"On Tuesday, June 14, David Toscano’s victory party at the Charlottesville Ice Park resembled a high school dance. You remember the scene—adults standing around, trying to talk over the booming music, while the cool kids are off somewhere else getting wasted.

In this case, the kids were up at Wolfie’s on Rio Road, eating barbecue with Richard Collins. Tuesday’s primary vote proved there is something of a generation gap among Charlottesville Democrats, as the party sought a candidate to run for the 57th District seat in the Virginia House of Delegates. Toscano won the three-way race handily, taking home 2,242 votes, with Collins taking second place with 980 votes. Toscano is heavily favored to beat Republican Tom McCrystal in the November 8 election.

Even though Toscano’s party offered bottles of Starr Hill beer chilling in plastic buckets, Collins captured the younger, Greener, leftier-wing of the Charlottesville Democratic party—youthful former City Council candidates Waldo Jaquith, Stratton Salidis and Alexandria Searls, for example, all supported his campaign.

Collins might have given Toscano a closer race, but homebuilder Kim Tingley collected 930 votes with his “more liberal than thou” platform. It was an incongruous message, perhaps, for a past president of the Republican-dominated Virginia Homebuilders Association. Tingley, in fact, performed best in Albemarle County (generally considered more conservative than the city) where he got 363 votes to Collins’ 248 in the eight precincts included in the 57th District. Alas, we couldn’t make it to Tingley’s party at his headquarters on W. Main Street. (“It was fun,” says Mike Pudhorodsky, Tingley’s press secretary. “We had food and music.”)

Toscano, however, won every precinct except Clark, where Collins won by five votes with a total of 84. Toscano’s victory wasn’t exactly a surprise, since the former mayor had obviously been garnering support for his campaign for a while. When Mitch Van Yahres announced his retirement from state politics earlier this year, Toscano immediately published a long list of City and County public officials who supported his campaign. He also scored endorsements from the Virginia League of Conservation Voters, the Virginia Education Association, the Charlottesville Area Association of Realtors and The Daily Progress. He led all the candidates in fundraising with a total of $76,692 from 348 contributors as of May 31.

“When you’ve been in politics for 20 years, and people have voted for you before, that’s a huge advantage,” says Lloyd Snook, a Toscano supporter and former City Dem chair. “I was doing some work on the phone bank, and I talked to someone who said ‘David’s doing a great job. We should keep him where he is.’ They thought he was the incumbent!”

As a City Councilor between 1990 and 2002, Toscano always made nice with Albemarle County, which also helped, says Snook. “He was never in a flaming war with the County,” Snook says. “There was really no group that was mad at David,” he says.

Van Yahres, who stopped by Toscano’s party, said that if Toscano wins in November, as he is expected to, his toughest challenge will be negotiating a General Assembly where right-wing Republicans hold a lot of sway. “He’ll have to deal with the Christian Right,” says Van Yahres, who has cited bitter partisanship in Richmond as a reason for his retirement. “That’s not going to be any fun.”

In Toscano, area Dems seem to be saying they prefer a moderate liberal who will take a more compromising tone with Republicans, in the style of Virginia’s Democratic Governor Mark Warner.

“Charlottesville is not that much more liberal than the rest of the world,” says Snook. “And the way things are in the General Assembly, no Democrat is going to be able to do anything without the help of about 15 Republicans.” (John Borgmeyer, C-Ville Weekly, June 21, 2005)