All 100 of Virginia’s House of Delegates seats are up for grabs this fall. The Virginia Public Access Project’s “Pass Rate” data visualization shows how many bills each member introduced and made it to the governor’s desk, but does that number matter come November?
First off, the data used by the Virginia Public Access Project is by no means an official rating of a Delegate’s effectiveness, it’s merely an observation of how many bills they passed. Virginia Beach Republican Barry Knight, for example, has a 100% pass rate, but that’s because his only bill, increasing the number of surety bonds a locality can issue, passed with unanimous support.
Speaker Don Scott, meanwhile, has a score of zero. That’s because the speaker doesn’t carry bills.
In the words of Mel Brooks, “it’s good to be the king.”
The average pass rate for all 100 delegates was 44%. VPAP notes the count doesn’t include memorializing resolutions, the budget bills, or bills carried over from the previous session.
Scott’s fellow Democrats make up the majority of the chart’s higher pass rates while many Republicans in competitive districts, another metric measured by VPAP, have a rate that matches Scotts: zero.
University of Mary Washington political science Professor Stephen Farnsworth said getting bills passed, or not passed, can be a campaign message either way.
“You can claim credit for introducing an idea even if it goes nowhere,” he said. “And you can blame the other side for standing in the way.”
Farnsworth said a lot has changed in the hallowed halls of Virginia’s capital. Years ago, centrists in both parties controlled how things would go down but today there’s fewer centrist lawmakers. Power isn’t held by the center, but rather with the majority caucus, he hypothesized. That means more conservative or liberal lawmaking depending on who's in charge. And control over the agenda is an immense power; if they don’t want something to happen, they have the ability to stop it.
“Political organizations are much better at applying the brakes than applying the gas,” Farnsworth said.
More public examples aren’t hard to find; Farnsworth pointed to Youngkin’s dream of a new sports arena in Northern Virginia back in 2024.
“Democrats were all in against almost immediately and Youngkin had not built bridges with Democrats, he burned them, from day one,” Farnsworth said of Youngkin’s trashing of COVID-era school closures and masking policies that helped him win the governor’s mansion in 2021. “There wasn’t an effort to find middle ground, so when he wanted something from a Democratic majority legislature, they told him to pound sand.”
Steve Haner with the conservative Thomas Jefferson Institute said he was disappointed to see VPAP produce such rankings in the first place. He said The Virginian Pilot used to make a similar list and it often reflected partisanship and the majority’s agenda, not “effectiveness” as some Democrats may argue leading up to November.
“There’s no question the majority party can get a bill passed and the minority can’t,” Haner told Radio IQ. “I don’t think it has anything to do with the merits of a bill or the legislators."
He fears VPAP is giving outside credibility to a political issue, but he noted the stats can still hold some political value in a year when turnout is so important.
“It does help defend you with your own voters, and it does help turn out your own voters, gives them a reason to turn out,” he said.
But there’s also the likelihood -or lack thereof- that voters will even pay attention to such statistics.
“This stuff goes in one ear out the other and they’ll just hear, ‘delegate so and so put in 20 bills and they all passed,' or 'they all failed’,” he said.
Farnsworth thinks, in these highly partisan times, pass rates may not be too high impact either.
“I don’t think people look much beyond the R or the D ahead of the name,” he warned. “And to the extent you can offer a message that is appealing to the voters in the district who share your partisan identification, then you’re all set.”
Haner also takes issue with VPAP’s listing of competitive districts. He says they only use the outcomes of the 2021 gubernatorial election that Youngkin won, and last year’s Presidential race, won by President Joe Biden.
“I think it can make people think the outcome is already written and people may not feel the need to turn out,” he said, suggesting the inclusion of more races could provide a better picture of the district’s partisan lean. “But there’s nothing in that chart that the political parties aren’t doing on their own.”
For one legislator who’s on the competitive list, and whose pass rate is above the median, it was new to them that the issue was even worth discussing.
“My biggest goal this session was, ‘What can I do to help out the people in the Fredericksburg’ region and to me it's not always about quantity,” Democratic Delegate Joshua Cole, whose I-95 corridor district sits at +3 for Democrats according to VPAP. Cole also mentioned budget amendments -his tax credit for new home buyers survived the conference budget process- which weren’t included in VPAP’s pass rate but are sure to be fodder on the road to November.
As for Republicans, House GOP spokesman Garren Shipley told Radio IQ there wasn’t any coincidence between the two charts.
“A challenger to one of our Republican incumbents launched her campaign by denouncing the member as ‘ineffective’ for having passed only a few bills this year,” he said of how the list is already making an appearance on the campaign trail. “Republicans in competitive seats didn’t get many bills heard or passed so Democrats could claim they’re ineffective, regardless of the subject matter.”
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
