June 28, 2019
Two Iranian-born women ran in the Virginia Democratic primary this month and drew national attention among Democrats as they showed great strength for the “progressive” wing of the party.
One toppled an incumbent for local prosecutor, while the other came startlingly close to defeating the Democratic leader of the State Senate, one of the state’s most powerful Democrats.
Both women came to the United States as toddlers and learned English as a first language. Both made no effort to hide their Iranian origins, but their ethnicity played no role in their campaigns. Both ran in northern Virginia, the Washington, DC, suburbs, where there is no hostility to immigrants.
The winner was Parisa Dehghani-Tafti, a long-time defense attorney. She defeated Theophani “Theo” Stamos, a Greek-American, the incumbent commonwealth’s attorney or public prosecutor for Arlington County and Falls Church City immediately across the Potomac River from Washington. Arlington, with 235,000 people, has a larger population than Birmingham, Alabama, or Providence, Rhode Island.
Dehghani emphasized her first name on her yard signs and literature and is commonly known simply as “Parisa” as voters avoided the harder last name. She won the primary with 51.4 percent of the vote. Her campaign was a pure progressive one as she accused Stamos of excessive prosecution, of filling the jails with minor drug law offenders, and of resorting to the overuse of bail, so that many poor offenders were forced into jail while awaiting trial.
No one has filed to run against Tafti for the post in the November general election, so she is as good as elected now.
The campaign was the only one to draw much attention in the local community–and it drew a great deal of attention for what is normally a very sleepy primary. The turnout was 16 percent of the active registered voters, which is unusually high for a primary in Virginia, where turnout is normally in single digits.
What was also unusual was the amount of money spent on the campaign. While the final campaign financial reports have not yet been filed, the two candidates together spent almost a million dollars, probably a record for a local contest in Virginia. Tafti received $615,000 form George Soros, the Hungarian-born activist, who has funded many liberal causes—and who has funded opposition groups in Iran and other countries, making him a bete noir in the Islamic Republic. Altogether, Tafti raised $747,000, an immense amount for a local race and almost five times more than Stamos raised.
Soros similarly funded the progressive challenger to the incumbent prosecutor in next-door Fairfax County. He won by 51 percent in a campaign run on the same issues, showing the strength of the progressive movement among Democratic voters in a state where such appeals have in the past gone nowhere.
Tafti charged in her campaign that Stamos had disproportionately prosecuted African-Americans, who are less than 9 percent of the population of Arlington and Falls Church. (Nationally, African-Americans are 12.6 percent of the population and Virginia is almost 20 percent black.) Tafti is married to an African-American and used her two children in one of her campaign videos, saying, “I want to live in a world where the color of their skin doesn’t affect their odds of an arrest.”
Elections for local prosecutors rarely have gotten much attention, but the criminal justice reform movement has taken off among both Democrats and Republicans in the last few years, as Americans have turned against the mass incarceration concept that they embraced in the 1990s. About 20 percent of all jail inmates in the world are held in the United States. This resulted just a few months ago in passage of a federal law designed to lower federal prison populations—a law that President Trump signed and boasted about, though he did little to promote it.
The other Iranian-born candidate was Yasmine Taeb, who entered the United States illegally, walking across the Mexican border with her Iranian mother. She has been very active the last several years in statewide Democratic politics and is well-known among Democratic activists. She is the female Virginia representative to the national Democratic Party from Virginia.
She ran against Dick Saslaw, an incumbent state senator who is known statewide because he is the leader of the Democrats in the State Senate. His district immediately adjoins Arlington County and includes Falls Church City. Taeb was widely expected to fail because of Saslaw’s prominence. He has been a state senator for 40 years and had not faced a primary challenger since his first race 1979.
But Taeb gave him a real scare, winning 45.5 percent of the primary vote to Saslaw’s 48.8 percent in a three-candidate race. Taeb challenged him chiefly on his alleged close ties to the corporate establishment in the state, especially his support for and from Dominion Energy, the state’s dominant utility, an issue statewide. Dominion Energy gave Saslaw $351,000, doubled the entire $177,000 that Taeb raised. Altogether, Saslaw raised nine times as much as Taeb, mostly from corporations.
The large vote totals drawn by the two Iranian-born women and by the winner in the Fairfax County prosecutor’s race was noted nationally among Democrats because it showed amazing strength for three candidates who ran as strongly progressive people challenging what they portrayed as limply liberal incumbents.
Their strength was especially noteworthy coming as it did in Virginia, where Democrats are normally rated as very moderate. While Virginia Democrats generally oppose the state’s historically frequent use of the death penalty, its right-to-work law, its weak gun laws and its constitutional prohibition on same-sex marriage (invalidated by the US Supreme Court), they have not marched in the streets on such issues but have—at least until now—bowed to the conservative forces that predominate in the state outside its northern precincts with a sigh. Expanding Medicaid coverage and giving voting rights back to former prison inmates have been the big issues statewide for Democrats in recent years.
The question Democrats are asking nationally is whether the votes in Virginia’s June 11 primary hold any meaning for Democratic presidential primaries to be held next spring across the country. Polling to date shows Joe Biden, a very moderate Democrat, far in the lead, with such progressive Democrats as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders trailing badly.
