Ralph Northam (center) chats with a young guest at a small gathering at the home of Northam supporter Veena Lothe in Glen Allen.
In Virginia Military Institute’s 1981 yearbook is a bit of flowery language dedicated to Ralph Northam: “A lanky denizen of the salty wastes of Virginia’s Eastern Shore made the long haul to Lexington. Onancock’s loss was VMI’s gain,” a friend wrote below Northam’s senior portrait. Northam climbed the ranks as a Keydet, ultimately becoming president of Honor Court, the body responsible for judging cadets accused of lying, cheating or stealing.
Today, as the Democratic candidate for Virginia’s governor, he finds himself in a similar position: Having done his duty as lieutenant governor under Gov. Terry McAuliffe, he’s within reach of the top rung. Tim Kaine followed the same path, as did Chuck Robb, Doug Wilder, John Dalton and Mills Godwin.
But are the Eastern Shore native’s faithful adherence to the “Virginia Way” and his nods to the progressive end of the voting pool enough to carry him into the Executive Mansion?
Army Doctor
Ralph Shearer Northam was born in September 1959 on a 75-acre farm where his family of four grew soybeans, corn, wheat and rye, and raised goats, sheep and chickens. His mother, the late Nancy Shearer Northam, was a nurse, and his father, 93-year-old Wescott Northam, was Accomack County’s commonwealth’s attorney and later a circuit court judge. Ralph’s older brother, Tom, was also a VMI man and practices law on the Shore today.
“You learn about hard work, especially growing up on a farm — everybody in the family has to chip in and do their share,” Northam says. “You also learn about people.”
In his first year of college, a poor eye exam meant he wouldn’t be a jet pilot, so he became a biology major and switched from the Navy ROTC to the Army, which would allow him to delay his military commitment until after medical school. He specialized in pediatric neurology during his residency in San Antonio, and as an Army doctor, treated children of military families for brain tumors, seizures and other disorders.
“You learn about hard work, especially growing up on a farm — everybody in the family has to chip in and do their share.” —Ralph Northam
In Texas, he met Pam Thomas, one of several single young women invited to a party in the mid 1980s, given by Northam’s friends with the ulterior motive of finding him a nice girlfriend.
“I just happened to come to this pool party and met him,” recalls Pam, who was a recent Baylor University graduate. “I didn’t want to have much to do with it when I found out his friend was trying to set us all up. But he was so nice and so sweet.”
He called her soon afterward, and talk drifted to the pregnant stray cat Pam had let into her apartment, who “promptly had kittens in my closet,” she recalls. “And one of them had all these problems.” Northam was working in the neonatal intensive care unit and figured out a way to feed the kitten with tiny tubes. He offered to come over. “How can you not like a guy who helps you save a stray kitten?” Pam says with a laugh. The female tabby, who was nonetheless named Lamont, lived with the family for many years, along with other rescued animals.
In 1987, the couple wed, and Ralph finished his residency in Texas, followed by work at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington and Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. During Operation Desert Storm in 1991, he treated evacuated soldiers at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, overseeing its neurology and neurosurgery units.
“It was the first triage out of the desert, so they would come to us on gurneys, and we would evaluate them,” he says. “We were taking in, on some days, 30 to 40 casualties a day.”
Pam, at that time, was several months pregnant with daughter Aubrey, the couple’s second child, and living on top of a mountain near the base. “They closed the American hospitals to civilians during the war, so I was over there with a toddler by myself, getting ready to deliver a baby,” she says. “I was driving 45 minutes to find a German hospital. It was quite the adventure.”
By 1992, Ralph decided to retire from the Army and start a medical practice with partners at the Children’s Hospital of the King’s Daughters in Norfolk. Pam taught science at a private school in Virginia Beach. Their son, Wes, is now a neurosurgery resident at the University of North Carolina, and Aubrey is a web designer at Richmond’s Mobelux firm.
Compelled to Run
A career in politics didn’t seem to be in the cards until about 10 years ago, Pam says, when her husband had been discussing – unhappily — what was happening in the state legislature, particularly with health insurance and environmental issues.
Svinder Toor, a fellow pediatric neurologist and partner in Northam’s practice, recalls a day when “we were talking about politics and complaining about how politicians are affecting our relationship with the patients.” Toor mentioned an uncontested seat in the Virginia Senate’s 6th District and said Northam should run for it. “He said, ‘You do it!’ ” Toor says, laughing. But soon, the conversation turned serious. In November 2007, Northam beat the Republican incumbent by 3,000 votes.
His arrival as a Democrat wasn’t entirely predictable. Northam twice voted for George W. Bush as president, decisions he now calls wrong. He says they were born out of being “apolitical” before his run for the legislature.
In 2009, his second year in the Senate, a rumor that he was considering changing parties caught fire, bolstered by a tweet from state Republican Party chairman Jeff Frederick. Northam says today that he never considered changing parties. “There was some funding language about the children’s hospital and also the medical school, and I just felt that a lot of what I was asking for was falling on deaf ears,” he explains. “I talked about power-sharing in the finance committee, because back then, there was a very tight 20-20 [party split] in the Senate.” He and then-Majority Leader Dick Saslaw, a Fairfax County Democrat, met with then-Gov. Kaine to work out the issue, “and that was the end of that.”
In 2012, Northam spoke out against the transvaginal ultrasound bill, a step that placed him more squarely into Democratic territory and endeared him to groups such as NARAL Pro-Choice Virginia and Planned Parenthood. Many legislators — including the bill’s sponsor in the Senate, current lieutenant governor candidate Jill Vogel — didn’t know that the measure would mandate that every woman receive a vaginal probe before having an abortion in Virginia. Northam explained to individual legislators that the probe was rarely used and would likely serve no purpose other than to delay abortions and cost women time away from home and work, recalls state Sen. Barbara Favola, D-Arlington County. On the Senate floor, he was the first legislator to use the word “transvaginal” in speaking against the bill.
Vogel pulled the controversial bill from consideration, although then-Gov. Bob McDonnell signed a bill mandating external ultrasounds before abortions, which Northam has tried to have repealed.
In 2013, Northam won the Democratic primary for lieutenant governor, and continued to the general election, defeating conservative activist and pastor E.W. Jackson with 55 percent of the vote.
In his gubernatorial campaign, Northam has promised to be a “brick wall” against GOP-sponsored abortion restrictions. During the Democratic primary in June, Northam played up the difference between his record and that of his opponent, former U.S. Rep. Tom Perriello.
While serving in Congress, Perriello voted for an amendment to the Affordable Care Act that placed restrictions on abortions paid for by private insurance purchased through the government marketplace. The vote, which he later apologized for, earned him the ire of abortion-rights groups that have embraced Northam.
However, Perriello’s opposition to two underground, natural-gas pipelines that would run through Virginia and his decision to turn down funds from Dominion Energy, which has supported Northam, McAuliffe and many other Virginia candidates of both parties over the years, earned him support from environmentalists and western Virginians. Perriello lost the primary by nearly 12 percentage points to Northam, but the pipeline issue still affects the race. Northam has said he will follow recommendations from Virginia’s Department of Environmental Quality in water-quality reports due this fall on the Atlantic Coast Pipeline and Mountain Valley Pipeline projects.
But he says most Virginians he meets at small gatherings in homes and businesses are concerned about issues sush as health care and jobs. To address Virginia’s shortage of skilled workers, Northam has introduced the “G3: Get Skilled, Get a Job, Give Back” proposal, which would provide state-funded tuition and fees for any Virginian seeking an associate’s degree or a credential in cybersecurity, coding, clean energy or health care, in exchange for a year’s public service somewhere in the state. He also supports allowing young, undocumented Virginia immigrants to pay in-state rates for college tuition.
Since the inauguration of President Donald Trump, the gap between Republicans and Democrats has grown. Even a moderate such as Northam — a man described by many as a “Virginia gentleman” — has harsh words for Trump. “I think he lacks empathy,” Northam says, “and certainly as a leader, I think it’s important to have empathy.”
Northam defends the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, and advocates for Medicaid expansion; he opposes Trump’s travel ban and the United States’ exit from the Paris Agreement, as well as his mixed messages in response to the violence surrounding the August protest in Charlottesville about removing a Confederate statue.
Soon after the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, Northam called for neo-Nazis, white supremacists and Ku Klux Klan members to “go home and not come back,” and said he would work with localities that want Confederate statues removed from public grounds and placed in museums. “We need to be open in Virginia and welcoming to people, so when there are things like statues or names of streets that ... are divisive and promote hate and bigotry, then those aren’t in Virginia’s best interests,” he said in mid-August. “The other thing that’s important is that we tell the rest of the story. There are a lot of heroes in my mind, leaders that haven’t been recognized.”
