An Interview with Virginia State Senator Ghazala Hashmi
Dr. Ghazala Hashmi is the first Muslim wan elected to the Virginia Senate. She was elected from the 10th district (the area surrounding Richmond) in 2019, the wave election that established total Democratic control in Virginia. Because her rise to power is emblematic of Democrats’ success in Virginia, we decided to sit down with her for an interview. Below is a transcript.
James Mannon: Can you tell us about who you are and how your background influenced the legislation or issues you support?
Senator Hashmi: Sure, I’m State Senator Ghazala Hashmi, and represent the 10th Senatorial District in Virginia and my district is covering parts of the city of Richmond, as well as two surrounding counties. My main areas of policy and legislative experience focus on education. I was an educator for 30 years in this area.
JM: You were a professor and administrator at a community college before you were elected to the Virginia Senate. That’s not a very common path to political service, so what led you to run? Were you recruited to run by any organization?
GH: Well, you are right, the path through education is not typically the way that a lot of folks enter into politics, but we actually do have several educators in the General Assembly here in Virginia. Immediately after graduate school, I was teaching at colleges and universities here in the Richmond area, and one of the reasons I decided to get more engaged in the political effort because I saw how state policies in particular were having an impact on my students. I realized it’s not so much the federal government, but the state government that really makes the decisions about tuition cost, support for students, support for colleges, faculty salaries, and so forth. A lot of these decisions are made at the state level, and I was becoming more involved in higher education policy through the work I was doing at my institution, and I thought I would just be focused on policy work in higher education. But the more I looked at the current political scene, I realized that in order to have a real impact I needed to run for office and it wasn’t a sudden move on my part. For the past few years I had been involved in helping other campaigns, especially those of women running for office, and I realized that we need to have more diversity and more female representation in our elected offices, so that’s what led me to run in 2019.
JM: Historically, AAPI voters have had little influence in the Democratic Party despite being one of its strongest supporters. How can we change this?
GH: That’s a great question. I think we need to have more AAPI folks involved at every level. It doesn’t mean we all have to run for office. There’s so many ways that the folks from the AAPI community can be involved, whether that’s on campaigns or in government work or policy work, and being involved on all of these levels brings about much greater representation and many more voices, and I think we are seeing that. If you are watching this [2020] election in particular, I’ve never seen the level of AAPI involvement in a presidential campaign. It’s been very well organized and there are a lot of people involved. There is a broad coalition that has brought different AAPI communities together. I’ve also seen a lot of smaller groups working in coordination. So for instance, we have South Asians for Biden, Indian Americans for Biden, a lot of different nationalities and ethnicities represented. So I think the way in which we are going to influence the Democratic Party is to be as fully engaged as possible and be committed to doing that hard work, whether it’s organizing people in the field, calling people to phonebank, or raising money for candidates. That level of visibility and engagement is really going to bring the AAPI community into the Party.
JM: How should we bring more awareness to and combat voter suppression efforts targeted at the AAPI community? Also, do you know of any efforts that happened before Democrats won control in Virginia in 2019?
GH: I don’t know of any direct efforts at AAPI voter suppression in Virginia. But historically there have been a lot of indirect efforts at suppressing the AAPI vote. And there are some ways that we can combat this disenfranchisement. One such effort is to make voting information accessible in different languages. We have many of the primary languages of the AAPI community represented as we send out voter information. We have done phonebanks in a multitude of different languages that are used in the AAPI community, and making those changes ensures that they do have a franchise and that they are part of the process. There is a need for them to be acclimated and find the information they need to register. So a lot of times, when we have communities that historically don’t play a role in voting, it’s because they find the process challenging or difficult and they can’t really navigate the system. So the easier we make it for voters to register, to find their voting location, to vote early if they have job responsibilities, that brings more voters into the process.
JM: What can campaigns do to improve AAPI turnout? Has your campaign used any AAPI specific methods?
GH: So my campaign last year did not really target the AAPI community here in Virginia because my district really doesn’t have a strong voter base that is from the AAPI community. That demographic is not very heavily represented in my district. But as far as what we’ve seen this year, I think there’s been a huge move to recognize the power of the AAPI community. We have a very, very large population in northern Virginia and significant populations in central Virginia and in the Tidewater region. So what we’ve seen the Biden-Harris campaign doing and other congressional campaigns is advertising in media that represents different ethnicities, whether it’s the Vietnamese newspapers or the Korean radio stations, we’ve seen an outreach to pockets, very targeted messaging in that regard. And as I’ve mentioned, the campaigns are phonebanking in different languages. This has had a significant impact of bringing people into the process and getting involved in our election.
JM: Tell us about your district, because it seems like an anomaly. It has voted Democratic since 2012 in every statewide election, yet it only flipped in 2019. Did the fact that it take so long to flip have anything to do with your predecessor?
GH: I think we are seeing a shift in our population. Virginia is increasingly turning blue, and that’s also true for central Virginia, same for my district as well. So to answer your question about the statewide election, we had some immensely popular statewide candidates in the past few years, such as Terry McAuliffe and Governor Northam. Prior to that we had Tim Kaine, who’s now our Senator, and Mark Warner, who’s also our Senator, so these folks had been involved at the state level and at the national level in many different ways, and had huge support from folks in Virginia. So I don’t think it is surprising that we’ve had these Governors in office. But you’re right, we struggled at the state legislative level, which had Republican control for many years. What happened in my district in particular was that it had been held by the Republican Party for 38 years or so. Part of that was because the gentleman who held the seat prior to my immediate predecessor (his name is John Watkins), he was a very good representative of the district. Though he was a Republican, he was well known as a moderate and he worked with folks across the aisle and really focused on the issues that mattered to the folks in the district. He was very well known, well liked, and highly regarded. My immediate predecessor took the seat after Watkins had retired (he took the seat in 2015). He was finishing out his first term when I decided to run. In talking to a lot of folks, we knew that the district was vulnerable for the Republicans. You are right, it voted heavily for Abigail Spanberger the previous year. It had supported Tim Kaine very strongly. We knew if we built a strong, broad coalition that could speak to many voters throughout the district, we had the chance to flip the seat. It was a bit of a gamble, but we thought we had a strong possibility and we were able to succeed in that because we spoke to the concerns that a lot of people in the district had.
JM: What laws have Virginia Democrats passed and how did these help Virginians? What were some points of disagreement between Democratic groups in Virginia and how were these resolved?
GH: Yeah, so in 2020, the past General Assembly saw some huge movements in Virginia. There were so many pieces of legislation that had been waiting 10, 15 years, but had been stonewalled by the Republican leadership. So we were finally able to make progress on many of these pieces of legislation. First and foremost was voting rights, access, and participation. We are seeing the results of that legislation in action right now. One of the things we passed was early voting. Virginia had a very restrictive policy, if you wanted to vote absentee, you could only do it 15–20 days prior to the election and you had to have an excuse (a justification or a documentation that you absolutely could not vote on Election Day) or you had to vote on Election Day. So one of the things we did was expand early voting on September 18th. There was no need for an excuse, and we just saw tremendous numbers of voters. The data I just saw said 47% of Virginians voted early. Having that expansion was tremendous, and in addition to that we also abolished photo ID requirements, which was an effort of voter suppression. During the special session we added secure drop-boxes and we also provided postage for absentee ballots. All of these efforts have had a huge impact in Virginia.
Because the Democrats are in power, we are able to pass common-sense gun safety measures, which included having universal background checks, red flag laws in case of individuals experiencing mental health crises, and we limited purchasing of handguns to one handgun a month. These are just incremental steps that bring Virginia in line with what other states have passed. Those were some big efforts of Virginia. We also passed the ERA (the Equal Rights Amendment) . We were the 38th state to pass that at the state level so that it can go into ratification. We are waiting to see what happens with Congress now, but that was a tremendous effort to get that out of the door.
I personally worked on environmental issues this past session and so we passed the Environmental Justice Act, which provides the definition for Virginia regarding what we mean by environmental justice and describing what needs to happen if we are going to take any action that might hurt particularly vulnerable communities through environmental degradation. So those were significant bills. And then finally I would point to legislation that protects members of the LGBTQ community (the Equality Act) that prohibits discrimination in housing and jobs. Those protections were really necessary. So we did a lot of good stuff for the first session that I was a part of, and we are working really hard on getting ready for the 2021 session.
