Trip Gabriel

Northam bumbled his response, admitting he was in the picture before saying he was not, then seemed like he might demonstrate Michael Jackson’s moonwalk at a news conference where he acknowledged blackening his face for a dance contest.

Now, after Democrats won control of the Legislature on Tuesday, Northam is positioned to be one of the most consequential Democratic governors in America in 2020, aiming to enact strong gun restrictions and LGBTQ protections and clear the way to take down Confederate statues — all potential headline-making changes that could galvanize the party base nationally in the presidential race.

For Northam, a medical doctor with a rural drawl, and a political moderate whom Republicans once hoped to recruit, it is an astonishing reversal of fortune. His salvaging of a year that began in disaster is a testament to a political age in which the half-life of scandal is brief and where suburban voters are punishing Republicans because of President Donald Trump. It also reflects Northam’s own efforts, largely out of the headlines, in repairing the damage with black constituents and lawmakers.

Virginians “supported me through this,” Northam said in an interview. “And they supported what our agenda has been on Tuesday, and now we need to deliver.”

Nudged to reflect on his personal arc of the last nine months, the governor deflected, steering attention instead to achievements in his two years in office: Medicaid expansion, criminal justice reform and luring an Amazon headquarters to northern Virginia. “My drive is to serve Virginia. That’s been my life, one of service,” he said earnestly.

The scandalous events of February that drew intense media attention played no apparent role in dampening enthusiasm for Democratic candidates on Election Day, as the party once feared.

“I kind of forgot about the blackface until you brought it up just now,” Tanisha Kelly, an adviser at a group home in the Richmond suburbs, said last week after voting for Democratic state lawmakers. She said the governor had seemed invisible during the campaign, making little impression on her.

Most governors love the limelight during an election season, but Northam may have helped himself this year by quietly tending to alliances and candidates and largely letting events play out rather than be seen as trying to stage manage them. And by all appearances he seemed fine letting other politicians cut a bigger figure on the campaign trail.

Northam did appear at get-out-the-vote rallies in the final weeks before Election Day, and at two dozen political events over the summer. But his predecessor, Terry McAuliffe, who in the spring ended a flirtation with a presidential run, was far more visible on the campaign trail. McAuliffe’s boisterous glad-handing was the opposite of Northam’s measured reserve. The former governor popped up at more than 125 parades and political events for candidates, sparking rumors that he might run again for governor in 2021. (Northam will be ineligible because Virginia governors cannot serve back-to-back terms.)

While Northam’s political action committee raised $1.5 million for Democrats on the ballot, it was a more modest sum than the $7.1 million that McAuliffe raked in for legislative races four years ago.

“What brought people to the polls on Tuesday, it was to vote for Governor Northam’s agenda,” said Jennifer Carroll Foy, a member of the House of Delegates. “I believe that no one wants to get in the way of what he can do here in Virginia.”

In the end, money was no problem: It rained down on Democrats from national anti-gun and abortion rights groups, and from individual donors in the state and around the country. All were driven to flip the General Assembly, where Republicans’ narrow majorities were the last barrier to unified Democratic control of state government for the first time in 26 years.

Party officials and analysts in Virginia said Northam owed his political survival to fortuitous events as well as his own efforts.

Just days after the surfacing of Northam’s 1984 yearbook photo — with one figure in blackface and another in Ku Klux Klan robes — the lieutenant governor, Justin Fairfax, was accused of sexual abuse by two women, which he denied. Before the week was out, Attorney General Mark R. Herring acknowledged he had worn blackface as a college student.

With the state’s top three Democrats compromised, the desire to force them from office and make way for the Republican next in line lost appeal to many in the party.

Republican candidates who reminded voters of Northam’s past had little success in the fall. Glen Sturtevant, a state senator in difficult terrain in the Richmond suburbs, ran TV ads flashing the yearbook picture and accusing his opponent, Ghazala Hashmi, of once calling on Northam to resign, until he donated $25,000 to her, “buying her silence.”

Despite the attack, Hashmi crushed Sturtevant in Richmond precincts with many black voters, the key to her upset victory.

“The liberal groups that should have continued to put pressure on Governor Northam for this scandal made the political calculation that it was better for their self-interest to shut up about it,” said Will Ritter, a Republican strategist in the state.

Whatever doubts that lingered with Democratic voters about state leadership were largely banished in the summer, when the governor called the Legislature back to Richmond to pass gun restrictions after a mass shooting in Virginia Beach on May 31.

The Republican majorities adjourned the session after 90 minutes, a bit of political drama that stuck with many voters in November.

“The calling of the special session turned out to be brilliant,” said Bob Holsworth, a longtime political analyst in the state. “Republicans couldn’t bring themselves to go against their rural base to make changes. This put a totally different dynamic on the election.”

Northam said the eight bills he introduced in the aborted session would be the first ones out of the gate when the new General Assembly majorities meet in January. They include universal background checks, a ban on assault rifles and high-capacity magazines, limiting handgun purchases to one a month and a so-called red flag law to let a court remove weapons from people who pose a threat. He has not ruled out confiscating assault weapons from gun owners.

Northam, who has treated gunshot victims as a pediatric neurologist and an Army medical officer, said he had hoped for bipartisanship from Republicans when he called a special session. “I said I want to dialogue. I want votes and laws,” he said. “They had an opportunity to have that dialogue and they chose not to, and I think they paid that price on Tuesday.”

All year, Northam has retained the support of black voters. Even as his overall approval plunged to 40% two months after the yearbook photo surfaced, 63% of African American voters wanted him to remain in office, according to a poll by Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia.

The same pollster found in an October survey that Northam’s overall approval had recovered, to 51%.

Defying calls to resign by the Democratic caucuses in the House of Delegates and state Senate in February, the governor vowed to dedicate the rest of his term to fighting racial inequity. His effort won support from black lawmakers.

He created a commission to comb Virginia’s laws for legacies of Jim Crow, and a second commission to review school textbooks for fair coverage of black history.

Last week, the governor included two historically black colleges in $1 billion of funding to graduate more computer science majors from the state’s universities.

Lamont Bagby, a member of the state’s House of Delegates and chairman of the Legislative Black Caucus, said the majority of caucus members were graduates of HBCUs, and ensuring more state support was a priority.

“February put the issues that have been important to the black caucus for decades on the front burner,” Bagby said, expressing his support for Northam. (Back in February, the Legislative Black Caucus had called on the governor to resign.)

Looking ahead, Bagby said black lawmakers want to see laws aimed at preventing evictions and increasing affordable housing. He added: “There is no reason why we can’t finally have a discussion on monuments.”

Northam said he supports overturning a century-old law that would clear the way to let local governments decide the fate of Civil War statues.

Modesty is not a quality in demand in modern American politics, either from voters or officeholders. But Northam’s level of self-effacement may have been what helped him survive. “The election on Tuesday was about Virginia,” he said. In other words, not Ralph Northam.

This article originally appeared in

From Pariah to Powerhouse: Ralph Northam's Unlikely Rebirth in Virginia

RICHMOND, Va. — Nine months ago, Democrats at every stratum in Virginia called on Gov. Ralph Northam to resign over a racist photograph on his medical school yearbook page.

Erskine, a medical assistant in this Richmond suburb, feels doubly motivated to vote in Virginia’s off-year elections Tuesday. “I want to keep Republicans in office and I want to keep Trump in office,” she said.

Allen Moser, a Democratic voter who also lives in the suburbs, said he thought the president had committed impeachable acts, and couldn’t understand why congressional Republicans stood behind him. “When Trump said he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and wouldn’t lose any votes, unfortunately that’s been shown to be true,” he said.

Moser, a retired sales manager, said he had never so strongly felt the urgency to cast a ballot. “What is happening in Washington is just very, very disturbing,” he said.

In Virginia, Kentucky and Mississippi on Tuesday, impassioned voters are set to deliver a final multistate report card on Trump before the 2020 presidential clash, at a time when an impeachment inquiry is galloping ahead in Washington and further splitting voters in a country that has rarely been so polarized.

Trump was headed to Kentucky on Monday to try to boost a Republican in a tight governor’s race, as he did in Mississippi on Friday, but he has pointedly skipped Virginia, where Republicans in contested districts are distancing themselves from him and the party.

With all 140 seats in the Virginia legislature on the ballot, the normally low-interest races are expected to send a national message from a state that has been a seismograph of voting quakes in the Trump era. A strong blue wave in statehouse races in 2017 and a Democratic gain of three congressional seats in the 2018 midterms reflected the national grassroots mobilization of women, as well as the suburban revolt against the president.

At the same time, Republican strength in rural Virginia, which has moved steadily away from Democrats since Barack Obama was elected president, demonstrated the country’s widening partisan gap.

Voters like Erskine, who live in red regions and are eager to stand with Trump, simply may be overwhelmed by a powerful tide flooding leftward in suburbia.

In Midlothian, a suburb in Chesterfield County that Trump carried in 2016, there are signs of change. Some are literal: A truck drove up and down the Midlothian Turnpike over the weekend with a sign reading, “Democrats Get Off Your (donkey picture) And Vote!”

“I used to align mostly with Republicans,” said Richard Livingston, who works in the county as a farrier, shoeing horses, and has served as a sheriff’s deputy. “But now I think things have gotten a little crazy.”

He called Trump unfit for office and said he was distressed by the president’s “hobnobbing with dictators.” He referred to details that have emerged in the impeachment inquiry that show the president holding up military aid to Ukraine in exchange for an investigation of a political rival.

“That to me sounds like somebody that’s not really a patriot,” Livingston said. “I just feel like if we support Republicans, we are supporting him. And I’m not going to do that. I’m going to vote Democratic from here on out until things get better.”

In another race set to be decided Tuesday, Gov. Matt Bevin of Kentucky, an unpopular Republican, has closely aligned himself with the president and fanned anger over impeachment in an attempt to outlast his Democratic challenger, Andy Beshear.

In Mississippi, the closest governor’s race in a generation matches Jim Hood, a Democrat who appeared in ads with his hunting dog and his pickup truck, against Tate Reeves, a Republican, for an open seat.

Yet Virginia is the main event, because partisan control of its legislature hangs in the balance. Republican majorities of 20-19 in the state Senate and 51-48 in the House of Delegates are threatened by demographic changes that have remade the state.

A transfer of power would enable Democrats, who already hold the governor’s mansion, to advance liberal priorities including gun restrictions and civil rights protections for women and LGBT people, and, most crucially, to draw new voting districts in 2021. Polling shows voters agree with Democrats on expanding background checks to all gun buyers, banning assault weapons and protecting abortion rights.

The prospect of a change in ideological direction has attracted a torrent of money on both sides, with 16 candidates raking in more than $1 million each and warring TV ads airing in the most competitive races. Outside interest groups are a big factor. For Democrats, those include Everytown for Gun Safety ($1.4 million) and EMILY’s List, which works to elect women who support abortion rights ($2.1 million). Republicans’ largest donor is the Republican State Leadership Committee ($3.2 million), which seeks to keep the drawing of voting districts in GOP hands.

Republicans last won a statewide election in Virginia in 2009. But the party’s grip on rural seats has only grown stronger as the country’s political divides have calcified in the Trump era. Trump is not on the ballot, but he loomed large behind almost every conversation with voters in recent days, even as they spoke of gun violence, health care and more local issues like the condition of roads. People expressed anger, anxiety, sadness, exhilaration and exhaustion.

Kathy Sherman, an antiques dealer and a Republican volunteer in Powhatan County, on the exurban fringes of Richmond, called the vote to endorse the impeachment inquiry last week “totally ridiculous” and predicted it would help her party.

“People will rebel, and they’ll vote,” she said.

But Ghazala Hashmi, a Democrat seeking a Republican-held state Senate seat based in Chesterfield County, said she had spoken to voters who were so upset with the president that she called him her “unspoken catalyst.”

“I’ve had many folks at the door express, in tears, how they are sickened by national politics, they’re sickened by the fact they cannot even talk to their own neighbors or among their own family members,” said Hashmi, a former college literature professor.

An immigrant brought to America as a child from India in 1969, Hashmi was roused to seek office by Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric and immigration restrictions. At a rally Saturday, she quoted Langston Hughes: “I, too, sing America.” Should she oust the Republican incumbent, Glen Sturtevant, she would be the first Muslim woman in the state Senate.

Both parties anticipate a record turnout for elections in which no statewide offices or the presidency are on the ballot.

“One of the things Donald Trump has done, for good or bad, has made people aware how important the stakes are when you show up and when you don’t show up,” said Schuyler VanValkenburg, a Democratic member of the House of Delegates elected in 2017 in Henrico County, which is north and east of Richmond and used to be a Republican stronghold. “That applies both to his base and our base.”

A poll last month of four competitive state Senate races by Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia, found 59% of likely voters were less inclined to vote for a candidate who supported Trump.

Quentin Kidd, director of the university’s Wason Center for Public Policy, which conducted the poll, predicted that the Democratic enthusiasm that led the party to a surprising gain of 15 seats in the House of Delegates in 2017 would likely be more closely matched this year by Republican enthusiasm. Two years ago, business-oriented Republicans were “embarrassed” by Trump, he said. “I think Republicans have gotten themselves around that. Trump is Trump. They’ve come to accept that.”

Scott Moore, a real estate investor in Henrico County, who said he loved “everything” Trump was doing, predicted Democrats’ timing on impeachment would backfire and motivate Republicans to turn out. “I think that’s on everybody’s mind,” he said, adding that he thought Democrats were “desperate to come up with something, anything, because they don’t have a candidate that can beat him right now.”

But Kim Young, a counselor for troubled youth who also lives in the county, said his vote for Democrats would be “100%” a message to Trump. “It’s just to let you know that your term is coming up and even if the impeachment doesn’t happen, I’m not going to stand by and listen to another four years,” he said.

Siobhan Dunnavant, a Republican state senator seeking reelection in Henrico County, in one of the state’s most competitive races, has distanced herself from the president. Her yard signs in rural areas identify her as a Republican, but the party label is omitted in suburbia.

Four years ago, in the pre-Trump era, Dunnavant, an obstetrician-gynecologist, won election by 20 points. Now she faces a tough challenge from Debra Rodman, a freshman member of the House of Delegates who was stirred to run in 2017 by opposition to Trump. Rodman said her internal polling showed a tied race.

Rodman was unknown two years ago. “This time around, I get to the door, they’re like, ‘Hey, honey, come down, Debra Rodman’s at our door,’ ” she said. “They’re really just motivated by what’s going on at the top, but also in the White House.”

The race has attracted more TV spending than any in the state, $2.1 million, much of it for negative ads: Rodman accuses her opponent of seeking to restrict abortion and opposing gun safety; Dunnavant attacks Rodman as a “radical” who favors “taxpayer-funded elective transgender surgeries.”

In an interview, Dunnavant said that state issues were top of mind for most voters, but that impeachment loomed in the background. “I do think people are saying, why are the Democrats putting us through this a year away from the election?” she said. “And why aren’t they getting anything done? And then they come back to the fact that in Virginia, we still do get stuff done.”

On Saturday, at a get-out-the-vote rally for Democrats in a leafy backyard in Midlothian, former Attorney General Eric Holder, making a stop on a statewide swing, sought to inspire a phalanx of door knockers.

He promised that in 2020 the party would send “the orange guy” packing. Before then, he said, Tuesday’s election would be seen nationally as a bellwether.

“I can guarantee that the news media will be looking at the election results,” he told the volunteers. “And they’ll be saying, well, this is an assessment of — fill in the blank — Trump, the Republicans, direction of the country, all that stuff.”

Virginia's Legislature Is Up for Grabs. It's a Referendum on Trump.

MIDLOTHIAN, Va. — Renae Erskine hates how disrespectful late-night comedians, the media and congressional Democrats are toward President Donald Trump. As a Trump supporter, she feels elites are disrespecting her, too. “We tolerated their choice, why can’t they tolerate ours?” she demanded.

But in the debate last Tuesday, Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota impressed her by calling out Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusets for offering voters a “pipe dream” rather than a plan to pay for universal health care.

And Friday, Kundel Vogel heard Klobuchar speak passionately in Davenport, Iowa, about one way of thinking about the 2020 race: the need to win support beyond the party base. “We have to remember that nearly 10% of Trump voters voted for Barack Obama,” Klobuchar said. “It’s our job to bring them in.”

“Seeing her in person just closed the deal for me,” said Kundel Vogel, 47, a human resources manager. “She understands what it’s going to take to win, which is to win over independents and former Trump voters.”

Riding a post-debate wave of attention, Klobuchar blitzed New Hampshire and Iowa last week, attracting new supporters and donors in those two states with early nominating contests. After months stuck in the polling doldrums, Klobuchar is getting a second look. But she faces several challenges, among them that she is arguing how to win general election swing states but has yet to show how she would win the nomination first.

The renewed interest comes as the Democratic field undergoes something of a shake-up. Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont are each jostling to consolidate the left wing, while the two Midwest moderates in the race, Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, are trying to break into the top tier of candidates after both enjoyed strong debate performances. Buttigieg is well ahead of Klobuchar in recent Iowa polls, adding to the pressure on her candidacy.

The competitive hunger on the campaign trail reflects a new urgency especially among moderate candidates and voters seeking an alternative to the ascendant Warren. Some donors and supporters of former Vice President Joe Biden suddenly seem up for grabs.

In an interview Saturday, Klobuchar drew an even sharper bead on Warren, comparing her avoidance of how to pay for “Medicare for All” with President Donald Trump’s habitual shirking of the truth.

“You’ve got a president that lies and doesn’t tell the truth, and I think it puts it on us to say, hey, there’s a different kind of president here where we’re going to be honest with you, look you in the eye, tell you the truth,” Klobuchar said. (Warren announced Sunday that she would release a plan to finance her Medicare for All plan in the coming weeks.)

For Klobuchar, the stakes couldn’t be higher. She has yet to qualify for the next debate in November. She has hit 3% support in only two qualifying polls, including one of Iowa voters released Monday morning; she needs to reach that mark in two more national or early state polls.

She is counting on a debate surge to make the cut.

“We are very hopeful that it will; we have a whole month to get it done,” Klobuchar said on her campaign bus as it headed to Waterloo, Iowa, on Day 2 of a three-day swing.

She packed the rooms where she appeared with 150 to 200 voters, who applauded warmly, even wildly at times, including when she said, “We have a huge amount of momentum coming out of that debate.”

But as a reality check in a state where Klobuchar drew only 3% in the latest Des Moines Register poll, Warren attracted more than 1,000 at an appearance Sunday night in Des Moines.

The Klobuchar campaign says it had its best 36 hours of fundraising after last Tuesday’s CNN/New York Times debate, pulling in $1.5 million in small-dollar donations. The money paid for a campaign bus wrapped in green with “Amy” in huge letters and for a five-figure digital ad campaign in Iowa. (She began her first TV ad here in early October.) Still, her cash on hand is tight: As of this month, she had $3.7 million, putting her eighth in the field.

She told Iowans that “many, many, many, many times” the ultimate nominee was not the candidate leading in polls at this point, and she offered examples: Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama.

On Friday, more Iowans filled in cards at her events committing to caucus for Klobuchar than any day of her candidacy.

Still, it is far from certain that post-debate momentum alone will make her a viable candidate. If she fails to make the next debates, she said, she will run at least through the Iowa caucuses Feb. 3. When asked how high a finish she would need to continue, she offered only a tight-lipped chuckle.

She did not hint at any strategy shift to create a breakthrough. She believes her best argument to be the nominee is that she is the most electable, as a heartland senator with proven appeal to swing voters, as shown in her reelection to a third term in 2018 when she carried Minnesota regions that Trump had won by double digits.

Two voters who committed Saturday to caucus for Klobuchar, Tom and Dorinda Pounds, had watched earlier debates torn among her, Buttigieg and Biden.

“This debate, she finally got a chance to talk, and the way she handled herself really made a big difference,” Tom Pounds, a retired county administrator, said at a Klobuchar appearance in Waterloo.

During the debate, in addition to calling out Warren, Klobuchar also attacked Trump more aggressively than Biden did. Klobuchar’s newfound readiness to swing a saber appealed to many who came out to hear her.

“With each candidate, I’m thinking how are they going to be on the debate stage against Trump, and I think she will handle herself well,” said Becky Langdon, a freelance writer in Davenport, who is on the fence about who to support. “She showed some passion and wanting to fight for it.”

Klobuchar was eager to contrast herself with Buttigieg over the weekend, who has a far bigger campaign war chest and more committed supporters in Iowa and New Hampshire.

“I am the one who has won statewide,” she said, referring to Buttigieg’s defeat in a 2010 race for Indiana treasurer.

On Sunday in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Klobuchar aimed a poison dart at Buttigieg over a 2018 tweet of his in support of a Medicare for All bill.

Buttigieg had just told host Jake Tapper on the same broadcast that he later gave up backing Medicare for All after politicians concluded that it meant eliminating all private insurance.

Klobuchar was unrelenting. “The bill has been very clear from the beginning,” she said. “On Page 8 it says it will dismantle our current insurance system. It says 149 million people will be kicked off their current insurance.”

On the stump, Klobuchar, 59, presents herself as the same hardworking, results-driven politician as she was when she won her first election in fourth grade, with the now-discarded slogan “All the way with Amy K.”

She name-checks Republicans she teamed up with on more than 100 bills that passed the Senate. She emphasizes her priorities of strengthening election security, doubling Pell Grants for college students (but not free college for all) and lowering medical costs through a public option.

All her plans include proposals to pay for them, she notes, a point of pride that reflects a fiscal responsibility that she acquired from her family.

“I don’t come from money,” Klobuchar tells voters, recalling her mother who taught second grade until she was 70 and her newspaperman father who battled alcoholism.

While the Democratic base is fired up, Klobuchar argues that the 2020 nominee must carry the battleground states of the Midwest that voted for Trump.

In Waterloo, speaking at a brew pub, she surmised there were people in the crowd who voted for Trump.

“It’s important for us as a party to not shut everyone out, to bring them with us, to bring back some of those conservative Democrats who voted for him or stayed home,” she said. “To bring back some of our base, our liberal Democrats who were disenchanted.”

A voter named Bob, whose written question was read out to Klobuchar, put his finger on a core dilemma for a candidate whose is running on a message about winning the heartland.

“We need a moderate candidate to beat Trump,” Bob asked. “How will you get through the primary?”

Klobuchar answered that she considers herself “a proven progressive,” citing her liberal views on abortion, immigration and the environment.

But rather than answering Bob in depth, she pivoted to talk about the need for a civil tone in politics.

Back on her campaign bus, she made the case more forcefully that someone with a profile like herself — rather than Warren or Sanders — is best positioned to win 2020 swing states. She cited the example of the 2018 midterms, when Democrats flipped governorships in Wisconsin and Michigan and gained a House majority by appealing to independents and disaffected Republicans in the suburbs.

“I just keep going back to 2018 because I have the facts on my side,” she said. “Everyone united behind the candidate, but tell me in those swing House districts, how many of them supported Medicare for All?”

In Iowa, Amy Klobuchar Gets a Second Look After Debate

MASON CITY, Iowa — Before last week, Beth Kundel Vogel was undecided when it came to the Democratic presidential hopefuls.

But Buttigieg also undertook a delicate task before the African Methodist Episcopal worshippers. As a gay, married man addressing a denomination that does not allow same-sex marriage rites, he tried to seek common ground over being members of minority groups whose civil rights have come under attack. It was a nod to his sexuality, following the disclosure last week that the Buttigieg campaign held focus groups that found some black voters in South Carolina were uncomfortable with a gay man as president.

“All of us in different ways have been led to question whether we belong,” Buttigieg told the pews of black worshippers. “And I know what it is to look on the news and see your rights up for debate. All of us must extend a hand to one another. Because I also know what it is to find acceptance where you least expect it.”

As Buttigieg increasingly presents himself to Democrats as a younger, moderate alternative to former Vice President Joe Biden, he is struggling badly to compete against one of Biden’s strengths: deep connections to black voters. Nowhere is that problem greater than in South Carolina, which votes fourth in the Democratic nomination fight in February and is the first state where black voters are decisive — a critical test that could be a prologue for primaries in March, when African Americans will also be influential.

A Monmouth University poll of Democratic likely primary voters in South Carolina released last week found Buttigieg at 3% overall, with just 1% support from African Americans.

There are many reasons for Buttigieg’s low standing among black voters, the foremost being that he is little-known to many of them. He is the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who still has a relatively low national profile — including on civil rights and issues of race — and focused much of this year building support among liberals, Democratic donors and voters in the predominantly white states of Iowa and New Hampshire.

But after attracting overwhelmingly white audiences to his campaign events in South Carolina, despite blacks making up a majority of Democrats in the state, the Buttigieg campaign held focus groups here, which suggested “being gay was a barrier” for him, according to an internal campaign memo that surfaced last week. (His campaign said they did not leak the memo.)

Many of the 24 uncommitted black voters in the groups, men and women ages 25 to 65, were deeply uncomfortable discussing Buttigieg’s sexual orientation, the memo said, adding that “they felt the mayor was ‘flaunting’ his sexuality by the very mention of having a husband.”

In interviews this weekend, black Democratic Party officials in South Carolina largely said that Buttigieg’s sexuality was not a concern to them, while voters expressed more divergent views. Yet most party leaders and voters agreed that being a married gay man would cause some discomfort with religious or conservative black Democrats.

Buttigieg’s sexuality may be a factor with religious and white conservative voters as well, but black Democrats are a focal point because they were critical to Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and others winning the party nomination in recent years.

“The biggest issue for him is he’s married to a man,” said Phyllis Harris-Drakeford, Democratic chairwoman of Kershaw County, South Carolina. “I have no problem with that: You love who you want to love, and you have the freedom in this country to do that. But in the South in particular, that’s not well favored.”

As part of Buttigieg’s effort to connect with African Americans this weekend, the mayor hosted a homecoming tailgate cookout Saturday at Allen University, a historically black campus in Columbia, South Carolina.

Gabriel Greene, a long-distance truck driver whose son was a football prospect, said he had not heard of Buttigieg. As a reporter ticked off some details about him — 37 years old, a mayor, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, married to a man — Greene interrupted.

“You say he’s married to a man?” he said. “He lost my vote. I believe in Adam and Even, not Adam and Steve.’’

In the crowd of alumni, students and parents at the university, which was founded by the African Methodist Episcopal Church, there were others who felt the same as Greene did, but also many who did not.

“I was not called to judge people; I was just called to love people,” said Leon Maxwell, an Allen alumnus, who is pastor of St. Peters AME Church in Walterboro, South Carolina.

Maxwell said that as an AME pastor, he was not allowed to perform same-sex marriages but that when it came to picking a presidential nominee, he was interested in polices, not “what this person does in their bedroom.”

“All I want to know is that we have someone who is going to try to bring people together rather than tear people apart,” he said.

At a barbecue pit staffed by older Allen alumni, Boston McClean, a retired real estate appraiser, said he could not support a gay presidential candidate because “I’m a Christian.”

But a fellow griller, Charlie Hudson, said he didn’t think Buttigieg “should be judged any different than anybody else.”

“The younger generation is kind of bringing us along to the fact there was misplaced judgment of other people," said Hudson, who is retired from the Department of Justice.

David Axelrod, the longtime Democratic strategist who was a top adviser to President Barack Obama, said in an interview that Buttigieg’s sexual identity is “a real issue for him,” but one born of success. Having risen to third in Iowa polling, a strong finish there could vault him into a position to challenge Biden for the moderate Democratic vote. But once the race turns from Iowa and New Hampshire, which are more than 90% white, to South Carolina on Feb. 29, Buttigieg will confront a wall, Axelrod said. “You can’t be the nominee of the Democratic Party and not engender support among African Americans.

“There has been historical resistance within elements of the African American community to homosexuality," Axelrod said. “We saw that in the debate over gay marriage, where the community was the least accepting of same-sex marriage among Democratic constituencies.”

Whereas Buttigieg’s support thus far has come from college-educated white liberals, 74% of blacks in South Carolina call themselves conservative or moderate politically, and 81% said religion is very important, with 64% reading Scripture weekly, according to the Pew Research Center.

Buttigieg, in an interview Saturday, said he was not concerned that being gay would substantially hurt him in the long term with voters black or white.

“In South Bend, people got over it," he said, referring to his landslide reelection as mayor after he publicly acknowledged he was gay. “I think people will get over it elsewhere, too. No gain is permanent in society, but moving away from prejudice has been a pretty strong one-way street.”

Buttigieg also said his campaign did not leak the memo, rebutting speculation that his operatives might have done so as an explanation for his failure to gain much support from black voters.

At a rally in Rock Hill on Saturday, Buttigieg drew more than 1,500, a crowd that sprung to its feet and whooped when an attendee asked if America was ready for such a young president.

But in the sea of supporters, there were very few black faces.

“I think we’ve got our work cut out for us, and we know what we have to do,” Buttigieg said afterward. “I think the majority of black voters here have no opinion of me at all, which means we’ve got to make sure that we get not just our message but my face out there, and that’ll continue to drive our strategy.”

The Buttigieg campaign was understaffed in South Carolina when it held its black focus groups over the summer. Today it has four field offices, 34 staff members and a black state director. The Monmouth poll last week showed 51% of likely South Carolina primary voters had no opinion of Buttigieg or hadn’t heard of him, suggesting room to grow his support.

Bakari Sellers, a former South Carolina state representative, pushed back on the notion that African Americans are less accepting of gay equality than other people.

“I don’t believe black voters are more homophobic than any other group, and I hate that narrative,” said Sellers, who is black.

He said Buttigieg’s struggles to win black support were explained by his lack of prominent African American endorsements and the fact he has engaged black voters superficially, like many white candidates do. “Nobody at the barbershop” knows who Buttigieg is, he said. “You’ve got to get out in these communities, have some connection with this struggle and why we just won’t throw our votes away.”

Polling suggests there are differences between how blacks and whites view homosexuality.

While support for same-sex marriage has grown broadly among all Americans over the past 15 years, black support, at 51%, lags the 62% of whites who support same-sex marriage, according to Pew.

The divisions are deeper when church affiliation and race are factored in. Nationally, fewer than 5 in 10 black Protestants support same-sex marriage, compared with roughly two-thirds of white mainline Protestants and white Catholics, according to a 2018 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute.

White evangelicals, largely a Republican voting bloc, are the least supportive of same-sex marriage: Only 34% back it.

Tameika Isaac Devine, a black City Council member in Columbia, said younger African Americans were more likely to embrace a gay candidate. Yet more than half of the state’s black voters are over 45, presenting another challenge for Buttigieg.

“When you look at who’s going to vote,” she said, “the majority of African Americans are going to be older people.”

As Pete Buttigieg Courts Black Voters, His Sexuality Is a Hurdle for Some

ROCK HILL, S.C. — Addressing a conference of African American church congregations in this vote-rich city, Pete Buttigieg quoted scripture Sunday morning and extolled his “Douglass Plan” to combat racial inequities in the U.S., one of several attempts this weekend to confront his strikingly low support among black voters.

1. Ohio is a historically accurate presidential predictor.

The state is typically a reliable weather vane on election night: It has voted for the eventual presidential winner every time since 1944 except once, in 1960, when Ohioans chose Richard Nixon over John F. Kennedy. In 2004, Ohio provided the Electoral College votes that put President George W. Bush over the top.

2. Many strategists no longer consider it a battleground state.

In 2016, Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton by a blowout 8 points in Ohio — more than in Arizona, North Carolina and Georgia — leading many strategists to remove the state from the map of presidential battlegrounds. Ohio Democrats, however, are not yet willing to admit they live in a red state, pointing to last year’s midterm elections, where...

3. Sherrod Brown easily won reelection as a progressive.

Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, won 53.4% of the vote in 2018, running a campaign that emphasized working-class economic issues.

4. And Democrats flipped six seats in the statehouse last year.

Democrats in 2018 flipped six seats in the statehouse from red to blue, including three in the Columbus suburbs, reflecting a national pendulum swing away from Trump by white college-educated independents and Republican women.

5. Republicans have a lot of power statewide.

On the other hand, Republicans won every state constitutional office in 2018 from governor on down, in a year when Democrats captured top offices in other northern industrial states including Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

6. Trump’s approval rating in Ohio is no better than the national average.

Trump’s approval rating in the state, now at 43%, is not much better than the national average of 42% and worse than in “safe” red states. A recent survey by Emerson Polling found that 54% of women in the state disapprove of Trump. Former Vice President Joe Biden and Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders all outpolled Trump in head-to-head matchups. Forty-seven percent of Ohio voters support impeachment, the survey found.

7. Trump promised to reverse the decline in manufacturing jobs, but he hasn’t.

The long-term decline of manufacturing, which fueled Trump’s victory in Ohio, has continued, but the state’s transition to a service economy has salved some wounds. General Motors, once Ohio’s largest employer, today ranks 72nd, while the Cleveland Clinic is No. 1, with Walmart close behind.

8. The closing of a General Motors plant had major repercussions.

The idling of a GM factory near Youngstown this year cost thousands of jobs, years after Trump visited, promising that the jobs were “all coming back.” But the closure may not sour all the rank-and-file union autoworkers who voted for him. Some white working-class voters are determined “to go down with the ship with him,” a union official told The Times recently.

9. Democrats are losing blue-collar voters.

Although black voter turnout in Ohio declined by 7.5 percentage points from 2012 to 2016, according to one analysis of voting data, that does not come close to accounting for Clinton’s loss there. Instead, Trump won white voters in Ohio by a much larger margin than the 2012 Republican nominee, Mitt Romney.

The political bottom line: Democrats in Ohio, as elsewhere, are winning over suburbanites while losing white blue-collar voters in places like northeast Ohio. Many strategists consider it a long-term trade-off that will outlast the Trump era.

10. The site of the debate is turning blue.

Westerville, with above average family income, education levels and home prices, is the home of former Gov. John Kasich, a Republican who ran in the 2016 presidential primary, but the community is trending blue. It voted for Romney in 2012 but Clinton in 2016. There was a 29-point swing toward the Democrats between 2016 and 2018 in Senate and House races, according to an analysis by Cleveland.com.

11. Columbus is on the rise.

Columbus, with an economy anchored by banking, insurance and higher education, fits the profile of a Sun Belt city plopped down in the Midwest: It is one of the 15 fastest-growing metropolises in the country, and the only one on the list in the Midwest.

12. And one more thing...

Columbus is home to The Ohio State University. Do not omit the article. And on Big 10 football game days, Michigan is pronounced “the state up north.”

12 Things to Know About Ohio Before 12 Candidates Debate There

As the 2020 Democratic candidates descend Tuesday on Westerville, Ohio, a northern suburb of Columbus, for the fourth presidential debate, here are 12 fast facts about politics and the economy in the Buckeye State that could help shape the upcoming election.

“Is this the same type of situation as with AOC?” he asked.

Indeed, there are similarities between Harper, 36, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., whose felling of a powerful House incumbent in 2018 was a shock alert to national Democrats of a populist wave.

Harper announced this past week that in just three months as a first-time candidate, she had raised an impressive $323,000, riding the endorsement of Justice Democrats, the same anti-establishment progressive group that backed Ocasio-Cortez.

Harper is running against Rep. Joyce Beatty, 69, who is in her fourth term representing Ohio’s 3rd District. Campaigning for a guaranteed income, reparations for African Americans and other policies designed to end “economic segregation,” Harper, a former senior adviser at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, sees no need to spend years ascending the rungs of local politics. “The world is on fire and we need a lot to get done,” she told Copeland in the barbershop.

The dynamic in this Ohio congressional race — which is being echoed in House races across the country where grassroots progressives have declared civil war on establishment Democrats — will be on display in the party’s 2020 presidential debate Tuesday night, which will take place in a Columbus suburb partly in Beatty’s district.

As Democrats wrestle over who would be their best nominee to defeat President Donald Trump, the energy and momentum is with the progressive populism of Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont. But there will be several longtime Democratic officeholders onstage who are also committed to liberal policy goals like expanding health care, strengthening gun control laws and raising taxes on Wall Street and the wealthy.

Like Harper and Beatty, the Democratic presidential candidates and others in the party are now debating just how much progressive change to push for, and what’s possible to achieve.

Meanwhile, in House primary races from New York to Illinois to Texas, progressive primary challengers like Harper have reported strong fundraising results while drawing the ire of the Democratic establishment.

“I think it’s hard when someone who has been registered for seven or eight months in the district says they know what the people want,” Beatty said in a jab at Harper, a Columbus native who moved back to the city in December after a career in New York and Washington.

Harper is campaigning by attending as many community events as possible, and by old-fashioned neighborhood canvassing. There are some signs her strategy is working. She said she had raised money from nearly every ZIP code in her district. (Beatty, who has not reported third-quarter fundraising, had $1.3 million cash on hand as of July.)

Harper has focused on residents left out of the recent growth of Columbus — now Ohio’s most dynamic city, surpassing Cleveland — and the gentrification that has followed.

A wave of new apartment blocks, craft breweries and espresso shops radiating from downtown has pushed out poor residents, many of them black. Harper’s website calls Columbus the second most economically segregated city in the country.

In the barbershop, Copeland, the retired principal, said he was a personal friend of Beatty from “way back,” but that would not cement his vote.

“We’re in a bad state of affairs,” he said, referring to local and national events. “When we’re looking at elections and who we’re going to be sending to Congress and that sort of thing, we’re probably in a position where good friends and all that kind of stuff is going to go by the wayside.”

Aaron Pickrell, a Democratic strategist in Columbus, predicted Beatty would take Harper seriously, but added that he did not see her as a vulnerable incumbent who had lost touch with voters.

COLUMBUS, Ohio — As Morgan Harper campaigned at the Prestige Cuts &amp; Styles barbershop here, Joe Copeland, a retired school principal, said he had never heard of the young woman mounting an insurgent primary challenge of a Democratic member of Congress. But he thought of a comparison.

Trip Gabriel

Articles written by the author

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