DPVA Chairman Bagby's 2025 Campaign Promises

A presentation of the commitments State Sen. Lamont Bagby made to the Democratic Party of Virginia's Central Committee as part of his 2025 successful campaign for chair.

Last Saturday, the Democratic Party of Virginia’s Central Committee elected State Sen. Lamont Bagby (D-Richmond) as state party chair. As Brandon Jarvis reported, Bagby received 172 out of 262 total votes. Approximately 40 additional members of the Central Committee decided not to cast a vote.

As part of Bagby’s campaign - and because he had two opponents (including me) pushing specific reform agendas - he and his campaign staff distributed a series of emails and text messages, many of which contained elements of his platform and commitments to the voters.

Here’s a presentation of most of Bagby’s campaign promises for his one-year term as chair, based on his campaign communications and the candidate forums.

Bagby’s Platform

In his March 3 email to Central Committee members, Bagby and staff laid out his platform:

1.) Create a Transparent, Responsive DPVA: Instill a transparent and responsive culture within the Democratic Party of Virginia to improve relationships between DPVA and our on the ground activists and leaders.

2.) Improve Communication and Coordination: Improve communication between grassroots volunteers, local party leaders, and Coordinated Campaign leadership during election season to ensure positive results, addressing past communication challenges.

3.) Empower the Central Committee: Seek to empower the Central committee as a more involved body within the Democratic Party of Virginia by ensuring that the Committee is given information and a true opportunity to be heard on critical decisions to boost attendance and participation. Your voice and input matter.

4.) Modernize our Party Plan for a Stronger Future: Appoint a committee that will update the Party Plan, including accounting for virtual meetings and electronic voting. It will review and potentially expand the responsibility of the Central Committee and acknowledge the importance of the DPVA being responsive to our committees.

5.) Strengthen Local Election Support: Ensuring that the local elections department at the Democratic Party of Virginia is a permanent department to help and support local candidates running for office.

6.) Build a Year-Round Organizing Infrastructure: I will work hard to fundraise for a a year-round organizing model that employs a permanent organizing staff. I will work with national partners to make it a reality.

Supporting Rural Organizing

In a March 4 email, Bagby and staff expanded his commitments with his email entitled “Supporting Rural Organizing.”

From the email:

To expand upon yesterday’s email, I aim to help bolster our rural organizing through several parts of my platform:

Strengthen Local Election Support:

I began my public service journey as a member of the Henrico County School Board, representing the community that raised me while fighting to support our public schools, students, and staff members. I know firsthand that our local electeds are on the frontlines fighting tooth-and-nail to protect our neighbors, to support our essential services, and to fight back against the current chaos in ways that directly impact our lives. Too often, our bench of local electeds in our rural communities are facing these challenges without meaningful support from our Party.

If we are truly committed to building our bench of Democratic local elected officials and a broader pipeline of Democratic leadership, especially in our rural communities, then the DPVA needs to be ready to lock in.

I propose making the Local Elections Department at the DPVA a permanent office to support candidate recruitment, running for office, and facilitating relationships between candidates, campaign staff, and local committees and activists. This isn’t just a matter of our candidates and their campaign teams staying connected to our Party infrastructure; rather, this is a necessary step to make sure our Party is learning from the leaders on the ground who have done the work to earn the trust of their communities.

We cannot win Virginia without rural Democrats who have been on the frontlines of fighting MAGA extremism for longer than most of us can imagine. I’m committed to making sure our Party is ready to build and in some cases rebuild our bench in Rural Virginia.

Year-Round Organizing Model:

There is no off-year in Virginia. While elections every year have forged the most effective committees and grassroots organizing in the nation, our candidates and their campaign teams too often find themselves starting from scratch every single cycle. Limited or nonexistent voter contact data from past cycles, particularly in rural areas, cost barriers to getting VAN access, and inconsistent candidate recruitment efforts, all hold our Democratic campaign teams back. In the current assault on our democracy by Trump, Musk, and their extremist MAGA followers, we can no longer afford to waste time recreating the wheel year after year.

Building a year-round organizing model will ensure both the integrity of voter contact data cycle-after-cycle, and will also lay the groundwork for sustainable growth to support our committees. A year-round organizing program will strengthen our rural leadership pipeline by making getting involved in the Democratic Party more accessible. Ultimately, the Party will be better equipped to develop effective and impactful messaging because this program will be laser-focused on the listening to the needs of the communities they work in and on building relationships that will be transformational, instead of transactional.

Virginia is a beacon of progress for the rest of the South, and this is in large part because of the rural organizers working to make our Party the strongest it can be. Deploying local, year-round organizers will exponentially increase the impact of our committees in ways that build more meaningful relationships; expand our leadership pipeline; and build a lasting diverse coalition of Democratic voters.

[Emphases in bold added].

Empowering the Central Committee

On March 6, Bagby and staff released an email entitled “Empowering the Central Committee.”

From that email:

I’ve heard from many Central Committee leaders about the need for a more deliberative and collaborative process that guides DPVA decision-making. Specifically, how can we do more to increase attendance and further involve the Central Committee in our Party’s business and affairs? I have a few ideas.

• Activities Before and After Central Committee Business: Hosting quarterly receptions with special elected guests prior to and after Central Committee meetings as well as breakfasts the morning of is an easy way to both show DPVA’s appreciation to those of you who travel far to attend our meetings and a way to increase collaboration amongst Central Committee members. You are a valued part of our DPVA family and I want you to feel that value each meeting.

• Relying Upon the Expertise of our Central Committee Members: Our first Vice-Chair of Organization, Gaylene Kanoyton, has been a steadfast advocate for regional trainings and workshops that utilizes and highlights the unique set of skills, value, and talent that each of you, as a member of Central, brings to our Party. Whether it’s utilizing our Young Democrats to train and talk to our committees about youth outreach or our caucus infrastructure to do the same regarding constituent outreach, we certainly can do more to utilize the expertise of our central committee.

• Being Accountable and Seeking Feedback from Central: I’ve also heard too often that the decisions that DPVA makes aren’t done with the collaboration of the Central Committee in mind. As Chair, I would seek to reverse that trend by making our meetings more conversational to collect and utilize your thoughts on the direction of our Party.

Sustaining the Party

In the March 12 CD10 Democratic Committee forum, streamed live on Facebook [at 00:55:00], all three candidates committed to refuse contributions from Dominion Energy and Appalachian Power to the Democratic Party of Virginia and its PAC.

And on March 19, Bagby and staff distributed an email entitled “Sustaining Our Party.” From that email:

With less than a week to go before the election of a new Chair, I wanted to highlight a skill that our next DPVA Chair must possess in order to be successful: the ability to fundraise the millions of dollars it takes to sustain the Democratic Party of Virginia.

Every candidate for Chair, including me, has spent weeks campaigning on new, innovative strategies and policies they would like to implement if elected – policies like implementing a year-round organizing plan, expanding departments to include new full time staffers and investing in rural Virginia. But the simple truth is these things cannot happen if we do not have a proven fundraiser at the helm of our Party.

I’m the only candidate for Chair who has a proven track record of fundraising. I am proud to be one of the top fundraisers in the Virginia General Assembly. And from 2018 onward, during my tenure as Chair of the Virginia Legislative Black Caucus, we’ve had our strongest fundraising years to date.

I refuse to allow DPVA to go back to the days where we couldn’t afford to hire quality staffers, where we relied on our statewide officeholders to keep the lights on, and when we struggled to garner the necessary resources to run any kind of effective program across the Commonwealth.

Know that when I unveiled my platform of investing in rural Virginia, of implementing a year-round organizing program, and bringing back our local elections department, I did so with the confidence that I could marshal the necessary resources to make it happen. So as this campaign comes to a close and you begin to make your final decisions for Chair, I hope you’ll evaluate both the promises that have been made to you as members of the Central Committee and the ability to implement said promises. There’s too much on the line for us not to get this right.

[Emphases in bold added].

As you can see, Bagby offered the DPVA Central Committee an expansive set of commitments for this one-year term as chair - and a majority of the Committee accepted the offer.