Donald Baker, top political reporter in Virginia

Donald P. Baker, a wry and grizzled Washington Post reporter who served as the paper’s longtime bureau chief in Richmond, chronicling the rise of the country’s first Black elected governor, L. Douglas Wilder, as well as the bitter 1994 Senate race between Oliver North and Charles S. Robb, died Sunday at an assisted-living center in Bethesda, Md. He was 90.

His daughter Lisa Baker confirmed the death but did not cite a cause.

Mr. Baker, a West Virginia native with twinkling eyes and a full, scraggly beard, was the Post’s Richmond bureau chief from 1985 until his retirement in 1999. For much of that period he was considered the dean of the Richmond press corps, known for his tough, aggressive questioning and for his shambling style, which led friends to liken him to Columbo.

‘‘You could easily underestimate him, and you did it to your detriment,’’ said his former Post colleague Peter Baker, now the chief White House correspondent for the New York Times. (The two Bakers were not related.)

Mr. Baker came to prominence in the state capital partly through his tireless reporting on Wilder, a grandson of enslaved people who served as Virginia’s lieutenant governor before being elected governor in 1989. Weeks earlier, Baker had published an unauthorized biography of the politician, ‘‘Wilder: Hold Fast to Dreams,’’ that recounted his early years — including a stint waiting tables at segregated restaurants in Richmond — as well as his struggles as a trial lawyer and his clashes with fellow Democrats.

In a phone interview, Wilder said that Mr. Baker was one of the first journalists ‘‘who took the time to try to understand what made me think I could win’’ statewide office in Virginia, a former bastion of the Confederacy and the Jim Crow South. ‘‘The Bakers of the world will be sorely missed,’’ he added.

‘‘That breed of inquiring and daring, asking the tough questions — and fair questions — is needed today in the American political arena.’’

Mr. Baker’s old-school approach to newspaper journalism was on full display in the 1996 documentary ‘‘A Perfect Candidate,’’ which looked back on the 1994 Senate race between North, a retired Marine lieutenant colonel who was under fire for his role in the Irancontra affair, and the incumbent Robb, a former Virginia governor who overcame damaging reports about his personal life to win reelection.

Directed by David Van Taylor and R.J. Cutler, the documentary used Mr. Baker as a stand-in for the audience, seeking to get straight answers from the candidates and to make sense of an election that one voter described as a choice between two evils, ‘‘the flu or the mumps.’’

The documentary received an Emmy nomination after it aired on PBS.

Survivors include two daughters, Lisa Baker of Brooklyn and Amanda Baker of Canton, Ohio; and five grandchildren.