Bob McDonnell, then a candidate for governor, greets the crowd as he and Democratic challenger Creigh Deeds, participate in the annual Buena Vista Labor Day parade, September 7, 2009. Buena Vista’s Labor Day Festival dates to the mid-1960s, when the city bought the Glen Maury farm, planning to convert it to a community park. To celebrate the work done by the many volunteers who cleared the land, built picnic shelters, and hiking trails, a Labor Day parade was organized to march from downtown Buena Vista to new Glen Maury Park. It attracted thousands of people from the region; its success ensured the event would become a Buena Vistan tradition. Local politicians invited governors and Senators (both state and national) to participate, and the festival began to serve as the kickoff for Virginia’s fall political campaigns. (Photo by Jahi Chikwendiu/TWP/Getty Images)
I’m glad I did it for all those years. But I’m also glad I won’t be doing the reporting gauntlet of Labor Day political parades, picnics and speeches on Monday, starting well before dawn and lasting into the night.
The political landscape has changed radically since then. These kickoff events for the sprint to Election Day were once command appearances for statewide office seekers. Now, they’re optional at best, depending on a campaign’s needs and the best venues for achieving them.
Festivities such as Wakefield’s Shad Planking each April, Acres of Democrats in Wytheville the Sunday before Labor Day, and the Labor Day morning parade in lovely Buena Vista, nestled along the western slope of the Blue Ridge, and an afternoon one in Covington, a manufacturing city near the West By-God border, have lost prominence. Even the Virginia Bar Association’s summer debate, held since 1985, was cancelled this year after gubernatorial candidates trampled tradition and declined invitations.
The atrophy of Virginia’s political press corps, which once felt a slavish obligation to cover the annual end-of-summer pageantry, bears much of the blame.
It’s been a dozen years since I last went through the daylong drill on the first Monday of each September. It was a chore we political correspondents greeted with a mix of resignation and adventure, particularly for writers based in Richmond.
Those days began at 5 a.m. Many of us traveled together, in a car that The Associated Press allowed me to rent for the trip. Park at my house by 5 a.m., riders were told, or miss out (though we left no scribe behind).
We would arrive in Buena Vista in time for the party breakfasts, greeted by tens of thousands of campaign yard signs bristling like a dog’s hackles from every spare swatch of soil along the parade route, backdrop for press cameras.
We tracked candidates for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general every other odd-numbered year. On most even-numbered years, we would follow U.S. Senate candidates. Skillful candidates spent their time on the curbs and sidewalks, shaking hands, back-slapping, kissing babies and posing for snapshots and Polaroids — forerunners of smart phones.
Regardless of the year, candidates would sweat their long-sleeved dress shirts completely through in mere minutes. I pitied the occasional neophyte who attempted the sweltering 1 1⁄2-mile march in a new worsted wool suit, a tie and wingtips.
Their reward for completing the parade? Sit in an open-air pavilion in a city park and wait in a queue to rouse crowds of mostly their supporters and volunteers while reporters scrounged for a morsel of news to lead their stories.
When that was finished, wily Buena Vista parade veterans changed into fresh clothing and were whisked west on Interstate 64 for Covington’s parade, culminating in speeches under the midday sun on a high school football field. After that, some Democrats would climb into a waiting plane bound for Scott’s picnic.
The more technically adept reporters attempted to write and transmit stories via hard-to-find telephone land lines before wireless data service was widespread. Traditionalists, such as the Richmond Times-Dispatch’s late, legendary Tyler Whitley, dispensed with the gadgetry and dictated notes and quotes by phone to the rewrite desk.
Once the stories were filed, we sweaty, nomadic newshounds feasted on our companies’ dime at one of the nicer eateries in Lexington, a fashionable two-college community convenient to the day’s events. Then came the dog-tired drive back to Richmond in a car filled with chatter about the day — at least among those who remained awake.
Today, candidates and the press have dialed it back.
“So much has changed in Virginia politics over the last 25 years, and those changes all work against events like Buena Vista,” said Stephen Farnsworth, political science professor and director of the Center for Leadership and Media Studies at the University of Mary Washington.
“For the dwindling Richmond press corps, it’s a very expensive proposition to make the trek. For the candidates, it’s not clear there’s a lot of value in going if there’s no coverage,” said Farnsworth who, before his 32 years as a professor, reported for the Kansas City Star.
He also noted the demise of competitiveness in GOP-red southwestern Virginia the past two decades further diminishes their value. Republicans aren’t compelled to gild the lily. Democrats have trouble finding a reason to even bother, especially if their message has at most local reach.
“There aren’t many persuadable voters out there,” Farnsworth said, noting that the last Democratic gubernatorial nominee to meaningfully compete in Virginia’s mountainous southwest was Mark Warner in 2001.
It meant something then to residents of an area closer to capitals of several other states than they are to Richmond’s Capitol Square, where they feel forgotten. Warner won 23 localities in the region over Republican Mark Earley, 13 by double-digit percentage point margins — including Buena Vista and Covington.
For that campaign, Warner went whole hog, contesting the GOP in hills and hollers it considered its own. The multimillionaire businessman had already spent years seeding start-ups across rural Virginia. In 2021, he sponsored a car in a NASCAR event in Virginia. He commissioned a bluegrass band to record a campaign song to the tune of “Dooley” with lyrics retooled by adviser David “Mudcat” Saunders, hired to give the Alexandria city slicker some good-ol’-boy cred.
A grassroots group calling itself Sportsmen for Warner sprung up to calm anxious gun-rights voters and helped Warner persuade the NRA not to endorse Earley. And when Saunders took Warner on his first turkey hunt, the candidate asked him for guidance. “Don’t shoot Mudcat,” Saunders drawled in response.
Twenty years after that campaign, Democratic former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, seeking a second term, won just two southwestern localities — the cities of Roanoke and Lexington — in his upset loss to Republican Glenn Youngkin.
The only other Democrat to make a dedicated outreach in Virginia’s southwest was author Jim Webb, a Democrat who had written about Appalachian people of Scots-Irish heritage in his nonfiction book “Born Fighting.” He carried 10 localities in the region in narrowly unseating Republican U.S. Sen. George Allen.
U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott’s Labor Day Cookout in Newport News, held annually since 1977 except for the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, has held its own. Because of Scott’s tenure and his standing in Congress, senior Democrats find a way to attend. Last year, Doug Emhoff, husband of Vice President (and Democratic presidential nominee) Kamala Harris was the headliner, yet media coverage of it was sparing.
“Events that are still big are not the bipartisan ones but partisan ones,” Farnsworth said. “When a top partisan figure encourages you to show up, you’re wise to make an appearance. But even those events, where there are a lot of political officeholders present at one place at one time, still don’t draw that many reporters.”
I suppose not.
Today’s press corps is stretched painfully thin. It is composed of technically adroit multitaskers who work at least as hard and probably smarter than we did. But something has to fall by the wayside, and those Labor Day totems drew the short straw.
Our dispatches from Labor Day venues weren’t breaking news, but Virginians will learn a little less about the candidates, especially in unscripted moments when they interact with everyday people whose votes they seek.
Today’s correspondents don’t endure those steamy, 18-hour Labor Days spent reporting, writing and traveling. Nor will they have those memories to share decades from now, either.
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