Cliff Hyra (right) chats with Liz Hogan of Charlottesville at the RVA TechXpo. (Photo by Brad Kutner)
It’s around 5 p.m. on a muggy Friday in July, and the RVA TechXpo is in full swing at the recently renovated Main Street Station train shed. Darting between attendees is a young, scruffy-faced patent attorney who is quite comfortable shaking hands and meeting strangers. Cliff Hyra, 35, is working the tech-savvy crowd to spread his free-market, small-government message as the Libertarian Party candidate for governor.
A native of Northern Virginia, Hyra moved to Hanover County about three years ago, and while he is new to politics, he’s hoping to make an impact this November however he can. He also aims to build on the showing of Libertarian Robert Sarvis, who ran in 2013.
The son of federal employees, Hyra attended Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County. He excelled with numbers and continued science-related pursuits when he entered Virginia Tech’s aerospace engineering program.
After graduating from college in 2004, he realized that the level of computer programming required for fully utilizing the degree wasn’t for him, so he switched gears to a longtime family profession, law. He moved back home with his parents and attended George Mason University’s law school. It was there that he found his professional and political leaning.
“George Mason is known for economics; even the law school has an economic portion,” Hyra says over a beer at the Franklin Inn in Richmond’s Museum District after leaving the TechXpo. “That was [also] the time when the blogosphere was kicking off and I started reading a lot of blogs by economists.”
The writing of GMU professor and blogger Don Boudreaux especially stood out to him.
“Boudreaux is an amazing communicator, with the ability to cut straight to the heart of a complicated economic matter and render it in perfect clarity,” Hyra says. “Much like law school as a whole, he opened my eyes to a lot of new concepts and to new ways of looking at the world.”
After finishing his law degree, Hyra gained his first professional experience with the Law Office of James C. Wray.
“I had my hands in everything and was dealing directly with a lot of clients, learned about billing and administrative [work],” he says. “The owner was a hands-off guy who was happy for me to take some initiative.”
“You have to respect people’s decisions about their own lives, and they’re in the best position to better themselves.” —Cliff Hyra
Before long, Hyra started thinking of establishing his own practice. He opened the new firm in late 2008, during the economic downturn.
“I went for it,” he says. “It was slow at first, but went pretty well, and I’ve enjoyed that autonomy ever since.”
Hyra’s aerospace engineering degree fits the multidisciplinary bill needed to be a patent attorney. “I do a wide variety of different technologies,” he says. “I get to learn a little bit about a lot of different things.”
He works from home or in Washington, D.C., or Northern Virginia, where he’s since joined with other firms to share office space. When he’s not working or taking care of his four children (Cheyenne, 7; Bridgette, 5; Thomas, 3; and Abigail, who was born in August) with his wife, Stephanie, he reads science fiction and fantasy novels, goes running or plays video games.
A Political Newcomer
While he’s voted Libertarian since college, he wasn’t a member of the party until about a week before he was announced as the candidate.
“I was too busy to participate,” he says. “I’ve always had to work a lot and had kids pretty early. It was tricky for me to spend a lot of time as an activist.”
His wife agrees. Stephanie says that while having four children was part of their life plan, the governor’s office was not. However, she says, “It’s important that [our children] grow up knowing they’re in a position to help other people.” She sees her husband’s campaign as confronting problems that are important to many Virginians. His decision to run, she says, comes from a spirit of service. “I think he could take up some issues that could help a lot of people.”
Those include criminal justice and education reform, and tax and regulatory burdens — issues Hyra says are not being addressed in a meaningful way by his opponents.
“I grew up here in Virginia and am raising my children here, so I am very invested in the future of Virginia,” Hyra says. “I feel very strongly about offering voters a third option and doing everything I can to fix some of the problems we have.”
One of those big-ticket problems is marijuana legalization. “It’s crazy how much money we’re throwing away [on jailing offenders] ... We’re taking people away from their families and making it harder for them to get jobs.”
Another is civil asset forfeiture: “The police can come and take your stuff just on a suspicion of a crime, and if you want your money or property back, you have to sue the police department … it’s crazy.”
Regarding the state’s economy, Hyra contends that Virginia has become less attractive to business under Gov. Terry McAuliffe, and he says that Republican candidate Ed Gillespie’s across-the-board 10-percent tax cut is poorly targeted.
Hyra calls for exempting income up to $60,000 from state taxes.
“For the average family in Virginia, they’d pay no income tax and be saving as much as $3K a year,” he says, defending his plan. “They could invest that in their business, career, education, children’s education. It could go a long way.”
The U.S. Census listed Virginia’s median household income at just over $65,000 in 2015, and Hyra thinks the targeting of lower-income people for the benefit is what makes his plan stand out. This also varies from Democrat Ralph Northam, whose rural economic plan includes $15 million to expand the University of Virginia at Wise.
“You have to respect people's decisions about their own lives, and they’re in the best position to better themselves,” Hyra says. “If you take $3,000 and spend it on a government program, it might go to the politically connected, but if you put it directly into someone's pocket, they’re going to be able to do something to better themselves.”
Asked about the reduced tax revenue resulting from his plan, Hyra says the loss, which he estimates at $3.5 billion, would be offset by Virginians’ ability to invest the money they get to keep, as well as increased income from projected economic and population growth. He says he would freeze new spending for two years and close tax loopholes identified by former Gov. Mark Warner’s administration, and he anticipates increased revenue from the legalization of marijuana and savings from reforming the criminal justice system, drawing on a proposal by the governor’s Commission on Parole Review in 2015.
Hyra calls his tax plan progressive. And according to Rick Sincere, a long-time Libertarian and political blogger based in Charlottesville, it's a practical approach.
“Pragmatic Libertarians are more electable than the hardliners,” he says. Recalling the 2013 race in which Sarvis, a Northern Virginia lawyer, managed to get 6.5 percent of the vote (a record for a third-party candidate), Sincere says that Sarvis and Hyra are similar in some ways — they’re both young family men and hardworking campaigners — but dissatisfaction with the two major-party candidates in the 2013 race helped carve out a slice for Sarvis, and that disdain is not as present this year.
“Neither Ed Gillespie nor Ralph Northam have the negatives of McAuliffe or [Ken] Cuccinelli,” Sincere says, pointing to poll numbers that show both candidates are more likely to be unknown than disliked. “So Hyra has to work that much harder to be noticed.”
Another Choice
Back at the TechXpo, one of the people to meet Hyra was Zach Phillips-Gary, a recent college graduate who recently moved to Richmond for work. He describes himself as left-libertarian and “one of the most political people” in his Facebook feed. He says he has left-leaning social beliefs, but supports limited government in the private sector. Would he vote for a third-party candidate? “I’d really have to look at his politics and see,” Phillips-Gary says, noting that the conversation was good but it was the first time he’d heard Hyra was even in the race.
Across the massive hall, Carl Johnson, chief financial officer of a Richmond-based information technology services company with 50 employees, is mingling and eyeing startup booths. He says he supports politicians who favor a free market, something Hyra champions.
“There’s so much money being spent on compliance and regulations,” he says. “It would be nice to focus on making profit and providing better service.” After speaking with Hyra, he shrugs, saying he’s not sure who he’ll vote for yet.
Hyra has an uphill climb. Lacking the major-party support of his opponents, he’s far behind Gillespie and Northam in fundraising; through the end of June, Hyra had reported raising $38,663, compared to the millions brought in by Gillespie and Northam. Hyra himself contributed $21,500 of his total in the form of loans, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. The next largest contribution was $10,000 from Texas retiree Michael Chastain; most of that went to Hyra’s ballot access petition drive. (Chastain also contributed $5,000 in July.)
Hyra says he’d love to be governor, and he thinks he’s got the best platform to service the state’s voters, but he’s also a realist. Absent the executive role, he at least hopes to have an impact on the race.
“My goal is to do as much good for as many people as I can,” he says. He contends that the current two-party system lets down the electorate and leads to apathy and disillusionment rather than civic pride. “[If] people don’t have any choice, that leads to people not participating as much in democracy.” And if voters are as disillusioned with politics as Donald Trump's populist win in 2016 would suggest, Hyra is happy to have them.
“It would be great if we had a sea change toward more Libertarians [from the] Republican or Democratic party,” he says. “I’d take either one.”
