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Republican Sen. Richard Stuart sits in the Senate chamber in Richmond, January 16, 2026. Stuart is trying install a solar farm on property he owns that is under a conservation easement. Photo by Christopher Tyree // VCIJ
Republican Sen. Richard Stuart wants to develop a large solar farm on his property. Green energy advocates say it would set a dangerous precedent.
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Alex De Paula, former program director of Safer Together, speaks about the anti-violence initiative in April 2024, at Chrysler Hall in Norfolk, Virginia. The three-year, $2 million program was cancelled this year after the Trump administration stopped funding its federal grant. (handout photo)
A Portsmouth nonprofit built a program to aid victims of gun violence in Hampton Roads. It was one of several anti-crime projects in Virginia to lose its funding to the Trump administration’s cuts this year.
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Tanna Price helped governments around the world build their economies and root out corruption. News of USAID cuts reached her in Sri Lanka. Almost a year later, Price and thousands of other professionals like her look toward an uncertain future.
Read moreSince 1967, Job Corps has been a fixture in Marion, Va. The residential campus on Main Street has trained generations in health care skills. Despite bipartisan support under previous administrations, the Trump administration is trying to close it.
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A map shows kindergarten measles vaccination rate across Virginia’s counties and cities according to the vaccination data reported by schools at the start of the school year. Map by Kunle Falayi // VCIJ at WHRO
Just half of Virginia’s public and private kindergarten classes reported a 95% vaccination rate – the key threshold for herd immunity – at the start of the 2024-25 school year, according to an analysis of state health data by the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO.
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Nearly half of the commonwealth’s public and private kindergarten classes fail to meet an important vaccination threshold, an analysis of state health data by the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO shows.
Read moreDetailed data on the 2024 general election in Virginia.
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Following an investigation by the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO and ProPublica, Del. Delores McQuinn introduces bill for a commission to investigate the displacement of Black neighborhoods by Virginia’s public colleges and universities
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A portrait of Trible and his wife hangs in the library named after them. Photo by Christopher Tyree // VCIJ at WHRO
Black enrollment at Virginia’s Christopher Newport University fell by more than half under longtime president Paul Trible, a former Republican senator who wanted to “offer a private school experience.” By 2021, only 2.4% of full-time professors were Black.
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Sun sets on Virginia Capitol in Richmond, Va., Nov. 3, 2023. All 140 seats in the General Assembly are on the ballot this year. Photo by Jimmy Clutier
Virginia’s high-stakes General Assembly elections on Nov. 7 are the commonwealth’s most expensive on record — and could prove to be among the costliest legislative elections in U.S. history.
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Illustration by the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO.
Out-of-state developers have poured a record $8.1 million into a referendum campaign to allow the construction of a resort casino in Richmond, far-and-away the highest sum for a local election in Virginia.
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Virginia legislative candidates across Greater Richmond and Hampton Roads raised nearly $3.8 million in the last three weeks of June — mostly from big donors giving more than $10,000 to their campaigns.
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Dominion Energy headquarters, as seen in Richmond, Va., on June 22, 2023. (Jimmy Cloutier/OpenSecrets)
The overwhelming share of campaign funding in the low-turnout, yet expensive, primaries in Greater Richmond and the Hampton Roads came from political organizations, business interests and corporate-aligned political action committees, according to an OpenSecrets analysis of campaign finance reports. Most candidates who raised big-donor money won.
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Sen. Louise Lucas is photographed with members of the Moms Demand Action booth at Pride in the ‘Peake in Chesapeake, Va., on Sunday, June 11, 2023. Photo by Kristen Zeis
It’s been decades since two Hampton Roads Democratic state senators, Louise Lucas and Lionell Spruill, were out of the public eye.
Lucas launched her political career in Virginia by winning a Portsmouth City Council seat in 1984. Spruill, a Chesapeake native, first won a seat in the Virginia General Assembly in 1994.
Both legislative stalwarts rose from poor backgrounds to become ambitious, long-standing powerbrokers in southeastern Virginia. On June 20, one will be out of a job.
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Empty coal cars sit on the tracks outside of Grundy, Virginia. Photo by Mason Adams
Southwest Virginia once voted reliably Democratic, and its transition to clean-sweep Republican within a generation demonstrates the partisan realignment that Trump accelerated, and which the 2020 election looks set to entrench for another generation.
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