The first "primary" race in Virginia just took place today! And Romney won.

At 1:30 today, Mitt Romney filed 15,000 signatures to meet the requirements for Virginia presidential primary.

Every campaign in the race will tell you that Virginia has the most difficult process to get on the ballot. You have to submit 10,000 signatures with at least 400 signatures from each 11 congressional districts. Each county or city entity has to have its own petition page for signatures and you need the voter address and in some cases the last four digits of the social security number for it to be valid. People who collect signatures have to be registered voters in Virginia (in other words you can't farm this out to high schoolers).

The VA ballot submissions opened up yesterday and as far as we know Romney is the first candidate to file.

Other candidates like Huckabee are paying 50 cents per signature. Thompson and Edwards are just getting started.

It will be interesting to see on December 14th who the actual candidates will be on the ballot.

As background, there are only a handful of paid staffers for Romney in Virginia but dozens (if not hundreds) of volunteers chipped in during the elections in November to help get the signatures required. Whole Saturdays were dedicated to rounding up the needed votes. Unlike other campaign Romney did this with a grassroots flare and did not outsource it.

Kudos to Team Romney, Lt. Gov. Bolling, and the VA team for making this happen.

This is one more example of why Romney is the best candidate to face the formidable forces of the DEMS in the general election.

Labels: grassroots, primaries, primary, Virginia