Back in January, James DeVita stood before the Arlington County Democratic Committee, announcing plans to run against incumbent state Sen. Adam Ebbin in the June Democratic primary.
Turns out he’s actually running against state Sen. Barbara Favola.
Blame the 2021 legislative redistricting, which shuffled districts and led a lot of people to be slightly confused about who will represent whom after the upcoming elections.
Ebbin currently lives in, and will run for a new term in, the recently reconfigured 39th Senate District, which has a handful of Arlington precincts but largely is centered on Alexandria. Favola will be running in the new 40th Senate District, which will include the remainder of Arlington.
Whether running against Ebbin or Favola, the race will be an uphill one for DeVita, an attorney. Both incumbents in the past have made easy work of challengers both during primaries and general elections.
In his January kickoff remarks, the challenger seemed to acknowledge as much.
“Politics should be about ideas,” DeVita said then, pressing issues ranging from decriminalization of drug possession to green energy to tackling hunger and homelessness.
As it stands now, DeVita is the lone intra-party challenger to Favola, while Ebbin has no competition within the party. Both seats are seen as reliably Democratic in their composition, likely making the general election a foregone conclusion.
Currently, Arlington has three state Senate seats (the third occupied by Janet Howell), but redistricting has reduced that number to two. Favola’s previous 31st District was an unwieldy one, running from Arlington all the way west to eastern Loudoun County, but the new district is far more compact.
