OPINION:
With all due respect to the six little-known candidates for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate from Virginia, the chances of any of them unseating three-term liberal Democratic Sen. Mark R. Warner on Nov. 3 are next to zero.
Their prospects of becoming a U.S. senator are roughly on par with those of the four Democrats challenging Mr. Warner for their party’s nomination in Virginia’s state primaries on Aug. 4. (Presumably, those four Democrats seeking to replace Mr. Warner don’t think he is far-enough left, despite his lockstep-liberal voting record in toeing the party line over the first 17 years of his three terms in the Senate.)
However well-intentioned, the six Republican unknowns vying for the right to take on Mr. Warner — Alex DePaula, Kim Farington, Al Mina, Bert Mizusawa, Chuck Smith and David Williams — are all too dishearteningly reminiscent of the candidacy of Daniel Gade, the Republicans’ sacrificial lamb candidate against Mr. Warner in 2020.
Mr. Gade was outspent 4-to-1, the contest was never close, and he lost by double digits, 56% to 44%.
By contrast, in 2014, when the Republican nominee was Ed Gillespie, a well-known and well-funded party operative, Mr. Warner won his second term in a squeaker, saved only by the presence in the race of a third-party Libertarian spoiler. Robert Sarvis garnered three times as many votes (2.4% of the total) as Mr. Warner’s margin of victory (0.8%).
That should demonstrate that Mr. Warner is hardly unbeatable.
With the candidacy-filing deadline of April 2 still more than three weeks away, there’s still time for a Republican candidate with a real chance of banishing Mr. Warner to the obscurity he so richly deserves to jump into the race.
At 6-foot-5, that candidate literally and figuratively towers over all the others. An affable campaigner and proven vote-getter, former Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin would pose an existential threat to Mr. Warner’s Senate career.
With apologies to The Temptations, that’s why Virginia Republican Party elders should not be “too proud to beg” Mr. Youngkin — who compiled a fiscally conservative, pro-business record during his four years in Richmond — to reconsider his decision not to run for Senate while there’s still time.
As was once said in jest about President Nixon, Mr. Youngkin by now should be “tanned, rested and ready” to jump back into the political fray some seven weeks after leaving the Governor’s Mansion on Jan. 17. He would easily be able to reactivate his campaign infrastructure and donor base, so it would not be like starting from scratch.
“After a remarkable upset in the race for governor of Virginia,” The New York Times proclaimed in November 2021, “Mr. Youngkin is the newest star of the Republican Party.” He was similarly hailed by a Virginia Republican gubernatorial predecessor, Bob McDonnell, as a “rare generational talent.”
Mr. Youngkin shouldn’t let his star go into eclipse after just one term in one office. To do so would be to squander that rare political talent.
His candidacy would greatly increase the odds of finally holding Mr. Warner to the two-term limit pledge he initially made in 1996, when he first ran (unsuccessfully) for Senate, but that he reneged on when he ran for a third term in 2020.
Just as important, with Virginia Democrats’ congressional-district map-rigging referendum question on the statewide ballot on April 21, having Mr. Youngkin back out on the campaign trail and speaking out against the gerrymandering proposal would energize Republican turnout.
It would also boost Republican chances of defeating the measure, which is cynically and shamelessly being billed by Democrats as intended to “restore fairness” — while doing the exact opposite.
Finally, unlike with the current crop of little-known would-be Republican nominees, Mr. Youngkin’s candidacy would force Democrats to redirect millions of dollars of campaign cash to Virginia to defend Mr. Warner’s Senate seat, rather than trying to flip vulnerable Republican-held seats across the country.
It should go without saying that retaining Republican majority control of the Senate (and the House, of course) in November is crucial to ensuring the enactment of President Trump’s policies and priorities in his final two years in office.
For all these reasons and more: Run, Glenn, run!
• Peter Parisi is a former editor for The Washington Times.
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