Jennifer McClellan, newly elected Democratic candidate for Congress in Virginia’s 4th District (Photo by Jay Paul)
After party workers spent roughly 16 hours counting 27,900 votes, Virginia state Sen. Jennifer McClellan, D-9th, emerged at 4 a.m. Thursday as the Democratic nominee to succeed the late U.S. Rep. Donald McEachin, D-4th. In a special election on Feb. 21, she will face Republican Leon Benjamin, whom McEachin defeated by large margins in November and in 2020. If elected, McClellan will be the commonwealth’s first Black woman to serve in Congress.
McEachin died Nov. 28 of cancer. To nominate a successor, voters in Tuesday’s firehouse primary turned out at eight polling places in the 4th Congressional District, which stretches from Richmond in the north to Emporia to the south and Chesapeake in the east. Voting at the Diversity Richmond polling place was particularly heavy, with residents waiting in long lines for several hours.
McClellan received 84.8% of the vote, while state Sen. Joe Morrissey, D-16th, netted 13.6% and entrepreneur Tavorise Marks and former Rep. Joseph Preston, D-63rd, each received less than 1% of the vote. McClellan had emerged as the clear choice of the Democratic Party establishment once Rep. Lamont Bagby, D-74th, ended his short-lived candidacy, endorsing McClellan. In 2017, she won election to McEachin’s state Senate seat after he was elected to Congress.
In a statement, the Democratic Party of Virginia said the firehouse primary was the “largest party-run nomination process” in its history, noting that the last state-run primary in the 4th District saw 15,728 votes cast.
