Former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner isn’t done with politics yet.
After raising $9 million to run for president on the Democratic ticket last year, Warner dropped out of contention in October and contemplated his options. Now, the former governor announced Thursday he’s running for U.S. Senate to replace U.S. Sen. John Warner, who is retiring after five terms. (The two politicians are not related.)
John Warner’s retirement gives Democrats another chance to extend their majority in Congress. According to the New York Times, two Republicans have said they will run for the Republican nomination - Thomas M. Davis and former Gov. Jim Gilmore, who himself mounted a presidential this year before dropping out in July.
Mark R. Warner , 52, had been considered a possible vice presidential candidate in 2008. A self-described moderate Democrat, Warner also has been courted by Democrats who expect to wage an expensive and nasty battle for the Senate seat being vacated by John Warner.
Virginia has not had two Democratic senators since 1970, and Republicans said they would send as much as $30 million to TV advertisements to keep the seat. The GOP was “demoralized,” the Post reported, when James Webb was elected to the Senate last year and Timothy M. Kaine was elected governor in 2005 over a well-known GOP candidate.
Warner is expected to announce his decision today in an email to supporters and then formally after the November general assembly elections in Virginia. Undoubtedly, he will use the national platform of the Senate race to campaign for fiscal responsibility, ending the war in Iraq, preventing climate change, and energy policy.
The former governor is estimated to be worth at least $200 million thanks to early investments in the cell phone and telecommunications industry. He was an early investor in Nextel as a managing director of Columbia Capital Corp. He also co-founded Capital Cellular. He gained an intimate knowledge of the telecommunications industry in the early 1980s as a staff member to Sen. Christopher Dodd - knowledge he parlayed into his lucrative business investments.
Warner’s experience as an elected official is confined to a single term as Virginia governor. (In Virginia, governors cannot serve consecutive terms.) But he managed Douglas Wilder’s successful 1989 gubernatorial campaign, served as chairman of the state Democratic party and ran unsuccessfully against John Warner in the 1996 “Warner vs. Warner” Senate campaign. Now, he has a chance to replace him rather than unseat him.
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