Northern Virginia shifts to the left with Democratic primary victories

For years, the political order among Northern Virginia Democrats seemed to follow a few rules: The candidates who won most elections were older and White. They generally cast a friendly eye toward business. And most of all, they did not hesitate to strike deals across the aisle, fashioning themselves as political moderates who stuck to the “Virginia Way.”

Saddam Azlan Salim checks off none of those boxes.

An immigrant who left Bangladesh as a boy for Falls Church, the 33-year-old went on the offensive on the campaign trail ahead of last week’s primary about gun control, abortion and transgender rights. The maverick longtime lawmaker he challenged, state Sen. Chap Petersen (Fairfax City), outspent him by a factor of nearly 6 to 1.

Yet Salim handily unseated Petersen in one of the biggest surprises of the primary election — the most telling example of how the commonwealth’s D.C. suburbs have taken a decisive step away from the region’s more centrist past.

“The progressive wing of the party had a very good evening,” said Mark Rozell, dean of George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government.

Voters “don’t want the old-line moderates working within the system, wheeling and dealing and easing and compromising,” he added. “They want liberal fighters who are going to fight the big fight and stick it to the governor as much as possible.”

That was true in another Fairfax state Senate matchup, where school board member Stella Pekarsky bested another long-timer, incumbent George L. Barker, whom she had called “inconsistent” on gun control and too quiet on abortion. Further east, former state delegate Jennifer Carroll Foy won a new district after criticizing her opponent, onetime delegate Hala S. Ayala, for taking money from politically powerful Dominion Energy.

State Senate veterans face stiff primary challenges in Virginia

And lower on the ballot, three commonwealth’s attorneys — top prosecutors in Arlington, Fairfax and Loudoun counties elected in 2019 on promises to reduce incarceration — easily fended off primary opponents who had tried to link the incumbents to rising crime.

Some of the differences between candidates were more stylistic than ideological. In the state Senate races in particular, deeper community ties may have boosted the challengers after a court-supervised redistricting process scrambled election maps and put incumbents in largely unfamiliar territory.

But Salim, who said even he was taken aback by his victory, said the implications for the Virginia Democratic Party were clear: As the region has changed on hot-button social issues, some incumbents have not changed with it.

“It’s sending a message that we need somebody to pay attention. If you’re not doing a good job, we are going to replace you,” he said over the phone Wednesday, as he was rushing to the western part of the state for Democratic lawmakers’ retreat, to which he’d been invited only after his upset victory.

“You can get Democrats you can rely on,” he added, rather than unpredictable representatives who “are going to vote one way or another depending on what day it is.”

The party’s shift was notable enough to prompt jeers from Republicans, who said incumbents had lost to the “radical progressive left” and would end up losing in the general election. (The winning left-wing candidates, all in blue districts, are not expected to face serious challenges in November.)

It also prompted some Democrats within the party to fret that the ouster of Barker and Petersen — combined with a wave of retirements by other longtime, well-connected Northern Virginia state senators — might prompt the region to lose its sizable clout in the chamber.

But at the polls, it seems, most voters did not seem particularly worried about those concerns.

“Democratic voters increasingly want candidates who are younger, more diverse, exciting and committed to the core policy issues that drive the progressive agenda,” Rozell said. “That’s very much a big part of the explanation of what happened.”

An underdog victory

There were notable exceptions to the region’s leftward shift.

State Sen. David W. Marsden (Fairfax) easily won his primary against a left-wing challenger less than half his age, while Del. Suhas Subramanyam (Loudoun) received the nomination for a state Senate seat against a former lawmaker who is perhaps best known for interrupting a speech by former president Donald Trump.

But Salim’s seven-point victory was enough of a surprise that on Wednesday morning, the Fairfax County Democratic Committee hit send on a congratulatory news release that erroneously included Petersen among the night’s winners. (The error was corrected later that morning, and the committee’s executive director, Dominic Thompson, said they’d been focused on other races.)

The upset win was the culmination of long-running frustrations that several area Democratic activists had with Petersen, a bow-tie-clad politician who has been a fixture in Fairfax City since his days as high school class president.

Descended from men who fought for the Confederacy as well as a woman who pushed for school integration, Petersen marched to his own drummer since he was first elected to the Senate in 2007, liberal on some issues, conservative on others.

In this year’s General Assembly session, he was the Democrat least likely to vote in step with the bulk of his caucus, joining them just 75 percent of the time, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Virginia Public Access Project.

“I’ve always had some Democratic activists who disagreed with me over a vote or two,” he said, but they’d always managed to “work it out over a beer.”

Yet party insiders say Petersen’s stances on guns — and during the pandemic, his push to reopen schools and make masks optional — increasingly angered his fellow Democrats.

Starting in June 2020, he represented two businesses suing then-Gov. Ralph Northam (D) to loosen crowd limits as a private attorney. And as the pandemic stretched into its second year, Petersen joined a handful of Democrats in February 2021 supporting a bill requiring that schools begin offering in-person teaching.

Petersen stood by those votes as a way to get kids “back to normal,” even as he pushed back on the notion that he was as conservative as Salim claimed, noting his top ratings from abortion and LGBTQ+ rights groups and his support for all but one of the gun rights bills Democrats passed in 2020.

“Reopening the schools and ending the mask mandate were probably my two biggest achievements,” he said. “I’ll let history be the judge if it was the right thing to do. But I wouldn’t change it.”

But liberal activists seemed to reach a tipping point.

“He became more and more conservative and more apart from my views,” said Judy Fisher, a retired teacher and gun-control activist who said she had long been hoping for a challenger to Petersen.

No matter that she had taught the future senator in eighth-grade math. She found a viable alternative in Salim. “Every time I heard him speak,” she said of the challenger, “I was just more and more impressed.”

Salim, a financial manager involved in local Democratic politics, had also been growing frustrated with the man who might become his representative in Richmond. He, too, had been a high school class president in Falls Church, where he became a well-known figure in the area’s political scene.

Except parts of his story read wildly differently: After his family was evicted and became homeless when he was a child, Salim said, his father worked his way up at a popular Indian restaurant in Falls Church city from dishwasher to head chef.

As Petersen tried to push back on pandemic shutdowns, Salim watched from afar as the coronavirus took the lives of several family members still in Bangladesh. Once he started campaigning, he joined Fisher each week at monthly vigils outside the National Rifle Association’s headquarters, just outside Fairfax City.

Several Democrats had expressed interest in taking on the longtime senator. “There was an appetite, definitely, to have new leadership in the Democratic Party,” said Erika Yalowitz, who also announced a bid to challenge Petersen in February before dropping out to endorse Salim’s candidacy.

Party committee leaders officially kept their distance from the race. But some privately encouraged others to back Salim, a quiet movement behind the political newcomer that Petersen apparently underestimated.

Salim’s backers included gun-control groups, unions and several area lawmakers, including Del. Eileen Filler-Corn (D-Fairfax), the former House speaker and a potential gubernatorial candidate in 2025. He performed particularly well on his home turf in Falls Church and other precincts inside or along the Beltway, all new territory for Petersen.

His campaign tried to tap into Fairfax’s fast-growing Muslim and Asian communities, where he had made a name through his leadership of a Biden campaign group for South Asians. (Petersen, whose wife is Korean, said he had always maintained ties to those groups. “His base was White liberals,” he said of Salim.)

But mostly, Salim said, his campaign went directly to voters in Petersen’s newer turf and pointed to his record on the issues. Do you want him to represent you, they would ask, or do you want someone new?

A loss in clout?

The victories this primary cycle have drawn more than a few comparisons to the elections of 2017, when Democrats nearly flipped control of a chamber that Republicans had long dominated.

A young, diverse set of mostly first-time candidates managed to oust 15 Republican incumbents that year, largely propelled by anti-Trump energy in exurbs like Prince William County. Their wins slashed the Republicans’ 66-34 majority to a mere 51-49 edge.

Two years later, Democrats flipped the House and Senate, giving the party full control of state government for the first time in a generation.

In closer-in suburbs that year, liberal candidates lined up to challenge four centrist stalwarts of the General Assembly. Meanwhile, a group of self-labeled “progressive prosecutors” ran primary bids against Democratic incumbents in those offices, drawing tons of outside money as they vowed to approach criminal justice with more-liberal values.

The liberal prosecutors won. But none of the challengers running for the General Assembly did, and most did not even crack 40 percent.

Four years later, the liberal victories in the General Assembly primaries could reduce the regional power of Northern Virginia, which has long been the state’s political center for Democrats.

Barker served as co-chair of the powerful Senate Finance and Appropriations Committee — which helps decide how state dollars get spent — and was poised to again play some kind of leadership role there had he won. Pekarsky, a Fairfax County School Board member, will have to rise through the ranks of any committee she sits on before she can wield that kind of influence.

“It’s going to cost our region a lot of money, no question about it,” outgoing Senate Majority Leader Richard L. Saslaw (D-Fairfax) said. “When you have somebody that senior on the money committees, you can’t afford to lose them.”

But Pekarsky, the daughter of Greek immigrants, a former teacher and a mom of six, said that was an argument that is “often used by people when they don’t want to see change.

“We should be applauding the fact that we have candidates this time around that reflect their communities and have deep roots in those communities,” she said. “Experience is great. Guess what? I have experience, too.”

Saslaw predicted that most of the liberal newcomers would gravitate toward the center out of necessity, given the realities of divided government. (Even if Democrats flip the House, Virginia’s current Republican governor serves through January 2026.)

“People, as time goes on, tend to drift back toward the middle,” said Saslaw, who is preparing to leave the Senate in January after 48 years as a state legislator.

“They realize that you’re going to have to do this, you’re going to have to make compromises, or you’re not going to be very successful,” he added. “You can say, ‘I’m not going to deviate one bit,’ and then you get nowhere, you know?”

Rozell, the political scientist, said the loss of the centrists would nonetheless be palpable. He compared it to the prospect of maverick Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) departing from Congress.

“People say, ‘Who’s the Joe Manchin of Virginia politics. Is it Chap Petersen or Joe Morrissey?’ ” he said, referring to the Richmond-area state senator who was trounced by a left-wing candidate on Tuesday.

Both, he noted, were now on their way out.

Vozzella reported from Richmond.

correction

A previous version of this article incorrectly referred to Dominic Thompson as the chair of the Fairfax County Democratic Committee. He is the executive director. The article has been corrected.

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Fernande Dalal

Update: 2024-08-25

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