Preston Bryant is a Republican who has represented Lynchburg and part of Amherst County in the Virginia House of Delgates since 1996.

It's telling because it demonstrates a realization among many - nay, most - Democrats that taking on sitting GOP legislators this year is an exercise in near futility. Who wants to wage an expensive battle that'll most likely lead to defeat?

It's amazing because few can remember a campaign season when so few general election combatants weren't already known by now. You see, Virginia has never been big on party primaries to determine nominees for General Assembly races, so usually by early spring we have a pretty good idea whose names are going to be on the fall's ballots.

State Democrats who've been working to recruit candidates for the House and Senate have admitted having difficulty doing so. Just last week, Democratic party chair Larry Framme said his rank-and-file have been demoralized since the Republican-led redistricting a couple of years knocked out so many incumbent Democrats and put out of reach for defeat so many more sitting Republicans.

That's what gerrymandering is all about, you know - the party in power slices and dices the minority party's incumbents and districts while strengthening its own. Democrats who controlled both houses of the legislature for more than a century put just such a stranglehold on Republicans for all those years; now, since the GOP gained control of both the House and Senate just a few years ago, and for the first time ever redrew the battle maps, turn-about is fair play.

This is not to say, however, that gerrymandering is the sole reason Democrats are having trouble recruiting candidates or that it'll be nearly impossible to beat Republicans this year. There are other reasons, too.

Let's not forget that Virginia has an increasingly right-of-center electorate. This has been the obvious trend for about the past 15 years. (That is, Republicans have been winning more and more General Assembly seats for more than a decade even without the benefits of controlling redistricting.) There's also the money factor: Republicans are raising much more these days than Democrats. And, Democrats in recent years have had trouble finding a message that resonates with a majority of voters. Warner's big push for more taxes, even via voter referendums, in addition to his high-profile veto of the death-tax cut have left his party extraordinarily vulnerable to that ol' tax-and-spend drumbeat.

So when you've got demographics trending heavily against you, and when you can't raise money in sufficient sums to mount winning campaigns, and when you don't have a message that makes people want to vote for your ticket, well, just what do you have to entice viable candidates to join your team?

Oh, to be sure, the Democrats are still trying to talk potential candidates into taking on incumbent Republicans. But the tick-tock of the campaign clock is getting louder and louder. And the louder it gets, the more deafening it is, driving home the point that it's way too late to be just now entering a race.

Heck, at this point, if there's any Democrat out there who's thought to have a legitimate chance of knocking off a sitting Republican, it's the candidate who's been on the trail for the past several months, engaged in full-time door-knocking and near-frantic fundraising. (The really smart ones would've hit the bricks in January, when incumbents were tied up in Richmond for two months with the General Assembly session.) No such ambitious Democratic candidate comes to mind.

Put more directly, any Democratic candidate wanting to overcome the odds that are naturally against him who - right now - doesn't have a top-notch campaign manager in place, an energized grassroots movement already underway, and about $50,000 in the kitty, well, he might as well forget it - because that's is how far down the tracks a truly viable Democrat would have to be by now.

Philosophically, no one can say that such a dearth of competitive races is good for a two-party system. It isn't. The strength of our system depends on having good candidates with credible ideas slugging it out before a tuned-in electorate.

Realistically, though, as long as the state's electoral demographics keep trending rightward while Democrats keep trending leftward - especially on taxes - it's a pretty safe bet that Republicans will continue to dominate the General Assembly with relative ease.