Lily Franklin
Who: Lily Franklin
Where: Virginia House of Delegates District 41 (parts of Montgomery and Roanoke Counties, including the Virginia Tech campus and the city of Blacksburg)
Why: Lily Franklin came within 183 votes of flipping this seat in 2023, and in November she will again face off against Republican incumbent Chris Obenshain. This contest is one of the “Spotlight Races” designated by the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which is the Democratic National Party’s initiative to win competitive seats in state legislatures.
Franklin is a former math teacher in Appalachia who also served as Chief of Staff to state delegate Sam Rasoul (HD-38). As a fifth-generation southwestern Virginian, Franklin is proud to have taken a district that previously voted for both Virginia Gov. Youngkin and President Trump and made it the second-most competitive race in Virginia’s 2023 election cycle.
Affordable home ownership, infrastructure investment, support for small businesses, clean drinking water, reproductive freedom, and connecting the New River and Roanoke Valleys to strengthen the local economy are her key issues.
Obenshain, whose family has deep political roots in Virginia, is an assistant commonwealth’s attorney in Montgomery County in addition to serving in the House of Delegates. He served as chairman of the UVA Chapter of the Federalist Society.
Despite raising almost twice as much as Obershain in 2023, Franklin didn’t receive as much funding as some of the other Democratic house candidates at the time, noted Dwayne Yancey, a former editorial page editor of The Roanoke Times and long-time observer of Virginia politics, in the Cardinal News, an independent, nonprofit news site that serves Southwest and Southside Virginia. “It’s hard to escape the conclusion that part of this might simply have been geographic—the assumption that a Democrat in that part of Virginia couldn’t win,” Yancey wrote shortly after her defeat.
Franklin’s take-away about the Democratic party from her narrow loss in 2023: We’ve got to do better in rural regions. After last November, we know that’s true not just in Virginia, but across the nation.
Your donation to Franklin’s campaign will help her do that in November.
For new DITB followers: Welcome! Before you make a campaign donation, I recommend that you create a separate email account for making contributions through the ActBlue platform so that the thousands of follow-up email appeals will go to a separate account that you can ignore forever. And, by all means, don’t share your cell phone number.
Sources: Ballotpedia, Blue Virginia, Cardinal News, Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee