There are many ways for a political candidate to garner the glowing press he desires while on the campaign trail.

He can host rallies and town halls, attend forums and speaking engagements, visit community colleges and housing developments. This is what industry insiders call “earned media,” that is publicity that a candidate neither owns (like a website) nor pays for (like an advertisement). Earned, owned and paid media are considered the three pillars of publicity.

But there is a fourth, and uncelebrated, pillar: simply cold calling a newspaper.

Which is what Levar Stoney’s campaign did.

Stoney, the former mayor of Richmond, is one of six candidates running for the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor in Virginia in Tuesday’s primary.

On March 20, Stoney campaign manager Zach Marcus reached out to The News Virginian in Waynesboro and invited a reporter to meet with the candidate “to talk about the campaign, the future of the Commonwealth, and everything going on right now.”

Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney speaks during a news conference on Tuesday, Sept. 5, 2023.

The News Virginian made no promise that the unsolicited invitation or the telephone interview that followed would be newsworthy enough to merit any coverage. But that’s clearly what the campaign had in mind.

Other nearby news outlets also were contacted around that same time. Other nearby news outlets ran stories with such nondescript headlines as “Stoney discusses run for Lieutenant Governor” and “Former Richmond mayor visits Lynchburg in campaign for lieutenant governor.”

On the phone with The News Virginian on April 1, Stoney was polished and poised. While not newsworthy in and of itself, the conversation provided some leads worth exploring for future coverage, whether or not the candidate won his race.

So after the call ended, The News Virginian reached out to Stoney’s former colleagues in Richmond and Virginia politics for clarification, perspective and insight. They touted his accomplishments in education, the opening of community centers and improved regional partnerships. They also noted some defeats in economic development and infrastructure.

The News Virginian reached back out to Stoney’s campaign with some follow-up questions, and the candidate agreed to sit down in The News Virginian newsroom in Waynesboro on May 24.

Stoney managed to make the meeting just an hour prior to a speaking engagement in Lexington. Again, the conversation was agreeable, the candidate affable. Again, there was no promise made The News Virginian would be covering that meeting or the prior one.

Then, on May 27, the newspaper received another unsolicited invitation.

“Levar Stoney told me you were writing a story on him and asked me to call you to speak about my decade of working with him,” Tyrone Nelson, who sits on Henrico County’s board of supervisors, said in a text message.

Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney poses for a photo outside of City Hall on Friday, Dec. 1, 2023.

Stoney’s model

Stoney knows he may come across as unconventional, despite his fairly conventional bona fides. He considers himself the “bold” choice.

“I never shied away from the decisions to be made,” he said of his career in politics. “I chose to be bold. You have to push the envelope.”

But even unconventional candidates find inspiration in their predecessors.

Stoney was explicit that he is modeling his political campaign, and his political future, on Tim Kaine, the sitting U.S. senator who previously served as Richmond mayor, Virginia lieutenant governor and Virginia governor — in that order.

“Tim Kaine is my model,” Stoney said. “I will be an advocate for all cities and towns. Tim Kaine visited all cities and towns.”

Kaine, a Minnesota native, made a point of traveling the commonwealth after he was elected lieutenant governor. Early in his tenure, The News Virginian found the Democrat visiting the Wilson Workforce and Rehabilitation Center in Fishersville, a visit that generated some earned media for the newcomer to statewide office.

Kaine told The News Virginian he was pleased to hear Stoney respects his work as lieutenant governor, but said he won’t be endorsing him.

Stoney did earn the endorsement of Kaine’s wife, Anne Holton, a former Virginia Secretary of Education and the daughter of former Virginia Gov. Linwood Holton. But Kaine, who said he knows all of the candidates in the lieutenant governor race well, declined to endorse the man who hopes to follow in his footsteps.

“I’m a fan,” Kaine said of Stoney. “He was a good mayor who helped with a renaissance of Richmond in his two terms.”

Kaine also lauded Stoney for his work in education, opening community centers and cleaning up the polluted James River that runs through the city.

Recounting his own political career, Kaine said that once he was elected lieutenant governor, “I knew I would be governor.”

The man who succeeded Kaine was more blunt.

“Anybody who runs for lieutenant governor wants to be governor,” Bill Bolling told The News Virginian.

Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney gets ready to deliver his State of the City address at Main Street Station in the city on Tuesday, Jan. 31, 2023.

Stoney’s obstacles

There’s no doubt Stoney wants to be governor; it’s the office he intended to run for this year.

On Dec. 4, 2023, Stoney, still mayor of Richmond, announced he was running to be the next governor of Virginia. By that time it had been nearly a month since U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger, D-7th, had announced her own candidacy.

Spanberger — with her national name recognition, strong polling, fundraising prowess and reputation for bipartisanship — proved to be an impressive opponent even before campaigning got underway.

Nearly five months after he threw his hat into the race, Stoney pulled it right back out. On April 23 of last year, he opted instead to run for lieutenant governor.

“Abigail Spanberger is a very formidable candidate,” Stoney told the Richmond Times-Dispatch after announcing his change of heart.

Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger speaks to a crowd during a campaign fundraiser, Sunday, April 27, 2025, at the Greencroft Club in Albemarle County.

“It would have been a grueling, negative race, and that is not what you want to ensure we elect a Democrat as governor,” he said.

Others said there was a simpler reason behind Stoney’s decision.

“It wasn’t inevitable that he would withdraw,” Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, told the Richmond Times-Dispatch at the time. “It was inevitable that he would not succeed.”

Instead of a single opponent, Stoney now faces a dense field of five other candidates, including two pretty formidable state senators: Ghazala Hashmi of Chesterfield County and Aaron Rouse of Virginia Beach. Whoever wins at the polls Tuesday will face Republican John Reid, a former Richmond radio host, in November’s general election.

Both Hashmi and Rouse have an advantage over Stoney when it comes to publicity: They are both still elected officials, passing bills, hosting press conferences and making the news.

“Aaron Rouse is a very impressive guy,” acknowledged Bolling, a Republican.

Hashmi leads the pack in recent fundraising, pulling in $742,841 between April 1 and June 5 this year, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. Stoney came in second, at $702,234, and Rouse came in third at $660,180.

Stoney has some experience running in larger candidate fields. He won Richmond mayoral bids by a plurality in two congested elections. He told The News Virginian that he knows all too well that he needs to get as many votes as he can from as many corners of Virginia as he can to win the primary.

“I will need the Shenandoah Valley, Southside and Northern Virginia,” he said, adding that he has spent most of his campaign in vote-rich Northern Virginia.

Absent from his list, though, is Richmond, the city he once led.

Former Richmond City Councilmember Michael Jones, now serving in the House of Delegates, has endorsed Hashmi over the onetime mayor.

“I’ve seen her do the work, and she supports the Black and Brown communities,” Jones told The News Virginian.

Hashmi has the most experience of any of the candidates, Jones said.

And Hashmi agreed.

“I have the longest length of experience in the General Assembly,” she told The News Virginian via email. “I have served in the Virginia Senate for six years. The lieutenant governor serves as the President of the Senate, and this experience is critical in order to ensure that the legislative work of the Senate moves forward effectively.”

Stoney’s Richmond

Stoney’s desire to lead began in elementary school. He helped his grandmother in York County by writing the monthly checks to pay bills, diligently calling her bank to make sure there was adequate money in her account to cover the bills.

At one point, he wrote to the maintenance director of the housing complex where his family lived, asking why the basketball goal remained broken. Stoney’s father was assistant maintenance director.

“My father asked if I had written a letter to his boss,’’ Stoney recalled.

The maintenance crew ultimately repaired the basketball goal — an early victory for Stoney.

Twice elected student body president at James Madison University, Stoney once led the Virginia Democratic Party and served as Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s secretary of the commonwealth. Stoney has been called McAuliffe’s protégé, and McAuliffe’s daughter Sally serves as Stoney’s deputy campaign manager.

The Stoney star burned bright after he became Richmond mayor in 2017. He delivered his State of the City address in January 2018 at a Richmond middle school with a flourish, at one point taking out a pair of pennies in a bid to persuade City Council to increase the city meals tax to fund new capital projects.

“It was great political theater. It showed him at his finest,’’ Rich Meagher, chairman of the political science department at Randolph-Macon College and host of the VPM podcast “RVA’s got issues,” told The News Virginian.

“I wanted to tackle school construction but didn’t have the revenue stream,” Stoney recalled.

Stoney noted that 40% of Richmond’s students live under the federal poverty line, meaning a family of four’s household income is less than $32,150 a year. Stoney also was haunted by the condition of a city school once attended by former Richmond mayors Doug Wilder and Henry Marsh. The school was mold-infested and obsolete. Stoney thought building new schools was imperative.

City Council voted 7-2 to increase the meals tax by 1.5%. The additional revenue funded $150 million in construction and enabled the building of three new city schools.

Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney speaks during a news conference on Tuesday, Sept. 5, 2023.

Stoney also pushed for more classroom spending, after-school programming and enrichment activities, as well as a scholarship program to help students attend community college for free.

By the end of his tenure, Stoney said, “We outperformed the commonwealth in reading and arithmetic.”

“Levar did some good things,’’ Jones said. The former councilman said two of the new schools funded by the meals tax hike were in his district.

Not everyone was as pleased with Stoney’s work.

Stoney does not recall Richmond residents “clamoring for tax cuts,” but Reva Trammell, a 24-year member of Richmond City Council, told The News Virginian that’s exactly what her constituents would have liked to see.

Trammell said she is grateful for Stoney’s initiative that built a community center in her Southside district, but she does not believe that Stoney’s taxes were a net positive.

“We didn’t correct drainage issues in my district and taxes are too high,” she said. “Why not give something back to the people?”

Trammell highlighted the Richmond water crisis shortly after Stoney left office. After a Jan. 6 breakdown at a Richmond water treatment facility, much of Richmond’s 230,000 residents were left without drinking water for six days.

The trouble with Richmond’s water infrastructure predates Stoney. Jones said Council tried and failed to raise water rates during his own seven-year tenure. The increased revenue would have allowed the city to provide necessary upgrades to the system and prevent future failures, but “no one on Council wanted to raise the rates.”

Jones maintains that Stoney could have done more. “He could have insisted on it,” he said.

Stoney disagrees.

He said water rates were modestly raised during his tenure to help fund a $400 million investment in water treatment infrastructure. But Stoney acknowledged the improvements “were a drop in the bucket because of deferred maintenance on a 100-year-old facility.”

A new billboard along Interstate 195 in Richmond features an attack on former Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney for the water crisis that left much of the city without water for days in January.

Other Stoney critics highlighted his failure to launch a $1.5 billion redevelopment project in downtown Richmond called Navy Hill.

The public-private project would have replaced the aging Richmond Coliseum and added new retail, office and hospitality space to the area. City Council vetoed Navy Hill by a narrow 5-4 vote in February 2020, citing risks and other concerns.

Beyond revitalization of a historically Black neighborhood, Stoney said Navy Hill would have brought “jobs, jobs, jobs’’ to Richmond. “It would have meant jobs for those with a high school education. It was important for the city to diversify the tax base,” he said.

Others noted Stoney’s handling of the 2020 protests in the city after the death of George Floyd, a Black man killed by a White police officer in Minneapolis. Stoney frustrated both sides of the matter by calling for the removal of the city’s Confederate monuments, viewed as symbols of White supremacy, and then calling in the police on the protesters demonstrating in front of those same monuments.

Meagher said Stoney should be applauded for his historic decision to remove the monuments.

“He took a political risk,’’ Meagher said. “He deserves credit for it.”

But the removal of the monuments has left a gaping hole in the landscape of a major city thoroughfare. There are still no plans to replace the statues which once towered over Monument Avenue. Marcus, Stoney’s campaign manager, said Stoney decided city funds would be spent more wisely in other areas.

Among Stoney’s more vocal allies is Nelson, the Henrico County supervisor who reached out to The News Virginian at Stoney’s behest.

Nelson lauded Stoney’s work building stronger bonds with Richmond’s neighbors in the region, specifically when it came to transportation.

“We are better regionally than when I came into government in 2012,’’ said Nelson.

Nelson credits Stoney for upgrades to the Greater Richmond Transit Authority, which provides bus service to Richmond and neighboring Henrico and Chesterfield counties, and more recently the Central Virginia Transportation Authority.

The transportation authority, formed in 2020 at the direction of the General Assembly, serves nine cities and counties in the Richmond area and obtains its funding from sales and gas tax revenues. Chet Parsons, its executive director, said the authority has contributed millions to transportation projects in and around Richmond, including a $100 million contribution to help widen Interstate 64 for 29 miles between Richmond and Tidewater.

Stoney represented Richmond on the authority board, serving as its chairman in his last year in office.

“Richmond is better off,” Nelson said of Stoney’s tenure. “People want to live in Richmond now. That was not always the case.”

And although Jones has endorsed Stoney’s opponent and has been critical of Stoney’s work in Richmond, he acknowledges that’s just the cost of doing business in politics.

“I don’t think any mayor has left office unscathed,” he said.

Some proud flesh can be beneficial, but open wounds and reckless behavior can be fatal. If Stoney loses in Tuesday’s primary, or in November’s general election, his chances of ever winning the long-coveted Executive Mansion diminish significantly.

“There are only so many elections you can lose before the door closes,” Meagher said.

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