RICHMOND, Va. — On a December afternoon, Winsome Sears, Virginia’s lieutenant governor-elect, stood at the podium in the State Senate chamber where she will soon preside. The room was empty except for a few staffers and clerks who were guiding her through a practice session and making pretend motions. Ms. Sears followed along as the clerks explained arcane Senate protocols, though she occasionally raised matters that weren’t in the script.
“What if they’re making a ruckus?” Ms. Sears asked her tutors.
Then, a clerk said, pointing to the giant wooden gavel at Ms. Sears’s right hand, you bang that. Ms. Sears smiled.
It was impossible to believe that she was even here. Her campaign was a long shot. She started late, was poorly funded, and was repeatedly reworked. The political trajectory that preceded it wasn’t any more encouraging: She made an appearance on the scene 20 year ago, winning a seat in a upset, but she was defeated after one term, and a quixotic bid to become a Congresswoman. She briefly surfaced in 2018, announcing a write-in protest against Virginia’s Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, but this earned her little beyond a few curious mentions in the press.
Three years later, she is the lieutenant governor elect. She defeated two veteran legislators for the Republican nomination. Glenn Youngkin, who is also running for governor, will be taking her place on Jan. 15.
The focus on Ms. Sears’s triumph, in news profiles and in the post-election crowing of conservative pundits, has been on the rare combination of her biography and politics: a Black woman, an immigrant and an emphatically conservative, Trump-boosting Republican.
“The message is important,” Ms. Sears, 57, said over a lunch of Jamaican oxtail with her transition team at a restaurant near the State Capitol. “But the messenger is equally important.”
Ms. Sears is the embodiment of this question: is she a singular figure that won a surprise win or the vanguard for a major political realignment that dissolves long-standing realities of race/partisan identification? Democrats say that there is not enough evidence to support the latter and that Ms. Sears was able to win with typical Republican voters in a particularly Republican year. But Ms. Sears insists that many Black and immigrant voters naturally side with Republicans on a variety of issues — and that some are starting to realize that.
“The only way to change things is to win elections,” she said. “And who better to help make that change but me? I look like the strategy.”
Ms. Sears traces her own partisan epiphany back to her early 20s. She already had a lot life experience at that point. She moved at 6 from Jamaica to Brooklyn to be with her dad, who had arrived seeking work. She was shocked to discover that she was a Republican after listening to the 1988 presidential campaign and hearing the debates about welfare and abortion.
Ms. Sears was a married mother of three and had previously run a homeless shelter. She also went to graduate school. It was more than 12 years before she began her political career. At the request of local Republicans, Ms. Sears ran for the House of Delegates 2001 in a majority Black district of Norfolk. The seat was held by Billy Robinson Jr., a Democrat for 20 years. His father had held it before him. A contempt of court charge placed Mr. Robinson in jail for a night just weeks before the election. Surprise of all the election season, Ms. Sears was elected.
She adapted to the political environment and her unusual position in the Legislature: she joined, then left, the legislative Black caucus; voted consistently as a Republican, but called earlier than most colleagues for the resignation by the Republican House speaker after news broke about his sexual harassment settlement.
She didn’t run for reelection and instead launched an underdog campaign to defeat Democratic U.S. Representative Bobby Scott. Mr. Scott was elected to Congress again, where he is still. The House of Delegates seat was then returned to the Democratic Party. Ms. Sears was “done with politics,” she said.
Her family moved from the Shenandoah valley to Winchester where Ms. Sears ran an electrical and plumbing repair shop. She held a few posts — on the state board of education and on a committee at the Department of Veterans Affairs — and wrote a book, “Stop Being a Christian Wimp!” Much of her focus was on caring for a daughter struggling with mental illness. DeJon Williams, her daughter, was killed in a vehicle accident in 2012 with her two young daughters.
While Ms. Sears was absent from politics, Barack Obama won the presidency, Trayvon Martin was killed, the Black Lives Matter movement rose up, Donald Trump was elected and neo-Nazis marched on Charlottesville, Va. Ms. Sears’s political example, as a Black woman Republican representing a majority Black district in Virginia, went unrepeated.
She stated that Republicans have rarely attempted to break old ties between Black voters in the Democratic Party and Republicans. This is partly why she decided that she would run in this year’s election.
“I just took a look at the field, and said, ‘My God, we’re gonna lose again,’” she said. “Nobody was going to reach out to the various communities that needed to be heard from: women, immigrants, you know, Latinos, Asians, Blacks, etc.”
She was the most far-right of the field and was, in fact, the most conservative of the three Republicans who were nominated to statewide office. She favors strict limits on abortion, calling Democratic abortion policies “wicked”; she is an advocate of vouchers to help students pay for private school tuition and of tighter restrictions on voting; and she insists that gun control laws do not deter crime — gun ownership does. A photo that went viral last springShe was seen holding an AR-15 while wearing a blazer and dress suitable for a Chamber of Commerce luncheon. This helped her to get the Republican nomination.
Ms. Sears derides the left as too concerned with race but often explains her politics as rooted in Black history, stressing Marcus Garvey’s rhetoric on self-reliance as a Jamaican immigrant in Jim Crow America, emphasizing that Harriet Tubman carried a gun and referring to the infamous Tuskegee experiments in explaining her opposition to Covid-19 vaccine mandates. “If the Democrats are always going to talk about race, then let’s talk about it,” she said.
She believes that the problems Republicans have in attracting Black voters may be more than just neglect. She was upset when Republicans nominated Corey Stewart to the U.S. Senate in Virginia. Stewart has a history associating with Neo-Confederates. But she said this didn’t give her qualms about the party. She remains a champion of Mr. Trump, who openly endorsed Mr. Stewart; indeed, she was the national chairwoman of a group called “Black Americans to Re-elect the President.”
Jennifer McClellan, a Democratic state senator representing Richmond, agreed that Democrats cannot assume that Black voters will vote for them. She stated that Black voters choose their candidates based on what they believe will solve their problems. She continued that little has been said by Ms. Sears suggests that she would be that person in the office.
“The vast majority of Black voters disagree with her on abortion, on school choice, on guns,” Ms. McClellan said. “Those aren’t necessarily the issues driving Black voters anyway. It’s the economy, it’s health care, it’s broader access to education.”
The evidence that this year’s elections scrambled the fundamentals of race and partisanship is mixed at most. If anything, some Republicans worried that Ms. Sears’s hard-right politics might jeopardize the campaign strategy of appealing to more moderate voters. This risk was largely mitigated, said John Fredericks, a conservative radio host, by the fact that Ms. Sears’s general election campaign, which he called “a train wreck from start to finish,” never raised enough money to really broadcast her politics.
In any event, attention was overwhelmingly focused on the top ticket.
“The election this year was all about the gubernatorial candidates,” said Stephen Farnsworth, a political scientist at the University of Mary Washington. According to several political experts, there were few surprises in the exit polls. However, Ms. Sears won by a margin that would have been expected from any Republican this election.
However, there were warning signs for Democrats as outlined by the Democratic Governors Association in a post-election survey. Although Black Virginians overwhelmingly supported Terry McAuliffe as Democratic nominee for governor of the Commonwealth, the analysis showed a decline in Democratic support among Black men compared to the 2020 presidential election. Notable declines in Democratic support were also noted among Latino and Asian voters.
“We don’t need to be tied or beholden to one particular party,” said Wes Bellamy, a Black political activist and a former vice mayor of Charlottesville. He said that he will be closely following Ms. Sears.
Lieutenant governors in Virginia are fairly limited in their responsibilities, but they have a public profile — and they almost always run for governor. If Ms. Sears advocates for policies that improve the day-to-day lives of Black people and, more crucially, if she can persuade her Republican colleagues to go along, Mr. Bellamy said, “I think she’s gold.”
Source: NY Times