Democrat Mark Warner, a former Virginia governor, was elected U.S. senator in 2008. He is considered one of his party’s fast-rising stars, having found a way for Democrats to make inroads among Southern voters.
Warner was born in Indianapolis, where his father was a safety evaluator for Aetna Life & Casualty Inc. and his mother stayed at home with their two children. The family moved to Vernon, Conn., when Warner was in the eighth grade. He later recalled that he was influenced by a social studies teacher who encouraged his students to pay attention to the turbulent social change unfolding in the late 1960s. Warner told The Christian Science Monitor, “The world was transforming around the whole notion that you could make change. But I wasn’t out marching because I was too young, and besides, my parents would have killed me.”
He graduated from George Washington University, the first college graduate in his family, and from Harvard Law School. Although he has emphasized his business experience in his campaigns, his first love seems to have been politics. After law school, he worked in fundraising for the Democratic National Committee and in 1989, managed Douglas Wilder’s successful campaign to become Virginia’s first African-American governor. His business success in fact grew out of his political contacts. While working for the DNC, Warner met Rep. Tom McMillen, a Maryland Democrat, who told him about the potential of cell phone markets just as the Reagan administration was about to award 1,500 free licenses for metropolitan markets. Warner cobbled together investor groups and packaged their applications in exchange for a fee and a 5% ownership stake if they received the licenses. The best known of these ventures was Nextel, and Warner quickly became a wealthy man. His net worth in 2009 was estimated at $174 million, putting him among the richest members of Congress.
But politics was always on Warner’s mind. From 1993 to 1995, he was the Virginia Democratic chairman. In 1996, he ran against Republican Sen. John Warner in what seemed a quixotic race: the senior Warner, elected narrowly in 1978, had won re-election in a landslide in 1984 and had no Democratic opponent in 1990. But the incumbent had antagonized conservatives by refusing to endorse Republican nominee Oliver North in his 1994 race against Democratic Sen. Charles Robb and by taking liberal stands on some cultural issues. Mark Warner pitched his campaign not to his home turf in Northern Virginia but to the Shenandoah Valley and southwest Virginia, where North had done well. He carried southwest Virginia and lost the part of the state outside the three big metropolitan areas by only 51%-49%, a considerable achievement for a Democrat. But John Warner’s strength among moderates enabled him to carry Northern Virginia 55%-45%, and to carry Tidewater and metropolitan Richmond with smaller majorities. The result was a 52%-47% win for John Warner, but certainly not an end to upstart Mark Warner’s political career.
In the late 1990s, Mark Warner put millions of dollars into philanthropic efforts and set up four regional business investment funds in southwest Virginia, Southside Virginia, Richmond and Tidewater. By 1999, he had an eye on running for governor in 2001 as an entrepreneur who could bring savvy business methods to government. He picked a good year. Incumbent Republican Gov. Jim Gilmore had succeeded in helping to elect Republican majorities in both houses of the legislature, but then battled with them over the budget. Gilmore wanted to fulfill his 1997 promise to cut the state’s automobile tax, but revenues were coming in under projections. Republicans had a primary battle in 2001 between Lt. Gov. John Hager and former Attorney General Mark Earley. Earley won but had little money and no clear campaign strategy. Warner ultimately spent $5 million of his own money on the campaign, but used his fundraising skills to raise more in Virginia and around the nation.
Warner lived in a mansion in Old Town Alexandria, but avoided being typecast as an urban liberal. He called himself a fiscal conservative and pledged not to raise the income or sales taxes. Responding to complaints from traffic-choked Northern Virginia and Tidewater, he called for regional referenda on local sales tax increases for transportation. This pleased business interests and local legislators who feared congestion would stop growth, and it propitiated some tax opponents who felt they would get a chance to vote no. He opposed any new gun control laws and wooed the National Rifle Association, which remained neutral. Warner ran ads featuring old pickup trucks and bluegrass music, and he sponsored a NASCAR race truck. He traveled to all parts of rural Virginia, much as Wilder had in 1989, to show that he was in touch with everyday folks and to remind them of his investment funds and philanthropic initiatives. In October, Earley came out against the regional referenda, and he ran ads on taxes and abortion rights. But Warner had inoculated himself on taxes and Earley’s opposition to abortion put off some suburban Republicans.
Warner won, but not resoundingly, by 52%-47%, a reversal of the numbers in the 1996 Senate race. He carried all major regions of the state, albeit by narrow margins. And he attracted notice from national Democrats for winning a Southern state through business-friendly, fiscally responsible policies along with cultural conservatism—a combination Warner dubbed “radical centrism.”
Once in office, Warner got the legislature to approve transportation tax referenda in Northern Virginia and Tidewater, but the House of Delegates rejected his education initiative in 2002. As a budget shortfall grew, Warner cut $858 million in spending and laid off 1,800 state employees. In November 2003, after the legislative elections and when Virginia seemed to be in danger of losing its AAA bond rating, Warner presented his new fiscal plan: a $1 billion tax increase, with increases in the income, sales and cigarette taxes, and tax reductions for those with low incomes and in the car and food taxes. He argued that state government needed the revenue and that under his plan, 65% of Virginians would pay less. In early 2004, his plan was rejected by the heavily Republican House of Delegates, which increased taxes by just $520 million and provided few spending increases. But the state Senate passed a $3.8 billion tax increase, with $1.7 billion in new spending for schools and $1.6 billion for transportation. But GOP Speaker William Howell was unable to hold his Republicans in line, and 17 of them abandoned their anti-tax positions. The Senate agreed to a $1.3 billion tax increase, more than Warner had requested, and the House went along, a major victory for Warner.
By December 2004, the fiscal picture had changed. State government was facing a $1.2 billion surplus. Warner called for spending $32 million to offset state employees’ health insurance premiums, $200 million more for Medicaid, $70 million to cover cost overruns in college construction, and $824 million in transportation spending. He also sought a larger national profile. He became chairman of the National Governors Association, urged Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry to target Virginia (which Kerry did, until August) and advised other Democrats around the country about how to win support in rural areas and among conservative voters on culture issues. He was viewed as a potential presidential candidate in 2008, as a Democrat who would appeal to moderates. But in October 2006, he announced he would not run, citing the impact a national campaign would have on his family.
Then, when Sen. John Warner announced in August 2007 that he would retire from the Senate after five terms, Mark Warner’s next career move seemed obvious. He had no serious opposition for the Democratic nomination. On the Republican side, Jim Gilmore, Warner’s predecessor as governor, decided to get into the race. At the state Republicans’ nominating convention in June 2008, Gilmore barely prevailed after being challenged from the right by Delegate Robert Marshall because of Gilmore’s support for abortion rights in some cases. He only narrowly secured the nomination.
It turned out not to be a seriously contested campaign. Warner led in the polls by 20 percentage points or more throughout 2008. Warner raised $13.6 million while Gilmore raised just $2.8 million. Warner argued that Gilmore left the state in poor fiscal shape and that he had been able to turn things around. Warner won 65%-34%, losing only two counties in the Shenandoah Valley, two exurban Richmond counties and two small independent cities. He got 2.37 million votes, the only candidate in Virginia history to win more than 2 million votes. He won 69% of the votes in Northern Virginia, 68% in Tidewater, 64% in Richmond and 62% in the rest of the state, running far ahead of Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama even as Obama was carrying the state by six points. For the first time since 1970, when Harry Byrd Jr. declared himself an independent, Virginia had two Democratic senators.
In the Senate, Warner’s voting habits have put him in the exact political center. He has supported the Obama administration on some major legislation, but he also has joined Republicans in backing caps on discretionary spending. In April 2011, he was one of 17 Democrats to support Oklahoma GOP Sen. Tom Coburn’s amendment to force $5 billion in savings by requiring the administration to end duplication in various programs, an idea that Senate appropriators strongly opposed. In his early months in office, Warner was given the chairmanship of a Budget Committee task force on government performance. He advocated eliminating spending on 17 programs, from watershed infrastructure grants to brownfields redevelopment. His proposal won committee approval as part of a broader budget measure, but the full Senate never acted on it.
Warner also developed a reputation for bipartisanship. He and Tennesssee Republican Bob Corker worked in 2009 and 2010 on ways to prevent financial institutions from becoming “too big to fail” as part of the Wall Street overhaul. Later in 2010, Warner circulated a proposal to let tax cuts for the wealthy expire and to use the money to finance additional tax cuts for small business and investment. Warner also reached out to Georgia Republican Saxby Chambliss, with whom he shared friends in Atlanta’s business community, in forming a “Gang of Six” that explored cutting the debt in ways other than slashing domestic spending. To keep the group’s closed-door meetings from becoming too partisan, Warner reportedly would occasionally push a comic buzzer that sounded the message: “Bull---- detected. Take precautions.”
Warner has worked on a range of other issues. He got a bill into law in 2010 creating a foundation to bring private sector resources to promote sports and nutrition as ways to fight obesity. He also pushed legislation authorizing the Federal Communications Commission to hold incentive auctions to free up the wireless spectrum. During the health care overhaul debate, he led 11 freshman Democrats in proposing a series of amendments intended to control costs and boost accountability of the new program. When serious management and record-keeping problems surfaced at Arlington National Cemetery in 2010, he organized a consortium of high-tech companies to help the cemetery organize its files free of charge.
After the 2010 elections, Warner was offered a chance to become part of the Senate leadership by taking the chairmanship of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. But he turned down the job, which would have required him to become much more of a partisan.
