VA-SD18: In primary between legendary Virginia Democrats, 'the loser goes home'
CHESAPEAKE, Va. — He was one of 15 children raised in a house with no plumbing, nearly deaf and beset by a profound speech impediment. She, a single mother by the age of 14.
State Sens. Lionell Spruill Sr. (D-Chesapeake) and L. Louise Lucas (D-Portsmouth) overcame the longest of odds in segregated southeastern Virginia to reach the state Capitol a generation ago. But on June 20, one of these veteran Black lawmakers will be ousted in a primary contest set up by a court-ordered Senate map that lumped them into a single district.
Neither near-octogenarian is going without a fight.
“Like ‘Thelma & Louise,’” House Minority Leader Don L. Scott Jr. (D-Portsmouth) says of the pair of regional power brokers who’ve wound up on a perilous adventure. Only this is no buddy movie. It’ll end with just one going over the cliff.
As billboards, mailers and scorched-earth TV ads flood this deep-blue corner of Tidewater, Virginia Democrats have all but gone into hiding. Just one sitting senator — Janet D. Howell of Fairfax County, who is retiring and endorsed Lucas last month — has publicly taken sides in a race that pits statewide political celebrity against grass-roots brawn, a salty firecracker with 90,000 Twitter followers against a Bible quoter with the stamina to shepherd statewide candidates through a dozen or more Black churches on any given Sunday.
Lucas, whose public profile as a flame-throwing champion of liberal values has only risen under Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R), has cast her victory as a coup for the Hampton Roads region — and a just reward for all the Black female voters whom she says her party sometimes takes for granted. Spruill, a more muted social conservative inclined to wheel and deal across the aisle, calls a win for him a validation of his more pragmatic brand of politics.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/06/05/louise-lucas-lionell-spruill-primary/
