Activated

“Have you seen my billboard?” Dot Heffron asks. 

It is a sunny Saturday afternoon in October, a high-traffic day on Midlothian Turnpike, a six-lane highway in suburban Chesterfield County, Virginia. At the crest of a sloping ridge, Heffron guides her blue Subaru Outback out of the coursing lanes into a parking lot. 

“It’s right up here.”

Above the Mediterranean restaurant and the thrift shop for a local hospice is an electronic billboard, changing messages every eight seconds. We idle in the lot. Ads for legislators, prosecutors, and revenue commissioners scroll by, indicators of election season.

Then we see Dot — a stark, 10-foot-high, black-and-white photo. She comes with a warning label.

DOT HEFFRON
Cast the Lone Vote to Keep Our Children Home During
COVID-19, Causing Excessive Learning Loss.
VOTE TO KEEP DOT HEFFRON OUT OF OUR CHILDREN’S EDUCATION

It isn’t every mom that’s attacked on the highways of her hometown and, until recently, it wasn’t Dot Heffron, either. 

Indeed, until recently, attacks were rare against anyone seeking a school board seat. But since Dot Heffron was first elected to the Chesterfield County, Virginia, Board of Education in 2019, things have changed.

Once the province of local good-government advocates, school boards today are swollen by the same red-meat politics of national cable newscasts. As the races became clouded by party-line social issues, the tactics common on the national stage — social media misinformation, partisan redistricting, whispered accusations, and outright harassment — came to the Clover Hill District of Chesterfield County.

“Look, I just got into this gig because I wanted to make sure that teachers get paid and that every school has access to the same level of resources,” Heffron says as we leave the billboard behind. “That’s all I’m doing, that’s my agenda. George Soros is not pulling my strings over here, guys.”

Her opposition thought otherwise. As Heffron worked to increase minority political engagement in her hometown, her opposition increased in volume and intensity. Facing reelection in 2023, she found it necessary to double down on the agenda that got her here in the first place.

But the billboard wasn’t wrong. Dot Heffron should come with a warning label.

The toplines on Dot Heffron’s biography suggest she was an unlikely candidate for an attack billboard. 

She and her husband, Richard, met in the 1990s working in the Richmond headquarters of the defunct Circuit City retail chain. Following the births of her three children, she became a homemaker, raising them in a modest 1,300-square-foot rancher in west Chesterfield County. She drove her kids to school and sports activities, became active in the elementary school PTA, and organized a neighborhood book club. 

There were, however, contrary indicators. Take, for example, the roller derby.

The Richmond Derby Demons organized in the roller derby renaissance winsomely portrayed in Drew Barrymore’s 2009 empowerment film, “Whip It.” Dot, known on the circuit as The Notorious D.O.T., proved she could take, and throw, an elbow.

“It was nice to see strong women being a team,” Heffron told the Chesterfield Observer four years ago. “It was a blast.”

Those strong women also came from a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences, a big-tent community that appealed to Heffron.

“We had women on our team who were in college, working poor women, queer women, women of all races and backgrounds, and even a stay-at-home mom trying to hang onto her rebellious youth,” Heffron said.

In 2000, Heffron converted to Judaism, her husband’s faith. She wears a Star of David necklace everywhere she goes. Her feet planted in insider and outsider communities, Heffron confronted the signal event of her adult life: Donald Trump becoming president of the United States.

The Washington Post has estimated that 3.2 million to 5.2 million Americans took to the streets in protest the day after Trump’s inauguration in January 2017. In the Washington Women’s March, 470,000 people filled the streets.

But Heffron noticed her largely white PTA meetings lacked the diversity of the Derby Demons — and her community. Marching down Pennsylvania Avenue would not change that.

“You can’t live in a district this diverse,” Heffron said, “and not be like, ‘Where is everybody?’”

Data proved her out. In the decade leading to Trump’s election, the U.S. Census shows Chesterfield’s population had grown dramatically — from 293,000 to 343,000. Nearly all that growth came from nonwhite persons. The Latino population had grown by 31 percent, the Black population by 14 percent, and the number of mixed-race persons had more than doubled. The white-only population, the group that historically dominated local government, including leadership of the local schools, had grown only 3 percent.

The anti-immigrant rhetoric surrounding the Trump campaign and presidency seemed to Heffron to clash with the reality of her community. “It looked like we were headed toward internment camps,” she recalled. “I was like, ‘What are we doing? This isn’t America.’ I really identified with our newcomers and our immigrant population, as that was the most vulnerable population.”

So, The Notorious D.O.T. became a public school teacher.

Not overnight: There were community college classes, a year of in-school training. But it happened. New teaching credentials in hand, Heffron arrived in 2018 at Providence Middle School in northern Chesterfield, adjoining Richmond, a thousand students in grades six through eight, most of them poor, 28 percent English-language learners, more than 70 percent Black and Latino. 

Halfway through her first year of teaching, however, a door opened when an incumbent school board member decided not to run for reelection. Heffron said to herself: “I’m a graduate of Chesterfield County schools. I’ve got kids in Chesterfield County schools. I’m a teacher in Chesterfield County public schools. Why not be a school board member?”

She ran in a three-way race in 2019. She had no fundraising base — she raised barely $11,000 — no political operation, and no political experience.  But she had a good pair of shoes. “I knocked on nearly 10,000 doors,” she said. “And I went to every neighborhood cookout, fish fry, and picnic.” In the end, Heffron won 45 percent of the vote, the smallest vote of any Chesterfield school board winner, but enough against two opponents who split the majority of the vote.

Squeaking into her seat did not faze Heffron. No longer in the classroom, she set about bringing her classroom experience to bear on the entire county.

At the time of her election, the entire Chesterfield system had two interpreters for its 7,000 English-language-learning students — who accounted for 12 percent of its 64,000 total enrollment. Heffron worked with Martín González, a longtime restaurateur in Chesterfield, to identify Spanish-language interpreter candidates. Then she got the schools to fund the new positions with federal grant money.

González says he had been waiting for someone like Heffron to connect the Latino community with the local schools. For two decades he had built La Milpa, his Chesterfield restaurant and market, around more than food. The entrance to La Milpa is a literal community bulletin board, dozens of business cards and fliers advertising everything from real estate opportunities to nonprofit services. González purchased farmland to grow his own vegetables; La Milpa translates to “the cornfield.” He hires many people and connects even more.

“We are not just a restaurant,” González said. “We started from the beginning showing our culture, showing our identity. And through that way we started getting the attention from the schools, and now the schools are calling us to share this knowledge.”

The result of their collaboration? The school system went from two interpreters to 30.

That dramatic change made a difference. Shortly after Chesterfield deployed the interpreters, Latino students’ scores on Virginia’s state English reading tests rose 19 percent; they stayed high the next year. But Heffron recognized that minority students in Chesterfield needed more than mere access to classroom lessons. 

They needed to make what they learned work in the world.

At the time Heffron was asking questions about the connection between achievement and empowerment, a new nonprofit in New Orleans was exploring the same territory across the South, specifically the systemic impact of white privilege.  

In 2018, former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu founded the E Pluribus Unum Fund to explore issues of racial equity across the South. In 2020, EPU organized a class of fellows — locally elected officials — committed to taking their interest in local changemaking to a new, more successful level. “We see each fellow as a way to create a ripple of change in communities, and then across the South,” said Maddie McLain, EPU’s communications manager. 

Heffron applied immediately after taking office and was accepted, one of two school board members in EPU’s class of municipally elected officials, joining a Memphis county commissioner, the president pro tem of the Birmingham City Council, and the mayor of Ville Platte, Louisiana, among others. The fellows spent six months learning before diving into community projects. Heffron’s initiative grew out of her first school board meetings, listening to people who filled the school board’s “public comment” agenda slot.

“If we just roll the footage of last year’s public comment, 95 percent of the public speakers are white,” she said. This contrasts with a district in which 52 percent of students are not white. “We’re not hearing from them. We’re not hearing from those parents,” Heffron said.

Heffron decided to teach high schoolers to become advocates. In 2021, with EPU’s financial assistance, she commissioned Sonia Smith, the former president of the Chesterfield Teachers Association, to develop a civic leadership and engagement curriculum for Chesterfield County students. She named it Chesterfield Young Leaders for Change. Then Heffron engaged three teachers to use the curriculum in after-school sessions for small groups of students. They met with local leaders, organizers, and activists and developed their own projects.

The project took off.  

“It was magic, I’m just telling you,” said James Skinner, a Black teacher with 18 years’ experience who led the Young Leaders program at Monacan High School, where half the 1,600-person student body is Black, Brown, or Asian.

“The beautiful thing was that they would go back into their groups and say, ‘Hey, look, this is what we're doing and this is how it affects us,’” Skinner said. “‘This is how we can have our input.’ They feel like, you know, ‘Hey, we got a platform that we can be heard that people can listen to our perspective and it matters.’”

EPU funded a second year of after-school classes and now is working to develop a tool kit to scale Heffron’s curriculum for nationwide distribution.

“I think Dot’s project was so successful,” said EPU’s McLain, “because it brought students together in a time when they were seeing a lot of tumultuous activity in the world around them and then helped them and supported them to really take on action in their own space and make things happen during a time when they were being shown not a lot could happen.” 

Miranda Wynne, then a sophomore at Monacan High, was such a student.

“Naturally, I'm a very introverted person,” Wynne said. “So I saw it as, like, an opportunity to come out of my shell a bit, and I think I definitely did that.”

The Young Leaders program taught Wynne about “leading from behind” — how her unique voice, while not the loudest, could still be effective.

“It wasn't necessarily being an outward leader; it's more leading from the back and by example, which I really leaned more toward,” Wynne said. “You don’t have to necessarily be the loudest.”  

Now college-bound, Wynne sees a future in helping to organize communities to take ownership of their own challenges. “My vision of leadership is really different. There’s room for everyone,” she said.

The EPU civic engagement programs rolled out in Chesterfield County schools against more national turmoil — the COVID-19 pandemic and widespread activism around racial justice, a time when engagement itself came under new fire.

“Systemic racism was not something I could fix,” Heffron said. “But I could do my part to get us there.”

Heffron’s work to increase representation of minority families in the school district, and her vote to keep education remote during COVID, drew complaints from the community, where 40 percent of residents remained unvaccinated by 2021.

Heffron says she noticed a shift in temperature in 2021 as the school board was preparing to return students to school full time despite continued COVID warning signs in Chesterfield County. She disagreed with the timing. She purchased a pair of earrings modeled after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s famous courtroom lace collar. On her way to a critical board vote, she put on the earrings, took a selfie, and tweeted “I dissent.”

That social media post was picked up, and it galvanized critics. “It was like being tied to the flagpole and everybody had been told to come take a stick swing. It was brutal,” Heffron recalled. “People were sending me GIFs cut out from movies of people cocking a rifle. I closed my Twitter account because I was getting death threats from folks.” 

It wasn’t the first time social media had warned Heffron to watch her back. The accumulated volume and vitriol in 2021, however, were dehumanizing. Which, she realized, was not merely the effect but, it appeared to her, the point.

One of the loudest critics was former Chesterfield teacher Samuel Peters, claiming that a direct link existed between Heffron, other board members, and left-leaning donors like Soros.

In 2021 Peters began to wage a one-man war against the Chesterfield County school board. He created the Coalition for Common Sense and purchased the web domain recallchesterfield.com (the site went dark during reporting of this story). He called for the recall of three board members: Katharine Haines, Debbie Bailey — and Heffron.

“After all the damage they’ve done, there simply won’t be anything left if we don’t get them out now,” read the landing page on Peters’ site, calling the three board members “most responsible for pushing our school system to embrace the ‘Equity’ agenda — an agenda that … is more correctly called ‘Critical Race Theory.’”

The site’s content was at once wide-ranging and laser-focused. The material was all aimed at Chesterfield County schools, but the subject matters covered the waterfront of grievances weaponized nationwide against public school administrators:

• Letters to the editor of a local newspaper, posted on Peters’ website, complained “about the impending girls-bathroom catastrophe” in Chesterfield schools;

• A copy of a complaint alleged school officials had illegally destroyed public records;

• A 2021 complaint claimed the school superintendent libeled Peters;

• A 2021 petition to the Virginia Supreme Court alleged Chesterfield schools designated Yom Kippur and Eid as official school holidays in violation of Peters’ constitutional rights;

• A pro se complaint to the Circuit Court of Chesterfield County contended that the schools breached a contract with Peters by not requiring his daughter and others to attend in-person classes during the COVID shutdown; and

• Petitions called for the recall of board members Haines, Bailey, and Heffron for failing to require school administrators to use certain tools to require active participation in online COVID-era learning.

The petition calling for Heffron’s resignation accused her of “irresponsible substitution of ideology for common sense” in the use of virtual education during the pandemic, resulting in a failure of “compulsory education … because of misguided ideological commitments.”

Peters’ online campaign was no mere stalking of a paper tiger.

Heffron speaks at a recent joint legislative delegation meeting in North Chesterfield. The mother of three and former public schools teacher is offering what may seem a radical approach in these divisive times: run to the center – not just the base – and govern from there.

In the fall of 2021, as his attacks intensified, so too did challenges at the Heffron home. Dot and Richard's 12-year-old had struggled with mental health challenges through the first year of the COVID pandemic. In October, those struggles culminated in an overdose of pills. 

Heffron drove their child to the nearest emergency room. For three days, they waited in the glaringly public space, with a law enforcement officer stationed nearby on suicide watch.

Finally, a bed opened at a psychiatric hospital. After the hospital escorted the Heffrons’ daughter away to a secure bed, Dot and Richard found themselves alone, empty as the tiny admitting room, with nowhere to go but home. Which they did — to find a summons taped to the front door. 

It was from Peters. 

He had petitioned a state court to recall Heffron from her elected office. A deputy had posted the petition and summons on the Heffrons’ front door while they sought care for their daughter.

“I like to think I’m a pretty even-keeled person, but I was not proud of my behavior at that moment,” Heffron recalled. “I said so many swear words I think at one point I was probably speaking in tongues.”

Peters’ petition would shortly be case-dismissed. (His war truly was one-man — no one else signed the recall petition, as the law required.) But the experience left a lasting mark.

“I have to sit there at these board meetings and have people tell me the impacts of COVID on children’s mental health,” Heffron said. “With a straight face and have them yelling at me and telling me I don’t understand. I think we’ve just hit a point where we’re all just sick of each other.”

Peters’ tactics worked, in part. In 2023, Bailey and Haines did not seek re-election. 

But The Notorious D.O.T. did.

And stop apologizing
For the things you’ve never done
’Cause time is short and life is cruel
But it’s up to us to change
This town called Malice.”

  — The Jam, ”Town Called Malice”

Some Southern places, the land is inextricably linked to its history. The Louisiana bayous and Kentucky coalfields come to mind. Some places, like the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville or Jackson Ward in Richmond, represent a uniquely Southern built environment that stirs the imagination.

And then there is the suburban South. Distinctively American, instinctively anyone’s.

Chesterfield County, Virginia, should not be such a place. Between the James and Appomattox rivers, Petersburg to its south and Richmond to its north, Chesterfield is millennia deep in American history. The Jamestown colony, sick and dying, sought temperate refuge upriver here. Pocahontas lived here.

But Chesterfield’s divided highways, drive-through chicken joints, high school football stadiums, endless housing developments, and big-box stores bear little connection to this unique history or people. The culture seems up for grabs, not so much rewritten as ignored, commercial development by commercial development, until the people of Chesterfield County seem engulfed by the projects that surround them. It’s the kind of place where, say, you could build the world’s largest surf park with a hotel, apartments, shopping, and inland surfing across the street from an overcrowded public high school.

That’s actually a project underway in Chesterfield right now. It’s called The Lake.

Development interests attempted in 2023 to turn the Chesterfield County Board of Supervisors and School Board further to their interests. The billboard attacking Heffron was paid for by a political action committee called Chesterfield Forward PAC, which, according to state records, raised $106,000 in 2023 — almost exclusively from real estate development interests. Just weeks before the ad attacking Heffron went up, state records show Chesterfield Forward spent nearly $2,000 with the billboard company.

The Lake and the overcrowded school adjoin a massive west Chesterfield development called Charter Colony. The streets have names like Shadow Ridge Road, Deer Meadow Lane, and Brandermill Parkway. The yards are immaculate, front porches pristine, lots uniform, and homes low to the ground. 

And the homes in Charter Colony represent, at 8 a.m. on an October Saturday, a tall challenge for the Dot Heffron re-election campaign.

While cars fill one corner of the Monacan High School parking lot for 7-year-old soccer, Heffron pops open the hatchback of her Subaru in an opposite corner, revealing the tools of the home stretch — yard signs, literature, and sticky, yeasty doughnuts. She is surrounded by a half dozen of her truest supporters.

“Now we’re in the get-out-the-vote stage,” Heffron encourages them. “Because we know, when we vote, we win.”

Heffron sends her friends to knock on doors across Charter County, heavily Republican neighborhoods the County Board of Supervisors allocated to Heffron during 2022 redistricting. “They gerrymandered this district,” Heffron says. “It’s much redder.”

She climbs in the driver’s seat, presses the ignition button, and the 40-year-old post-punk beat of The Jam pumps through streets lined with her opponent’s yard signs.

Three centuries ago, Midlothian, Virginia, was one of America’s earliest industrial coal mining operations. Enslaved Black people worked the pits and dug the mine shafts. White enslavers captured the wealth. Now a forested park surrounds the mine shaft ruins. Polite greenways connect the $700,000 homes on the site. 

Heffron pulls into Charter Colony. She gathers campaign literature, opens the walklist app on her iPhone, and sets out down Grey Goose Court to meet her voters. 

She presses 15 Ring doorbells. On a perfect Saturday morning, no one answers. “These are Democratic voters?” she asked, perhaps not rhetorically. She leaves behind a flyer at each door.

The election is 10 days away.

The Charter Colony experience is jarring. Heffron had won four years prior at the doors. Now the doors do not open as easily. She seeks the comfort of an early voting place, where she knows she will find engaged voters. 

She drives to a branch library doubling as an early polling place. Candidate signs are planted like row crops on both sides of the approach.

Heffron notices her election opponent, Millie Corsoro, standing with a small group of supporters outside the library. It is Heffron’s cue to get out of the car, walk up to Corsoro, perhaps to make a point of her own, and then head inside to chat up polling place workers. 

Minutes after the short exchange, Corsoro gets in her car, alone, and leaves.

Heffron returns from the polling place: “Her heart just doesn’t seem in it.”

Perhaps it wasn’t. The Corsoro candidacy seemed an odd placeholder for the money behind it. The developers and homebuilders who put up the billboard attacking Heffron made half of Corsoro’s disclosed campaign contributions. Interestingly, while Corsoro’s campaign disclosed the in-kind contribution, the PAC did not. Heffron said she rarely saw Corsoro at public events. Indeed, at a well-attended Halloween trunk-or-treat sponsored by the local YMCA — on a Friday night less than two weeks before the election —  Corsoro is nowhere to be seen among the Disney princesses and Marvel Universe characters.

Still, it is Chesterfield County. Republican Glenn Youngkin carried Chesterfield County in the 2021 governor’s race by 4.3 points, four years after the county had voted Democratic. Corsoro signs appear in front yards promoting the local Republican legislative candidates (blurring the fact the school board race is nonpartisan). One such yard near the Heffron kids’ high school also has a “Let’s Go Brandon” sign. Incumbent Republican legislators are on the ballot. 

Voters are asked to care about a great many things. It is rare in any election that the school board is the one thing they care about. In such low-information races, the simplest messages can work: party identification or vote-the-bum-out.

“It’s terrifying,” Heffron says, “because it can work. Ask anybody at the grocery store, who’s your school board rep? No clue. Ask them what district they live in, I’d say 70 percent of people don’t know what district they live in. And I’m running a school board campaign on a budget of [only] $15,000.”

On November 7, though, the voters in Chesterfield County reached a decisive conclusion, returning Heffron to office with 60 percent of the vote and the largest victory margin in the county’s five school board races. 

Heffron won the new Republican precincts she’d received in redistricting. She won the polling place where the recalcitrant Charter Colony residents voted. 

She won every precinct in her district. We speak on election night after she has left her victory party for a deep dive into election results throughout Virginia. She is exhausted and jazzed, all at once, sentences trailing and reconnecting as her laptop bounces from one race to another. I think of The Notorious D.O.T. and what she told me of those days:

“I will say that there is catharsis in hip-checking someone and witnessing the wipeout.”

The Chesterfield County school board meets monthly in a small, auditorium-style room in the county police building. The ceiling is low. There is seating for about a hundred. Imposing armed officers post at the forward doors.

A school board meeting shouldn’t take six hours, but these days it does. On November 14 — seven days after Heffron’s reelection — there is a late-afternoon work session, staffers scattered through the auditorium, waiting to update the board on the stuff of school boards: the latest college admissions test results, an updated budget, a new custodial contract. There are questions and answers, insights gained and appreciated. Next is an hourlong private session with the board attorney to discuss disciplinary and employment issues.

At 6:30 p.m., the main event. The room is at capacity and unusually warm for November. Families crowd the back amid the police presence. Some have no doubt come for the honoring of the food service employees of the month and the volunteers who staff the non-English-speaking parent-help lines.

But as those recognitions come and go, and the room stays stuffy and full, it is clear the agenda’s centerpiece is “Item D: Public Comment,” or, as Heffron calls it, “karaoke night.”

Before she sought and won election to the school board, Heffron had noticed her largely white PTA meetings lacked the diversity of her community. She wasn’t sure that earnestly marching down Pennsylvania Avenue was going to change that.

Lights up and cameras rolling, public comment careens from Rockwellian town hall to political stagecraft. Some of the participants break your heart: an emotional father whose daughter was hit by a car because she couldn’t find a spot in the overcrowded school lot; teachers struggling to fit more state mandates into their workday. 

Some of the participants are so regular, they offer each other pre-meeting production tips on the internet broadcast. “I noticed the camera angles got wider,” says one. “I see that we took that suggestion.”

And some of the participants are using live ammo. This night, as on most nights in 2023, transgender kids are in the crossfire. One by one, public comments are entered into the record.

• “I have seen my daughter's best friend … decide to make a transition. It's a great honeymoon period for the first five years for the kids, but after that it is downhill. It's suicidal.” — Kevin Nelson

• “It is sexually grooming children and indoctrinating them with confusing thoughts about who they were created to be by God, in which he tells us that we are fearfully and wonderfully made by him.” — Michon Ziobro 

• “Governor Youngkin's policy requires students to use their assigned sex for bathrooms and school activities. His model policies put control of how students express gender identity back into the hands of the parents by not complying to the model policy.” — Carol Steel

The 2023 Youngkin transgender policy — forbidding reference to gender identity, no sports competitions for transgender students, no use of bathrooms or locker rooms without parental consent — is the latest public comment anger button. But the board takes no action on it.

It isn’t clear the board ever will.

The next day, Heffron and I meet over piles of biscuits and gravy in Woodlake, a rapidly growing Chesterfield exurb that likely will require a new school before Heffron’s next term is over. 

The topic was the future.

Youngkin is governor of Virginia for two more years. And while the 2023 elections did not go to his liking — not only did Republicans lose the Legislature, but Chesterfield’s board of supervisors flipped Democratic — he is personally wealthy, with national ambitions. Those factors will keep his agenda front and center, including his “model policy” for transgender students, the policy Youngkin says schools must adopt, the policy Chesterfield County still has not adopted.

Heffron believes voters this November understood all that — and rejected it.

“I knew that my neighbors don’t align themselves with this Youngkin political agenda,” she said. “They could be Republican, but they’re not taking on this charge against schools. It feels very foreign, very subversive, like somebody’s been infiltrating your neighborhood when you have this top-down agenda being pushed in.”

In fact, she believes the reelection of a blue school board member by red voters in a purple county signals something, a lesson for the wider South. She cites her support for increased school security officer presence in the wake of far too many school shootings, a position popular with constituents unconcerned with the academic studies on SSO efficacy. 

It is a signal even Youngkin appeared to recognize in the wake of November’s election.

“The number one lesson is that Virginia is really purple,” The Washington Post reported the governor saying at a Richmond news conference the day after the election. “I’m a little disappointed, to be clear. And I think that’s just a natural reality,” he said.

It is an important, and somewhat startling, admission from a modern politician. Acknowledging disagreements among the electorate seems obvious. Hearing it from an officeholder almost never happens. 

Perhaps that is because, adopted broadly, the statement can have broad implications. Heffron hopes for just that.

“If a wild, radical liberal like myself can see the value in school security officers,” she said, pausing to slide the edge of her fork through the gravy-covered biscuit, “as responding to parent concerns and community desires, then there’s hope that we can have some other folks that can see the value in books in the library and keeping our hands off of them, and letting families choose for themselves what’s appropriate and what isn’t.”

Run to the base, govern to the center is an old political recipe. But the volcanic debate over the war in Gaza and the American failure to resolve important current questions of race suggest the political and policy challenges in such an approach.

Put simply, it is safer to play to the base. In both American parties, there is little risk in appealing to the extreme, even redefining the extreme, for it is at the extreme where citizens vote.

Heffron, the retired roller derby queen, offers a different, more dangerous, way — run to the center and govern from there. The results so far — political and policy-related — are encouraging. But can the center hold?

This is where the danger lies. If Heffron is right, if voters adopt her philosophy, then the political status quo is endangered. If she is wrong, then the system won’t think twice about hip-checking her out of the rink. 

Perhaps it is in places like Chesterfield County, founded at the intersection of Virginia’s slaveholding and tenant farming cultures, where the answer lies.

For if you approach Chesterfield County from the south, from the buckled cobblestone streets of Petersburg that once endured the carpet-bombing of the Union army, from the perspective of the historic trauma that comes north in waves from a war that has not ended, the future that Dot Heffron imagines seems unlikely, nearly fantastic. 

Come at Chesterfield from the west, however, from the direction of America’s future, where the same nation that pulverized Petersburg preserves the village of Appomattox Court House and the sitting room in the McLean farmhouse that brought Lee and Grant together, and it is possible to imagine Heffron is onto something, the same thing that James Skinner was onto when he said of the Monacan students: “They wanted to find a way to bring everybody to the table.”

For there is a different billboard in Appomattox. It greets every traveler headed to Chesterfield County along the parklike lanes of U.S. 360. This one reads: 

“WHERE OUR NATION REUNITED.”

~ In partnership with E Pluribus Unum ~

Tom Lee is a partner in the Nashville office of Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough, one of the nation's 100 largest law firms. He is a political strategist and lobbyist in his home state of Tennessee, a certified lay speaker in the United Methodist Church, and a frequent contributor to The Bitter Southerner.

Brian Palmer is a Peabody Award–winning journalist based in Richmond, Virginia. During his 30-year career he has photographed conflict, politics, activism, daily life, and more around the world and in his own backyard.

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