I first encountered Tom Perriello, who lost the Virginia Democratic
gubernatorial primary, on June 13th, almost twenty years ago. I had
written an article about Bill Clinton’s disastrous foreign policy in
West Africa, which bolstered one of the region’s worst war criminals,
President Charles Taylor, of Liberia, and strengthened his grip on
neighboring Sierra Leone. Perriello read the piece and shared some of my
outrage at American policy there. He called me and we chatted about the
yin and yang between realism and moralism in American foreign policy.
While I had written the piece entirely from a desk in Washington,
Perriello was inspired to move to West Africa and work as an adviser to
the prosecutor for the Special Court for Sierra Leone. The tribunal,
established jointly by the U.N. and the government of Sierra Leone, was
charged with prosecuting war criminals in the region’s long-running
conflicts. In an audacious and controversial move, the prosecutor for
whom Perriello worked unsealed an indictment against Taylor while he was
visiting Ghana, making him the first sitting head of state since
Yugoslavia’s Slobodan Milosevic to be indicted by an international
court. Taylor fled back to the safety of Liberia, but, thanks to
pressure from the Bush Administration, he stood trial and was convicted
at the Special Court, in 2012. He will spend the rest of his life in
jail in the U.K.
Perriello played a crucial role in bringing one of the worst murderers
of the twenty-first century to justice. The next time I heard from
Perriello was in late 2008, just after he won an upset victory—by less
than a thousand votes—over a longtime Republican congressman from
Virginia, where Perriello grew up. Perhaps being overly generous because
he was an incoming member of Congress who needed media contacts, he
called and reminded me that his career in public service all started
with that article I had written. As a journalist, you tend not to forget
those kinds of calls, and I’ve always followed his career with interest.
Perriello was swept out of office two years later, when midterm voters
turned ferociously against Obama and the House of Representatives
flipped into Republican hands. Obama and many of his aides retained a
special affection for Perriello as someone who championed much of their
ambitious early agenda despite the difficult politics of his district.
He worked briefly at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think
tank, before Secretary of State John Kerry brought him into the State
Department, where Perriello had a notable—and under-covered—achievement
late last year. He helped broker an agreement that could lead to the Democratic Republic of the Congo's
first peaceful transition of power.
As he was wrapping up that work, Donald Trump was preparing to become
President. Perriello decided to run for governor of Virginia—one of only
two states that elects its governors in the odd year after each
Presidential election and so, along with New Jersey, is often seen as
the first real referendum on an incumbent President.
“The election of Donald Trump was not just some transfer of power from
Democrats to Republicans,” Perriello, who is forty-two, told me earlier
this week, as we discussed the lessons of his losing campaign to secure
the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. “It was really the rise of at
least a wannabe racial demagogue on U.S. soil. The response to that was
going to be extremely important, and it was going to start in Virginia.
So we closed up the peace deal in Congo at 11:00 P.M. on New Year’s Eve
and launched the campaign for governor January 5th.”
Perriello lost the primary by almost twelve points. His main lesson of
running for office in the era of Trump is a little surprising. “The
single biggest thing that I took away from this campaign,” he said, “is
that whichever party ends up figuring out how to speak about two
economic issues—automation and monopoly—will not only be doing right by
the country but will have a massive electoral advantage.”
In many ways, Perriello’s race in the Virginia primary was as much of a
long shot as the Congo peace deal. His opponent, Ralph Northam, the
lieutenant governor, was older and more established in the state. (He
attended the Virginia Military Institute, while Perriello went to Yale
as both an undergraduate and for a law degree.) Northam already had the
backing of most top Virginia Democrats, including Governor Terry
McAuliffe, one of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s closest friends, and the
two Democratic senators—Tim Kaine, Hillary’s 2016 running mate, and Mark
Warner.
Perriello had some other big problems. He had trouble distinguishing
himself ideologically from Northam, who moved to the left on a host of
issues, including adopting a minimum wage of fifteen dollars per hour,
two years of free community college, and comprehensive criminal justice
reform. But Northam also pilloried Perriello from the left on abortion,
because Perriello once voted on an amendment during the Obamacare debate
that would have prevented the use of federal funds for insurance
coverage of abortions.
Perriello was also outspent and outraised. He won the backing of
Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and thirty former Obama staffers, and
the primary was cast in the media as a fight between the Democratic
Party’s populist and establishment wings. But the national fundraising
networks of the left never adopted Perriello as a priority. (Northam had
a four-million-dollar spending advantage.) Instead, most of the Netroots
energy and dollars focused on the special congressional election in
Georgia, where Democrat Jon Ossoff raised an astounding twenty-three
million dollars but still lost. There are no limits on donations in
Virginia, and Perriello relied on a few wealthy donors—or “angel
investors,” as Perriello prefers to call them—who wrote six-figure
checks, which was slightly awkward for the populist candidate.
Perriello also ended up losing his anti-Trump edge over Northam, an Army
veteran who was originally reluctant to run as a fierce voice of
#TheResistance. But in a TV ad on which he ended up spending the most
money, Northam, who is a neurologist, looked straight to camera and, in
a weirdly matter-of-fact way, called Trump a “narcissistic maniac.” (The
ad was in heavy rotation on D.C. television, especially the cable news
channels, and Trump himself, who watches hours of cable news, almost
certainly would have seen it.)
Finally, the Washington Post, which endorsed Northam late in the
campaign, had an enormous impact on the race. Perriello’s internal polls
showed a fifteen-point swing against him in the last ten days of the
race after the endorsement.
Despite the loss, Perriello thinks there are some lessons for
progressive Democrats who believe that anti-Trumpism is enough to win.
“I think it’s important for Democrats to keep a couple of things in mind
right now,” Perriello said about what he learned. “One is not to assume
that all anti-Trump energy is pro-Democratic energy. We have to go out
and earn those votes. And I think, related to that, it’s important for
us not just to be addressing Trump, but the forces that gave rise to
Trump.”
Trump, he believes, has been the result of “a coming collision course
between the rise of economic anxiety due to the disappearance of work
and the persistence of structural and overt racism. One of the silliest
conversations we’re having in Democratic politics is whether the
Presidential election was about economic anxiety or racism. My answer to
that is, ‘Yes.’ Those two have always gone hand in hand. So for us to
not speak out forcefully about the structural and overt racism would be
to not be doing our job as progressives, but we can’t miss the
implications of a genuine shift in the economics of the United States.”
Despite being cast as the candidate of the populist left, Perriello did
better with less-traditional Democratic constituencies. “We did really
well with all the groups that Democrats are struggling with,” he said,
“young voters, rural voters, diaspora, communities of color, voters
below the age of sixty-five. And we did terribly with all the people
that are going to vote with Democrats no matter what.”
He found a major disconnect between how the economically struggling
parts of the state understood the big economic trends in the country,
compared with voters in the more upscale areas.
“When I talked to Trump voters, I talked about the fact that he’s half
right about 5.7 million manufacturing jobs being lost in the last
decade, and that that’s devastating communities,” Perriello said. “But
then I’d ask that room, ‘Can anyone tell me where eighty-five per cent
of them went? And when I was in red parts of the country, every hand
went up and said, ‘technology and automation.’ And when I was in the
blue parts, say, at a donor meeting, and it might be one or two hands
that got that.”
Perriello announced this week that he will run a new PAC to focus on
helping Democrats win seats in the Virginia House of Delegates. Ideally,
he said, the group will serve as “an innovation hub for testing better
strategies for campaigning, which could then be useful to candidates
across the country in 2018, both in terms of messaging and how Democrats
run in the Trump era.”
His main insight on that front so far is that his party needs to harness
the revulsion to Trump that exists in many quarters with an economic
message that has been lacking. “If Democrats lazily think that
anti-Trump energy is pro-Democratic Party energy,” he said, “we’re going
to miss a generational opportunity to realign people’s political
identities.”