Does Virginia Offer Enough Jobs for Political Professionals?

Corey Lewandowski need not fret.

Donald Trump’s mercurial campaign manager lost his job Monday morning, apparently fired after an intervention staged by Trump’s offspring.

Still, Lewandowski will probably be able to find a new job, either managing another campaign or becoming a Fox News contributor.

That’s the nature of the political consulting profession. Although the jobs are seasonal — like department store Santas — another season always rolls around, particularly in Virginia, where annual elections offer unusual opportunities for campaign professionals, though fewer than one might expect.

Surprisingly according to a report released last month by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, Virginia only ranks tenth in the country as an employer of workers in political campaigns, with only about one thousand people (at most) permanently engaged in the profession.

I say “surprisingly” for two reasons: one, Virginia is adjacent to Washington, D.C., and its permanent political class and, two, because of the perpetual cycle of Virginia politics that I already cited.

As the BLS report notes,

Although political organizations employment in the District of Columbia has also varied quite a bit, it rarely fell below 1,000. Political organizations employment in the District of Columbia has been under 1,000 in only about a dozen months since 1990 (mostly in the early 1990s) and has averaged around 1,200 for several years. Since a decline after an unusually high peak before the 2004 election, it has ranged from 999 to 1,882.

You’d think that some of that employment would spill over to Arlington and Alexandria (not to mention Bethesda and Silver Spring) but apparently it doesn’t, at least not significantly.

States with a larger political campaign sector include California and Illinois, which makes some sense because of their larger populations and geographic areas, but also for a more compelling reason: in places like Chicago and Los Angeles, a city council race could cost millions of dollars, with everything that money can buy in terms of TV advertising, direct mail, and door-to-door canvassing — and all the people hired to do those things. Virginia simply lacks comparably large cities, though Fairfax County comes close.

Virginia’s statewide elections are countercyclical, in terms of the BLS data, but still not big enough to make a real dent in the political employment statistics here.

And most Virginia elections — think of the House of Delegates and state Senate — are uncontested, which means incumbents don’t have to hire anyone to work on their campaigns, and whatever challengers remain have too few resources to hire professionals and instead rely on volunteers as much as possible. Local offices are rarely competitive, too, so paid campaign workers are a rarity.

Come to think of it, political consultants should get on the bandwagon to end gerrymandering. It would be good for their business.