when Wyoming elected Democrat Nellie Tayloe Ross, five years after women won the right to vote. Most of women’s success in governors’ races has come in the 21st century when 30 of those 44 women took office in 23 states, Guam and Puerto Rico, five of which have elected women governors twice during that time.

The Food and Drug Administration expanded emergency use authorization of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine to include adolescents 12 to 15 years of age on May 10. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention followed with recommendations endorsing use in this age group after their advisory group meeting on May 12. The American Academy of Pediatrics also supports this decision.

Dr. Debbie-Ann Shirley is an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Virginia specializing in pediatric infectious diseases. Here she addresses some of the concerns parents may have about their teen or preteen getting the COVID-19 vaccine.

1. Does the vaccine work in adolescents?
Yes, recently released data from Pfizer-BioNTech shows that the COVID-19 vaccine seems to work really well in this age group. The COVID-19 vaccine was found to be 100 percent efficacious in preventing symptomatic COVID-19 in an ongoing clinical trial of children in the U.S. aged 12 to 15. Adolescents made high levels of antibody in response to the vaccine, and their immune response was just as strong as what has been seen in older teens and young adults 16-25 years of age.

A COVID-19 vaccine mandate is not being ruled out in Virginia but it won’t happen in the near future, if at all. That’s according to the state’s Vaccine Coordinator Dr. Danny Avula, who spoke to 8News via Zoom on Thursday.

In the meantime, Dr. Avula said the use of so-called “vaccine passports” or certifications are a more likely solution for skepticism.

“If our ability to move forward as a society, to open back up businesses, to open back up schools, is contingent on this, then I think we find every way we can to incentivize it and potentially even get to a point where we require it, but I think we’re a long way from that,” Dr. Avula said.

Gov. Ralph Northam amended Virginia’s mask mandate to match recently issued guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The changes, announced in a Thursday press release, went into effect immediately, according to Northam’s spokeswoman, Alena Yarmosky. They allow fully vaccinated Virginians to “participate in outdoor activities and recreation without a mask,” based on language from the CDC. Those include solo activities and small outside gatherings of fully vaccinated people.

People are considered fully vaccinated two weeks after receiving their second shot (or two weeks after their first, in the case of Johnson & Johnson’s one-dose vaccine). Neither the state nor the CDC has specified whether there’s an exact size limit for “small” outdoor gatherings, but Yarmosky said the administration is “asking folks to use their best judgement.”

Virginia universities plan a return to campuses in the fall, but there are questions if the COVID-19 vaccine can be mandated.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration only authorized the vaccine for emergency purposes, according to Lisa Lee, professor of public health at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. The vaccine does not yet have full FDA approval.

The vaccine was authorized for emergency use, so people have to be given the choice to take it and be informed of the consequences if they don’t, Lee said.

“Many legal scholars have interpreted that as saying that people cannot be required to take a vaccine that is under an emergency use authorization,” Lee said. “They can be when it has full approval, so that’s where the hitch is.”

Starting May 15, Virginia will significantly relax capacity restrictions on social gatherings and entertainment venues as COVID-19 numbers plateau across much of the state.

Gov. Ralph Northam announced the latest rollback in a video message on Thursday, citing the state’s continued progress in vaccinations. Data from the Virginia Department of Health indicates that more than 40 percent of the population has received at least one shot and more than 26 percent are fully vaccinated. Every Virginian 16 and older became eligible for the vaccine on Sunday.

“Vaccination numbers are up, and our COVID case numbers are substantially lower than they were earlier this year,” Northam said in a statement. “So, we have been able to begin easing some mitigation measures.”

Over the last month, state and federal officials have directed thousands of COVID-19 vaccines to large-scale clinics in vulnerable communities with high rates of coronavirus cases — all in areas with significant or majority Black and Latino populations.

The sites have been touted by leaders as a core strategy in expanding access to vaccines among communities of color, where immunization rates are consistently lower than they are for White Virginians. “We have done a very good job in the commonwealth in addressing this issue,” state Health Commissioner Dr. Norman Oliver said at a news briefing last month in response to questions over vaccine equity.

“We have brought on staff in our emergency support team that is doing outreach in these communities,” he added. “We’ve put boots on the ground in all 35 of our health districts and those teams are doing your basic sort of community organizing — door to door, working with faith leaders, community-based organizations to bring people from these vulnerable populations to our vaccination sites.”

National data is shedding new light on how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting medical providers and their mental health as they balance the emotional and physical demands of a sometimes deadly virus. For frontline hospital workers, it’s often the visceral jolt — and exhausting work — of caring for critically ill patients. But primary care physicians are also reporting fears of infection and ongoing stress that comes from a radical shift in how their businesses operate.

In Virginia, there’s growing concern that burnout and extreme stress could lead more providers to leave the field or grapple with long-term mental health problems. On an individual level, it’s bad for doctors and their patients. But on a systemic level, there’s also worry that COVID-19 could make an existing physician shortage worse.

“One of the things we always talk about is physicians, nurses, support staff — they’re taking care of patients every day,” said Taylor Woody, the communications manager for the Medical Society of Virginia. “But who’s focusing on taking care of them?”

Virginia is one of a growing number of states exploring testing as a way to combat COVID-19 in K-12 schools.

Dr. Laurie Forlano, a deputy commissioner for the Virginia Department of Health, said the agency is launching a pilot program to provide rapid antigen tests to schools across the state. VDH is rolling out the program with Abbott BinaxNOW tests — portable kits, roughly the size of a credit card, that provide results in around 15 minutes.

“We agree that testing can be a layer of prevention,” said Forlano, who oversees population health for the department. The concept of screening students and staff isn’t a new one, and some colleges and private K-12 schools have been testing since the fall. But it’s taken on a new importance since Virginia — like many states across the country — began encouraging local school divisions to reopen for in-person instruction.

As of March 22, only three of Virginia’s 132 school districts were operating fully remotely. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have also issued interim guidance for K-12 testing, which is largely mirrored by VDH in its own reopening guidelines for schools.

Gov. Ralph Northam announced Thursday that the state will expand vaccine eligibility to all Virginians 16 and older by April 18.

The news puts Virginia nearly two weeks ahead of the May 1 deadline set by President Joe Biden earlier this month. In a news release, the administration said that nearly every high-risk Virginian who pre-registered for a vaccine has already received a shot, allowing the state to expand eligibility sooner than expected. Those still on the state’s pre-registration list will receive an appointment invitation within the next two weeks.

“Expanding vaccine eligibility to all adults marks an important milestone in our ongoing efforts to put this pandemic behind us,” Northam said in a statement. “I thank all of the public health staff, health care workers, vaccinators, and volunteers who have helped make this possible.”

In late September, when Virginia health officials launched a dashboard that detailed outbreaks in K-12 schools across the state, it was applauded as a long-needed step toward more transparency — and a relief for parents hesitant over the prospect of sending their children back to the classroom.

Six months later, the data on reopening has gained even more importance amid a state and nationwide push to return students to the classroom. But there are limits on what it can and can’t tell officials, parents and others looking for answers on the relative risks of in-person school.

In early February, Gov. Ralph Northam directed local divisions to begin offering in-person instruction by March 15. Three weeks later, the Virginia General Assembly passed legislation — with bipartisan support — that mandates a return to the classroom by July 1.

As a result, only three of the state’s 132 local school divisions were operating fully remotely as of March 22, according to data from the Virginia Department of Education. Thirty-eight are fully in-person — defined by the agency as providing at least four days of in-person instruction for all students.

Sam Kukich was initially excited to join a workgroup she thought would focus on improving staffing levels at Virginia nursing homes.

The director of Dignity for the Aged, a Poquoson-based nonprofit, Kukich had become an almost inadvertent advocate for reforming standards of care in the nursing home industry. She and her family had already made headlines across the state when they detailed a nearly five-year-long struggle to find care for her mother-in-law, who lost 65 pounds and suffered dozens of falls at multiple facilities in the Hampton Roads region.

When she started Dignity for the Aged in 2018, largely out of frustration, Kukich started hearing from “all sorts of people” about cases of abuse and neglect in Virginia nursing homes. Many of the cases, she said, were linked to understaffing — certified nursing assistants and other health care workers who were simply too overworked and overwhelmed to properly care for residents.

So Kukich was disappointed last year, when a Virginia Senate subcommittee rejected a bill from Sen. Jennifer Kiggans, R-Virginia Beach, that would set minimum staffing ratios for the industry. It was the 16th straight year similar legislation had died, but this time, legislators ordered the state Department of Health to organize a work group to “review and make recommendations” on increasing the nursing home workforce in Virginia.

With COVID-19 cases down after a winter surge, and with nearly a quarter of the population having received at least one dose of vaccine, Gov. Ralph Northam is again rolling back some of Virginia’s pandemic restrictions — cautiously.

At a Tuesday news briefing, the governor announced the expansion of the attendance cap on indoor social gatherings from 10 to 50 people. Outdoor gatherings, currently limited to 25 attendees, will be allowed up to 100.

Alena Yarmosky, the governor’s spokeswoman, said the new guidelines will offer slightly more flexibility to events-oriented businesses — including Virginia’s wedding industry, which has lobbed some of the harshest criticism at Northam’s health and safety guidelines (at least two venue owners have sued over the restrictions).

But the governor is still taking a moderate approach to reopening compared to some neighboring states, including Maryland, where Gov. Larry Hogan lifted all capacity restrictions for the vast majority of businesses earlier this month. Northam’s executive order requiring mask wearing in indoor public areas remains in effect.

More essential workers and Virginians with underlying medical conditions can now access COVID-19 vaccines through major pharmacies across the state, the Virginia Department of Health announced Wednesday.

There are currently eight large chains that offer vaccines through a partnership with the federal government, including CVS, Walgreens, Walmart, Kroger and Albertson’s, which owns Safeway grocery stores.

Some independent pharmacies are also included in the partnership, which provides doses to more than 300 locations across Virginia, according to Stephanie Wheawill, director of VDH’s Division of Pharmacy Services.

While the doses supplied to pharmacies are separate from Virginia’s overall allotment, Wheawill said locations are asked to follow the state’s distribution guidelines. Until this week, state health officials instructed pharmacies to limit doses to residents 65 and older, as well as certain essential worker categories.

More than 70 million Americans have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine — and along with that shot, a small paper card with the CDC’s label detailing the timing and manufacturer of the dose.

Those paper cards at the moment are the only proof readily available to Americans of their vaccination against a virus that has upended businesses, schools and most other aspects of daily life.

That could soon change, with multiple companies and nonprofit groups working to create “vaccine passports” — smartphone-based apps that would allow someone to certify that they’ve been vaccinated. The apps so far are aimed at travelers, who may be required to show proof of their vaccination status before boarding a plane or entering another country.

In early January, Gov. Ralph Northam warned that the worst of Virginia’s winter surge may not have happened yet.

“The virus is worse now than it’s ever been,” he said at a news briefing. At the time, the state had reached an all-time high in daily new cases and hospitalizations — a trend that threatened to overwhelm some hospital systems. Many local health departments were forced to suspend contact tracing programs amid the spike, warning residents that winter travel and holiday gatherings had made it impossible to keep up with cases.

“Case numbers are about four times higher than they were last spring, and we can expect them to go higher,” Northam continued. “In fact, the [University of Virginia] model shows cases could keep rising until Valentine’s Day or even later.”

The pandemic has made this past year unlike any other at Beth Sholom, a senior living center in Henrico.

In late February, it seemed we were facing a typical long-term care viral threat, but I could not shake the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that this was going to be much bigger. In the early, there was so little information available, making it difficult to anticipate and prepare for the reality of what was coming. We were one of the first senior living communities in our area to lock down, and like so many others in our industry, we faced extraordinary daily challenges and heartbreaking losses.

Here is our story.

Our frontline staff put themselves and their families at risk every day simply by coming to work. Once the March lockdown was in place, many of our staff found it difficult to meet the challenges of working and managing their families. When schools closed, they scrambled to find ways to address the needs of their children while continuing to work. Daily, our employees faced the fear of bringing the virus — which was not understood — home to their family.

As Virginia continues to combat the public health challenges of COVID-19, the distribution of vaccines in the commonwealth provides a long-needed glimmer of hope.

The complex COVID-19 vaccine distribution process underscores the importance of accurate immunization histories and records. While Virginia had the foresight years ago to invest in an immunization registry for individuals, families, medical providers and public health researchers, recent action by the General Assembly has strengthened the statewide database of vaccine history and distribution. To keep our communities healthy even after the pandemic, all health care providers that administer vaccines, starting in January 2022, will participate in the Virginia Immunization Information System.

VIIS is a free, statewide, digital immunization registry that records reported vaccination doses distributed by health care providers to individuals, thus increasing the ability to appropriately react to vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks. Vaccine registry systems like VIIS are incredibly helpful for improving the public health response to outbreaks of diseases like measles, Hepatitis A, H1N1, and now COVID-19. By sharing the data with the state, appropriate resources can be deployed to counteract outbreaks and help increase community immunization rates. Currently, the Virginia Department of Health reports that 2.1 million children are under-immunized.

For public health experts across Virginia, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was a more-than-welcome addition to the state’s weekly allocation.

The one-dose shot boosted Virginia’s shipments by 69,000 this week, spurring a slew of new mass vaccination events. It doesn’t have the same cold storage requirements, making it easier to ship and redistribute. And at the national level, it’s prompting a new wave of optimism, with President Joe Biden promising a vaccine “for every adult in America by the end of May.”

But state health officials also worry the Johnson & Johnson vaccine has an image problem. When trial data was released, many reports honed in on the numbers: 72 percent effective against COVID-19 infections in the United States, 66 percent effective in South America and 57 percent effective in South Africa. Pfizer’s, by contrast, showed 95 percent effectiveness at preventing symptomatic COVID-19 after two doses. Moderna’s showed 94.1 percent.

President Joe Biden is urging states to prioritize teachers for COVID-19 vaccines, setting a goal of ensuring that every pre-kindergarten through 12th grade educator, school staff member and childcare worker is able to receive at least one shot this month.

At least 34 states and the District of Columbia have some or all teachers eligible to receive the coronavirus vaccine, according to tracking data from Education Week.

That tally has been growing in recent weeks, as many students across the country approach the one-year mark for switching to virtual classes due to the pandemic.

Biden’s latest directive to states is the latest step in his administration’s effort to aid schools in safely reopening their buildings to in-person classes. In a televised statement from the White House on Tuesday, Biden described teachers as “essential workers,” and said that accelerating vaccinations can help assuage anxieties about school reopenings.

Executives from five COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers told Congress Tuesday that they expect to significantly boost the number of shots delivered to states in the coming weeks.

Pfizer will increase weekly shipments to more than 13 million doses by mid-March, an increase from the 4 to 5 million doses shipped weekly in early February, the company’s chief business officer, John Young, told a U.S. House panel.

Moderna, the other vaccine that has received federal authorization for emergency use, expects to double its monthly vaccine deliveries by April to more than 40 million doses per month.

Fairfax County is ranked as one of the wealthiest communities in Virginia. It’s also one of the healthiest.

As of 2020, Fairfax led the state in measures including length of life, access to exercise opportunities and low rates of poor health indicators such as smoking and adult obesity, according to annual rankings by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. From 2015 to 2019, the county’s median household income was $124,831 (nationally, it’s around $68,703, according to the U.S. Census Bureau).

Currently, Fairfax County is also leading Virginia in vaccine distribution. In late January, health officials shifted the state’s strategy, routing doses through local health districts based on their percentage of the state’s population. As Virginia’s largest locality with more than 1.1 million residents, that left Fairfax with the largest share.

Even before then, the Fairfax County Health Department had requested — and received — more than eight times as many shots as other local health districts, according to data from the Virginia Department of Health. From Dec. 22 to Jan. 23, Fairfax received a total of 74,625 doses. Over the same time period, the Richmond-Henrico Health District, received a total of 19,550 doses for both localities, which have a combined population of nearly 560,000.

In the early weeks of Virginia’s COVID-19 vaccine rollout, hospital systems in five local health districts requested, and received, tens of thousands of doses — a disproportionately larger share than pharmacies, community health clinics and even the local health departments charged with overseeing the state’s immunization plan.

In Chesterfield, for example, HCA Virginia requested 27,775 first doses from Dec. 14 to Dec. 20 and ultimately received 18,275 — more than enough to vaccinate what Jeff Caldwell, the system’s vice president of communications, described as more than 17,000 total employees across the state. VCU Health in Richmond requested and received 20,050 first doses within the first three weeks of the state’s rollout — far more than its roughly 13,000 employees (spokeswoman Alex Nowak said the health system also has more than 10,000 “affiliated team members,” which include residents, medical students and food service workers, but not every direct or affiliated employee is involved in patient care.)

The Mercury obtained detailed distribution data for the Richmond, Henrico, Chesterfield, Fairfax and Central Shenandoah health districts from a reader, who noticed that the Virginia Department of Health’s public vaccine dashboard initially allowed the public to download spreadsheets showing how many doses were delivered to individual facilities.

States will see another increase in the COVID-19 vaccine doses they receive, with President Joe Biden’s administration announcing Tuesday that the federal government will distribute 11 million doses next week.

That’s an increase from 10.5 million doses this week, and 8.6 million during the week President Joe Biden took office last month. Those increases were attributed to boosted production by vaccine manufacturers.

The administration has not published a state-by-state breakdown on how many doses are distributed each week. Iowa Sens. Joni Ernst and Chuck Grassley, both Republicans, have questioned whether Iowa is receiving a fair share of doses under that formula, and wrote to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday, asking CDC officials to release the weekly formula for allocating vaccines to states.

State officials say they’re confident that no COVID-19 vaccines are going to waste in Virginia.

But seven weeks into the state’s vaccine rollout, the Virginia Department of Health won’t release data on wastage, which vaccinators are required to report under a provider agreement distributed by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The document, which providers must fill out in order to administer vaccines, requires them to report the number of doses that were “unused, spoiled, expired, or wasted as required by the relevant jurisdiction.” In practice, that means hospitals, pharmacies and other administrators should be reporting the data to VDH, which then passes the information onto the CDC.

The Mercury first requested the data from VDH in late January, after Dr. Danny Avula, the state’s vaccine coordinator, stated in a telebriefing that the reporting was required but that he didn’t have information on wastage in Virginia.

Here we go again, Virginia, trailing the pack at yet another critical turn in combating the global coronavirus pandemic — the rollout of the lifesaving vaccine that could finally break the back of COVID-19. And if you’re a Democrat in Virginia, particularly one who’s seeking statewide office this fall, this isn’t what you had hoped to see.

It feels like last March, when the coronavirus caught the commonwealth flat-footed and plodding in its initial mobilization against the novel and then-mysterious plague, forcing Gov. Ralph Northam’s administration to play catch-up.

Yes, catch up Virginia did. Eventually. Northam, the only physician governor of any U.S. state, finally issued forceful and unambiguous orders to kick Virginia’s protective response into the same high gear that Maryland, Ohio, New York and other states had already hit. Schools closed, as did most businesses not deemed essential. Home sheltering, working and learning remotely, social distancing, hand washing and mask wearing were the order of the day. Literally.

City streets fell silent and abandoned. For weeks on end, springtime gusts whistled across sprawling, empty shopping mall parking lots. Small businesses — and even some large ones — took it in the neck, particularly mom-and-pop restaurants, bars, retailers, gyms and cinemas. A chilling number of those shops and offices and eateries died, in many cases taking family livelihoods and life savings with them, and they will never be resurrected. Those were lifesaving steps Virginia had to take and the government was justified in taking them.

Even then, just when Northam had emphatically laid down the law on requiring the use of face coverings, he undermined his own messaging when photographs of him laughing it up unmasked and huddled close with others for selfies on Virginia Beach’s Boardwalk began trending across social media.

By summer, Virginia had ramped up testing, plateaued its numbers of COVID-19 cases and related deaths, and driven down the percentages of positive coronavirus tests. Restrictions were eased. By autumn, ours was among the states faring the best with the coronavirus. But getting there was like pulling teeth.

For reasons still not clear, Northam’s Department of Health balked at making public the granular coronavirus testing data for extended care facilities that families of elderly, ailing and vulnerable people could use to make informed decisions about their loved ones. That was particularly galling after an outbreak at a Henrico County nursing home was among the nation’s deadliest in the early weeks of the pandemic. Eventually, faced with withering media coverage and public outrage, the administration relented and, without explanation, made the data available.

The VDH’s reluctance to provide specific, actionable guidance last summer to school districts on whether, when and how to reopen classrooms or continue virtual schooling created chaos and conflict among faculty, administrators and parents within school divisions and resulted in a crazy-quilt patchwork of differing regimens across the state.

And so it goes.

Last Thursday, with the respected Becker’s Hospital Review ranking Virginia’s vaccination effort the fifth least effective in the nation, Northam found himself promising to jump-start a torpid immunization effort one month after Virginia got the first of its nearly 846,000 vaccine doses. According to Becker’s, only about 218,000 — barely over one-fourth — of those doses have been injected into the arms of Virginians.

Compare that to West Virginia, which has dispensed nearly 70 percent of its approximately 161,000 doses — the nation’s best rate. Maryland and North Carolina have each dispensed about 32 percent of their vaccine allotments, while Kentucky and Tennessee have injected 43 percent and 44 percent, respectively, of their doses. Idaho, Hawaii, Alabama and Georgia (the nation’s worst at just under 20 percent) were the only four states that performed worse than Virginia.

At Thursday’s news conference, Dr. Danny Avula, Northam’s newly appointed vaccine czar, said that to achieve a pace that puts the commonwealth ahead of the virus and returns life to normal sooner rather than later, Virginia needs to dispense about 50,000 doses daily. Last week, the state was at about 30 percent of that pace. As of Friday, 88 of the state’s 133 localities remained mired in Phase 1A, the first phase of the vaccine rollout that includes frontline healthcare workers, first-responders and nursing home residents. Only one-third of the localities, clustered mostly in Southwest Virginia, the Eastern Shore and Northern Virginia, had advanced to Phase 1B, which includes people 65 and older, police and firefighters, teachers, grocery workers and essential government workers.

Northam said he was “pleased” with a pace in which only one out of every four doses the state received a month ago has been injected.

“Everyone will need to be patient. It’s going to happen as fast as it can be done and it’s moving faster every day,” he said Thursday. “Monday, we vaccinated more than 15,000 people. Tuesday, it was more than 17,000.”

When Virginia is the laggard behind every one of its contiguous neighbors, isn’t it fair to ask why? Two weeks ago in Tennessee, for instance, officials in Sullivan County opened a max vaccination site at the Bristol Motor Speedway Dragway, a 10-minute drive from the Virginia border. On its first day, Jan. 7, the site ran out of doses by noon. Vaccinations are scheduled for four days starting this week at Richmond’s enormous car-racing venue. The sprawling NASCAR stadium in Martinsville also volunteered to be a mass-vaccination venue if needed, but thus far has no takers.

Patience, your excellency, is in short supply. After a life-altering (and, in more than 5,600 cases in Virginia and nearly 400,000 nationally, life-ending) 11 months of pandemic, a searing summer of racial unrest, an election from hell and an even worse post-election in which a defeated president instigated the attempted violent overthrow of Congress in a vain effort to keep the victor from taking office, this might not be the most opportune time to prescribe a chill pill.

And, boy, did Virginia’s out-of-power, victory-starved Republicans notice.

Del. Kirk Cox, a conservative former House speaker and a declared GOP candidate for governor, assailed the Northam administration’s lethargic response in a statement.

“While … it’s good news that he’s trying to speed up vaccine distribution, the truth is ‘better late than never’ just doesn’t cut it,” Cox said, adding that he urged Northam “to take decisive action over a week ago.”

Northam could still turn around Virginia’s thus-far inauspicious vaccine deployment, just as his administration eventually energized Virginia’s leisurely initial response to the pandemic last spring. But if he doesn’t, it could hand Republicans another significant election-year bouquet.

This year, the GOP won’t run in the shadow of a president so polarizing that he just cost once-ruby-red Georgia both of its Republican U.S. senators, flipping control of the Senate to the Democrats. They’ll also have a raft of brochure issues courtesy of Virginia Democrats, including proposals to end the death penalty and legalize marijuana, plus last year’s parole board debacle. Those issues resonate among conservatives and many centrists and could buttress a GOP argument that Democrats have gone too far left for an electorate that traditionally rewards moderation.

That said, Republicans haven’t found an opportunity over the past dozen years they couldn’t squander. They could do it again by nominating Amanda Chase, a Trump-style nationalist who urged the president to declare martial law to stay in power and whose incendiary claims have gotten her suspended from Facebook and ostracized by her own party.

The vaccine issue is one that voters will remember in November. The vaccine represents a genuine human triumph, our deliverance from the pain and loss that the past year has inflicted upon us. Government must get this right, and those in charge of it should answer for the consequences if it doesn’t.

News that the federal government has already exhausted its supply of “reserve” COVID-19 vaccines sent Virginia officials scrambling on Friday — less than 24 hours after Gov. Ralph Northam outlined plans to expand vaccine eligibility.

The Washington Post reported Friday that there was no federal stockpile of additional vaccines, despite an announcement earlier this week by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, who told states the Trump administration would begin distributing those doses immediately. Previously, the administration said it was holding back the vaccines to ensure a second dose for everyone who had already received a first shot.

Both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines — the only ones currently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration — require a two-shot schedule.

Northam, along with multiple other Democratic governors, first asked HHS to begin releasing the reserve doses earlier this month. Virginia, like other states, has attributed its slower-than-expected vaccine rollout in part to the limited supply coming from the federal government.

HHS initially appeared unwilling to acquiesce to the request, according to reporting from Politico. But the administration’s Operation Warp Speed reversed that stance soon after President-elect Joe Biden announced he would begin releasing reserve doses to states after taking office.

Northam was one of many public officials to celebrate the arrival of additional vaccines. In his State of the Commonwealth address Wednesday, the governor announced that Virginia would begin vaccinating residents aged 65 and older — a direct response to Azar, who told states to expand their vaccination eligibility to speed up the pace of administration.

At a news briefing the next day, Northam announced that Virginians aged 65 and older, and those 65 and under with underlying medical conditions (including asthma, heart conditions and obesity, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), would be moved into Phase 1b of the state’s vaccination plan — the second stage of prioritization after health care providers and long-term care residents.

“This means about half of Virginia is now eligible to receive the vaccine,” he said Thursday. “That’s a major logistical effort, and it’s not going to happen overnight.”

But with Friday’s report, the timeline — and whether those expanded populations will still be eligible for Phase 1b — is even more unclear. Last week, the Virginia Department of Health announced that 11 local districts were moving into the second stage of the state’s campaign (two more — Pittsylvania-Danville and Southside — later this week). At his briefing, Northam said the rest of Virginia would move into Phase 1b by the end of January, and some local health districts have already announced plans for delivering vaccines to the expanded population.

The governor’s office couldn’t immediately confirm whether the reported lack of reserve vaccines would affect plans to expand 1b. “Honestly, right now we’re just trying to get clear answers from the federal government,” spokeswoman Alena Yarmosky wrote in an email on Friday.

But the Post reported that vaccine shipments, for all states, would likely stay flat if no additional doses had been held in stockpile. For Virginia, that’s roughly 110,000 doses of Pfizer and Moderna vaccine a week.

If that distribution remained the same, it would take around 39 weeks to vaccinate roughly half of all Virginians who fall into the expanded 1b category — which also includes teachers, first responders, and other essential workers. That’s a rough estimate, not accounting for new vaccines that may enter the supply chain and assuming that the state was also administering 110,000 doses a week.

At the same time, Virginia is still struggling to administer the vaccine doses it does have available. As of Friday, the state had only administered about 28 percent of the 943,400 total doses distributed to hospitals, local health departments and other medical facilities, according to date from the Virginia Department of Health’s vaccine reporting dashboard.

State health officials have said the dashboard is undercounting vaccines, partially due to lags or glitches in its electronic reporting system. But the CDC currently ranks Virginia 43 out of 50 states and Washington, D.C., when it comes to the number of doses administered per 100,000 people.

Dr. Danny Avula, the director of the Richmond-Henrico Health District who was recently appointed to head the state’s vaccine efforts, said officials were actively working to speed up the pace of vaccinations — including plans to establish large, free-standing vaccine clinics across the state.

But any mass immunization efforts will be hindered if vaccine supply remains low. Yarmosky said it was just one more frustration in trying to coordinate a COVID-19 response with the federal government.

“Once again, the Trump administration cannot seem to provide basic facts and truths,” she wrote Friday. “On Tuesday, governors were told explicitly that we would be provided additional doses — Virginia immediately pivoted and we moved quickly to expand eligibility and increase access.

“Now, the news media is reporting that the exact opposite may be true,” she said. “We’re frankly trying to gather as much information as possible right now — like every American, we need to understand what is going on, so we can plan accordingly. While astonishing, this is hardly surprising. What we’re seeing is fully in line with the dysfunction that has characterized the Trump administration’s entire response to COVID-19. President-elect Biden cannot be sworn in fast enough.”