At the end of his 44-year tenure in the Virginia Senate, increasingly surrounded by a new generation of more liberal Democrats, Dick Saslaw remained a bulwark for the state’s business community.
Now, two years after his retirement, Saslaw, 85, is putting himself back in the role of nudging Democrats toward the middle — with the help of an unexpected $450,000 windfall that he has rolled into a new political leadership committee.
Saslaw said the Virginia Forward PAC would focus on state legislative races “to help Democrats stay in the majority and hopefully keep them as close to the political center as possible.”
His first choice will be to support business-friendly candidates who are willing to stake out centrist positions. “That’s how you get things done,” he said. “There has to be a middle ground on damn near everything.”
Saslaw said his PAC won’t have a litmus test, like the environmental group Clean Virginia, which donates only to candidates who agree to swear off money from electric utility Dominion Energy.
“I don’t insist on purity,” he added. “I know that not everyone is going to think like me.”
His tenure in the state legislature lasted so long that in the end his colleagues maintained a running joke about Saslaw being old enough to have rubbed shoulders with historic figures dating back to Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson and even Moses. At the 2024 unveiling of his Senate portrait, the sarcastic and wisecracking Democrat noted that when he arrived at the General Assembly in 1976, the House speaker was the son of a Civil War veteran.
“When you’ve been in any job long enough that you can tell people you served with somebody whose father fought in the Civil War, it’s probably time,” Saslaw said.
With his new PAC, Saslaw will now try to stay relevant in state elections this fall and the next Virginia Senate elections, scheduled in 2027.
Seed money for the Virginia Forward PAC came from court-ordered restitution in the case of a former campaign treasurer who embezzled $653,000 from Saslaw’s campaign account from June 2013 to September 2014.
Saslaw didn’t know about the theft until FBI agents knocked on his door and informed him of what was going on. “I wasn’t going over the monthly [bank] statements, because I trusted these people,” he said.
Saslaw was one of a handful of Virginia politicians who have paid too little attention to the bottom line and placed too much trust in their bookkeepers. Last week, the former longtime treasurer for U.S. Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine pleaded guilty to stealing more than $840,000 in political contributions.
In his case, Saslaw was fortunate to recover a bulk of the money stolen from him because his ex-treasurer and her husband owned a beach house that federal authorities were able to seize.
In July 2023, the U.S. Treasury cut a check for $552,946 to Saslaw for Senate.
That year, Saslaw dipped deep into his campaign funds to help Democrats hold their majority in the state Senate. He donated every penny of the more than $1 million he had in his Senate campaign account when he announced his retirement.
But Saslaw kept the bulk of the restitution money in his Senate account. Early this year, he created the Virginia Forward PAC and transferred $456,000 to the new fund.
There is a long tradition of ex-state legislators using leftover campaign funds in an effort to remain relevant after they leave office. Republican Sen. John Chichester doled out $273,000 to Republican candidates and favorite charities for more than a decade after he retired from the Senate in 2008. Former House Democratic Leader David Toscano donated more than $100,000 to candidates in the three years after he left office in 2020.
In fact, Saslaw is not the only state legislator who retired in 2024 with a large war chest in the bank. Former Republican Sen. Tommy Norment reported in May that he still had $417,672 in the Virginia Way, a leadership PAC.
But Saslaw says he’s going to attempt something no ex-legislators have ever done — to raise a significant amount of new money after leaving office.
Saslaw’s seniority and affinity with the state’s business community made him a formidable fundraiser. It remains to be seen, however, how much money he can raise now that he no longer has his hands on the levers of power.
His PAC got a promising start last month (June) when Dominion Energy kicked in $50,000. The Richmond-based electric utility was Saslaw’s top donor with $665,000 donated between 1996 and 2023, according to the Virginia Public Access Project, a nonpartisan tracker of political donations.
Saslaw has not set a fundraising goal. “I’m going to do the best I can,” he said.
