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When L. Douglas Wilder won the 1989 Virginia gubernatorial election, he had already shattered a major barrier four years earlier by becoming the state’s first Black lieutenant governor.

In the 1980s, Virginia’s rapidly-growing suburbs were becoming major centers of power in the legislature, but the Commonwealth’s rural heartland, filled with the sorts of conservative Democrats who once formed the backbone of the party, remained a critical part of Wilder’s calculus for winning the highest office in state government.

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