Sen. Bernie Sanders (I. VT) & Tom Perriello (D. VA)

Some more big news out of Virginia today:

Sen. Bernie Sanders, who has emerged as a leader of the Democratic Party’s progressive wing after his unsuccessful presidential campaign, has endorsed former congressman Tom Perriello in the Virginia governor’s race. Perriello is competing for the Democratic nomination in the June 13 primary against Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam, who is backed by nearly every Democrat in the state legislature, congressional delegation and statewide office. “We need to elect progressives at every level of government if we are going to beat back the dangerous agenda of the Trump Administration and its Republican allies,” Sanders said in a statement Tuesday. “Tom is committed to fighting the rigged economy and income inequality. He was the first major statewide candidate in Virginia to run on a $15 minimum wage and the first to say two years of community college should be tuition-free.”

Perriello also received some high praise today from an op-ed from former Congressman Henry Waxman (D. CA) on Huffington Post:

Perriello faced massive pressure from Tea Party Republicans and polluters to oppose the Waxman-Markey climate bill I authored as Chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee. The legislation would have dramatically cut pollution and shifted energy to locally produced solar and wind, helping create jobs throughout the nation and in Virginia. It faced hundreds of millions of dollars in attacks by oil and coal companies who wanted to protect the status quo. Too many Democrats from less conservative districts than Tom’s told me they thought the legislation was good for America and the world, but that they weren’t willing to risk their political fortunes to vote for it. Some voted for it, and then tried to back away from their vote on the campaign trail. In contrast, Tom proudly voted for this legislation, and then went back to his district to explain why he took the vote he did, and how a shift to clean energy would dramatically bolster Virginia’s economy. When we turned to writing the health care bill that became the Affordable Care Act, we faced another tough fight that involved taking on Republicans who just weren’t willing to support anything Democrats proposed no matter the merits – and no matter that it made health care coverage significantly more affordable and provided coverage to tens of thousands of Virginians. Tom advocated for changes to the legislation to help his constituents, such as increasing compensation for rural hospitals, and making sure the legislation remained affordable. But the Republicans running ads and riling up Tea Party activists didn’t care about the content – they were still out to get anyone who voted for Obamacare. Tom proudly stood up and voted for expanded health care. Again, he stood up for his vote, and hit the trail to defend it.

Now the primary is far from over. Lt. Governor Ralph Northam (D. VA) picked up a big endorsement this week:

The Virginia Education Association has endorsed Ralph Northam for governor of Virginia. The group’s announcement comes after the lieutenant governor addressed educators around the Commonwealth on Thursday. During a question and answer session, he shared his vision for making a quality education available to every Virginian, no matter who you are, no matter where you are. As a state senator and as lieutenant governor, Northam has worked to increase investment in early childhood education, in STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and maths) education, and advocated for increasing pay for Virginia’s teachers, which falls short of the national average. These are among the provisions included in the education plan Lieutenant Governor Northam unveiled on Thursday.

The way I see it, we have two great candidates but only one can move on to take on the likely GOP candidate, Ed Gillespie (R. VA), who is veering pretty hard to the right to win his party’s support so he can beat the mini-Trump of Virginia, Corey Stewart (R. VA):

Which brings us back to Stewart. The Virginia Republican doesn’t share Trump’s wealth or status. But he has adopted the president’s method for building authenticity, taking it one step further and jettisoning any remaining subtext. Stewart, in his bid for the governorship, has centered his campaign on one issue: Confederate memorialization. Virginia, whose Richmond was once the capital of the Confederate States of America, is dotted with Confederate statues and memorials. And in recent years, Virginians have struggled with what to do about them. In towns and cities like Charlottesville, residents are working to either recontextualize these figures—explaining the history behind these monuments of men like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson—or remove them outright. For some, this is an affront and an assault on their heritage. Stewart stands for them, with a rallying cry in defense of this Confederate nostalgia. “Folks, this is a symbol of heritage. It is not a symbol of racism. It is not a symbol of slavery,” said Stewart, a native of Minnesota, at a recent campaign event, where he unfolded a Confederate battle flag. “I’m proud to be here with this flag.” Holding rallies at sites of Confederate memorials like the Robert E. Lee statue in Lee Park in Charlottesville, Stewart has promised to defend them from efforts to revise their context or remove them from the public square. He will, he says, reinstate state-issued Confederate license plates and excise any mention of slavery from official proclamations of Confederate history. “The only way that we can kill political correctness is to be politically incorrect,” he has said. By Stewart’s understanding, “political correctness” is a pejorative for a faithful accounting of Virginia’s history, and “political incorrectness” is obscuring that history for the sake of a rose-tinted “heritage.” It’s of a piece with Trump’s rhetoric, which celebrates the same kind of “political incorrectness,” where rejecting the politically correct means embracing explicit racism.