The Virginian Pilot released its first round of endorsements in today’s paper. As I predicted, they endorsed Republican incumbent Fred Quayle in the 13th Senate district and in Chesapeake, Republican incumbents John Cosgrove (78th House) and Harry Blevins (14th Senate).
The Pilot is doing their endorsements by city this year. On tap tomorrow will be the Norfolk races. We’ll see if I go 5 for 5 🙂
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
Great job! I predicted it would rain. We’re both right.
Yeah, well, two of those races were included in my least difficult category.
What are you reading into the endorsements so far, Vivian? The Pilot is not for candidates “threatening to blow up” the transportation plan. I didn’t realize that Heretick had done so. I was under the impression that all of our Democratic candidates wanted massive fixes to it, but none called to literally demolish it. I also didn’t realize that Heretick, according to the Pilot, spent the majority of his time on this one issue and pursued it with “a penchant for partisan warfare”. If that is true, that is too bad for Heretick. I’m glad none of our other Dem challengers did that. LOTS of other issues discussed by Northam, Mathieson, and Bouchard, thank you very much!
The Pilot is a staunch supporter of the transportation plan. Anybody who disagrees with them on this starts out with one foot in the hole – the issue is that important to them. (Look here for the candidates’ stand on transportation.) Note that they mentioned it in the reference to Mick Meyer.
Expect them to make that an issue in each of their endorsements.
Heretick is no partisan hack – he just dared to disagree with the Pilot on this.
Pilot is Too Myopic with Endorsements So Far
As I learned during the IA caucus of ’00, endorsements are exciting for political junkies and staffers but don’t really sway voters one way or another.
There is a certain set of voters for whom the endorsements matter. And they happen to be a reliable voting group. But the group is getting smaller, no doubt about that.
By the way – did anyone see the op-ed piece in the paper today lambasting the editorial board for getting out of the presidential endorsement biz?