Opinion | Virginia state Senate race is the first skirmish of 2024

Predictions are that the 24th Senate district could be the tightest contest in Virginia’s General Assembly elections on Tuesday. President Biden won it by about three percentage points in 2020. Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin carried it in 2021 by about the same margin. And it split nearly evenly in last year’s congressional election. “One source involved in this year’s campaigns told us the district could be decided by double-digits — in terms of actual raw votes, not percentage margin, that is,” analysts J. Miles Coleman and Jackson Hamilton wrote in Sabato’s Crystal Ball, the authoritative political tipsheet run by the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.

Adding to the uncertainty is the fact that the last round of redistricting, conducted by an independent commission, took away about one-third of Mason’s Democratic precincts and replaced them with ones that lean Republican. “We’ve known since the day this district was drawn, this would be a 50-50 race,” he said.

As one Democratic activist put it to me, this race is likely to be the “critical tipping point” — determining whether Youngkin and his fellow Republicans pick up the two seats they need to take a majority of the 40-member Virginia Senate, and with it, trifecta control of all the levers of government in Richmond. That is, unless Democrats do well enough to flip the 100-member House of Delegates, where Republicans currently hold a 50-46 majority.

If Republicans succeed, it will burnish Youngkin’s national reputation and potentially position him for a presidential run, more likely in 2028 than as a late entry in 2024.

A victory would also provide a template for Republicans across the country. Politically, the battleground districts of Virginia are not all that different from the suburbs around Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Phoenix and Atlanta, “where the congressional, Senate and presidential races will be decided in 2024,” noted Dave Rexrode, Youngkin’s senior political adviser. Rexrode also runs the governor’s political action committee — which has raised upward of $26 million over the past two years.

Across Virginia, abortion has become the overriding issue on the airwaves for the Democrats, highlighted in more than 40 percent of their ads. Republicans are talking about it in only 3 percent of theirs, according to the tracking firm AdImpact. But Mason noted: “People bring it up to me. I don’t have to lead with it in a lot of places.”

That is because Virginia is the last Southern state where the procedure has remained widely available after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. Abortion in Virginia is legal up to 26 weeks of gestation.

Youngkin has proposed banning it after 15 weeks, with exceptions in cases of rape, incest and where the life of the pregnant woman is threatened. (More than 93 percent of abortions take place at or before 13 weeks, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.)

So, the Virginia election is being watched by both parties as a signal of whether abortion will be the 2024 silver bullet that many Democrats are hoping for, or whether Youngkin has created a safe middle ground for Republicans on the issue.

Diggs supports the governor’s proposal, which he says is “another example of Republicans being able to bring people together,” and vows not to go any further toward restricting abortion. “Some people are going to vote on the issue alone, and if we don’t stick to our promise on that, we don’t deserve” a victory, he told me.

But, as might be expected of someone who served more than two decades as a sheriff, Diggs would rather talk about crime and public safety — which have been common themes of Republicans across the state….