First there were the signs, lining the roads for miles to the dusty clearing in the Sussex County woods where the annual festival of bony fish, beer and backslapping known as the Shad Planking is held. Then there were the 100 campaign aides, and the banner of the plane streaking overhead — all urging attendees to back Terry McAuliffe in the 2009 gubernatorial race.
Four years later, McAuliffe (D) is running for governor again. But he and his entourage won’t be at Wednesday’s Shad Planking — the latest sign that one of the commonwealth’s quirkiest bipartisan traditions is morphing into something more typically partisan.
As he battles Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II (R) — this year’s featured Shad Planking speaker — for the governorship, McAuliffe will be spending the day visiting a community college across the state. Sen. Timothy M. Kaine (D) skipped the event last year during his Senate race against George Allen (R), officially because he missed the deadline to accept a speaking invitation.
Since at least 1965, every Virginia governor has attended the Shad Planking the year he won election. With candidates, political operatives, activists and much of the state’s media all gathered on the same patch of ground, the event, held on the third Wednesday of April, was a fixture of the electoral calendar. Everyone went because everyone went.
So what’s changed? Mo Elleithee, a consultant who worked for Kaine in 2012 and McAuliffe in 2009, offered a blunt explanation.
“Shad Planking is a Virginia tradition that has totally and completely and utterly outlived its usefulness,” Elleithee said. “There are much better ways and much more productive ways to campaign in rural Virginia than going to an event where there are more Confederate flags than there are undecided voters.”
Shad Planking began in the 1930s as a small gathering to mark the migratory running of the shad — an oily, bony type of herring — in the James River. The Wakefield Ruritan Club has been organizing the event since 1949, using it as a fundraiser for community groups.
The gathering takes its name from its marquee dish: Shad that are nailed to oak planks and cooked slowly over an open fire. Last year’s gathering featured about 1,200 pounds of shad, 800 pounds of coleslaw and untold gallons of cold beer and iced tea, offered up by candidates and interest groups hoping to curry favor with the crowd.
Mirroring a broader shift in Virginia politics, the Shad Planking used to be dominated by conservative Democrats — particularly the “machine” of legendary Sen. Harry Byrd — before its more recent lurch toward Republicans. The crowd now clearly leans to the right, with a strong showing of tea party activists in the last couple of years.
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This article first appeared in the The Washington Post on April 16, 2013.