Story by Chris Graham 

If any of the four moderate-conservative Republican senators being challenged for their party nominations was thought to be vulnerable, it was Emmett Hanger.

Go figure, then, that Hanger, R-Mount Solon, was the one incumbent who didn’t have to sweat much the night of the June 12 primaries.

“It’s extremely gratifying to be in this position,” says Hanger, who beat back the challenge of staunch-conservative Rockbridge County businessman Scott Sayre in last month’s primary in the 24th Senate District, which represents a wide swath of the Central Shenandoah Valley and a sliver of Central Virginia.

Hanger ended up receiving 53 percent of the nearly 15,000 votes cast in the 24th - for a margin of victory of 866 votes.

Brandon Bell in the 22nd District and Marty Williams in the First District weren’t so lucky. Bell lost to former Roanoke mayor Ralph Smith by a razor-thin 75-vote margin in the 22nd, which includes Roanoke, and Williams lost by a surprisingly significant 758-vote margin to conservative challenger Tricia Stall in the First, which is located in the bustling Newport News area

Perhaps even more surprising was the narrow victory posted by Senate Majority Leader Walter Stosch in the 12th District. Stosch, who spent more than $800,000 on his renomination effort, defeated challenger Joe Blackburn by 269 votes of the nearly 17,000 votes cast in that party primary.

It had appeared before the primaries that all four would sail through - and that the fledgling intraparty revolution that has been waged by conservatives in recent years would be dealt a final death blow.

That conventional wisdom has since changed.

“The struggle within the Republican Party is really intensifying right now - and I think the antitax wing of the Republican Party is really taking the moderate wing of the Republican Party to task right now,” Christopher Newport University political-science professor Quentin Kidd says.

The door is now open for Democrats to try to take advantage. The party has candidates running against Stall, Smith and Hanger in November - with the goal of trying to take advantage of the obvious open split within the GOP ranks.

“There’s no question - people sense the confidence,” says Bath County Sen. Creigh Deeds, the architect of the Senate Democrat strategy for the 2007 elections.

“For the first time probably in my lifetime, Democrats are on the offensive in these legislative races - and people see that, people sense the confidence, people sense that the candidates that we’ve recruited are not just throwaway candidates, they’re substantial people who have contributed to their communities, who are going to run decent campaigns and have a real shot,” Deeds says.

“In the past, too much of Virginia has been viewed as territory that we couldn’t compete in - that Democrats couldn’t compete in - because tradition had dictated that Republicans just win in some areas, like the Valley, for example. But people all over Virginia, all over this country, deserve representation - and my view is that Democrats do a better job of providing that representation. And we’re not going to cede one square inch of territory. We’re going to work, we’re going to fight, and we’re going to win,” Deeds says.

Filed under: 6-July 2007 Issue