Steve Burns
WMAL.com
WASHINGTON – (WMAL) The rumblings have begun in Richmond following Hillary Clinton’s selection of Virginia Senator Tim Kaine as her running mate: should the Clinton/Kaine ticket move into the White House, who steps in to Kaine’s Senate seat?
Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe would be tasked with appointing someone for one year, until a special election in November 2017. The seat is then up for re-election in 2018.
“Whoever the Governor appoints has to be able to run a statewide special election in 2017, and then, presuming they want to stay, run again in a general election in 2018,” Christopher Newport University political scientist Quentin Kidd told WMAL. “It has to be somebody who could raise the money and put the organization together to run two statewide elections, one year after the other.”
Kidd said the need for a solid fundraising foundation points to well-established Virginia politicians like Congressmen Don Beyer, Gerry Connelly, and Bobby Scott, though Connelly’s Fairfax seat could be harder to keep blue than Beyer’s or Scott’s.
“It could be the case that the Governor wants to go a different route,” Kidd said. “He could go deep into what I think is a shallow Democratic bench and pick a ‘rising star’.” Del. Jennifer McClellan, Kidd said, who represents an area in Richmond and Henrico County, came to mind.
There is, of course, an intriguing option that everyone is keeping in the back of their mind: a play for McAuliffe himself to run for the seat. Kidd suggested he could put in a one-year placeholder like recently retired Norfolk Mayor Paul Fraim. McAuliffe’s term in the Governor’s office is up in January 2018, just in time to take the Senate seat if he were to win the 2017 special election.
“It isn’t often that a Senate seat comes open for exactly the right time for a Governor who’s stepping out of office,” Kidd said. “But if there’s any sense that he might have a future in a Clinton cabinet, he might not be interested in running.”
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