Ahead of this year’s state elections, WHRO invited voters across the region to share their thoughts and questions about our state’s government.
Casey Slaughter was browsing books at Chesapeake’s Greenbrier Library one Saturday morning when WHRO asked if she had any questions about how our state’s government works.
“I didn’t know Virginia doesn’t do consecutive governor terms. So I am a little curious as to why Virginia doesn’t allow consecutive terms,” Slaughter said. “I don’t know if that’s to prevent corruption or if that’s to give a new breath of fresh air. So I am curious why Virginia is like that and how many other states are like that as well.”
John Dinan chairs the Department of Politics and International Affairs at Wake Forest University and literally wrote the book on Virginia’s constitution.
He said the limitation dates to the late 1700s and early 1800s. America’s founding fathers had just won a war against a tyrannical king and distrusted executive power.
“The founding generation was very jealous of protecting the legislator’s power from the executive, and so their putting limits on the governor's terms was meant as a way to limit executive power and preserve a strong legislature,” Dinan said.
Legislators were so serious about keeping the reins on the governor that they selected Virginia’s executive themselves, until a new state constitution in 1851 gave voters a chance to pick the governor directly.
That version of the Constitution included the sequential-term limit to prevent any one governor from accruing too much power and influence.
Dinan said single-term limits were more common in America’s earlier eras. When the state constitution was last redrafted in 1971, Virginia was among 15 states with a one-term restriction.
“Since that time, though, all the other states have just eliminated that limit, and so now Virginia stands alone,” he said.
The idea of adopting a two-term limit has come up in the General Assembly.
Democrats floated the idea when Ralph Northam was in office, and it popped up again just last year. Del. Tom Garrett, a Republican from Goochland County, argued that consecutive terms for the governor wouldn’t upset the balance of power.
“What happens is we get an executive, whether Democrat or Republican, they come into office, they have bold ideas on which they ran upon, which they were elected, that appealed to your constituents and my constituents, and they won,” he told a House subcommittee in January 2024.
“And they’re a lame duck the day they get here.”
Like other efforts over the last couple decades, Garrett’s bill didn’t make it far.
Democrats killed the 2024 effort in a subcommittee vote along party lines. In that meeting, Del. David Reed from Ashburn questioned the wisdom of potentially doubling a governor’s tenure.
“By most calculations, our governor is the most powerful governor in the United States. And so therefore, I’m curious how you would reconcile having a two-term, very powerful governor with no other changes to the constitution that would maintain a checks and balances with the legislative branch,” Reed asked.
Garett said just one more term for a governor wouldn’t upset the balance of power and refuted the idea that Virginia’s governor is notably more powerful than other states.
Dinan said Reed’s idea that Virginia’s governor is uniquely powerful may have been true earlier in the state’s history, but these days the state’s executive branch’s power is about average compared to its peers across the nation.
When the state was updating the constitution in 1971, leaders had a different take than Garrett.
“The former governors who talked with a commission that was drafting the constitution said, ‘We actually think that having a one-term limit allows us to better do our job without having too many political considerations or electoral considerations over our head,’” Dinan said.
That input is likely a big reason why the constitution commission didn’t change the limit then. But Dinan also notes the attitude has flipped recently.
Governors since the 1990s have signaled they’d like the chance to serve a second consecutive term. Virginia’s structure doesn’t restrict someone to a single term, but only prevents them from serving one term after another.
But doing so has proven pretty difficult over the state’s history.
In recent memory, Gov. Terry McAuliffe, who led the state from 2014 to 2018, unsuccessfully ran a second time in 2021, three years after his first term ended.
However, one person did serve two terms as Virginia’s governor: Mills Godwin.
Godwin was an ardent segregationist and one of the primary architects of Virginia’s Massive Resistance movement to fight school integration. He won the Governor’s Mansion as a part of the famed Byrd Democratic political machine in 1965. Godwin pivoted after the fall of the Byrd machine, assembling a coalition that included Black advocacy groups and won again as a Republican in 1973, after Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy prompted a national realignment of the two major parties.
So why keep the single-term limit in the modern day? Dinan said one reason is that it makes for more even elections.
“You take away the governor's reelection and incumbent advantages and allow the competition to be waged between candidates without regard to incumbent advantage,” he said.
Dinan doesn’t think the one-term limit is set in stone in Virginia, but it seems unlikely to change anytime soon.
