Increasingly Desperate Cuccinelli Seeks to Fire Up Lunatic Base

With polls consistently showing him losing to Democrat Terry McAuliffle, GOP candidate Ken Cuccinelli - a/k/a Kookinelli,a self-loathing closet case in my opinion - has decided to throw all claims to being a moderate to the wind and has launched an all out effort to motivate the ignorance embracing, white supremacist leaning, and religiously extreme Christofascist/Tea Party base that gave him the nomination GOP nomination in the first place.  In doing so, he has had a parade of crazies come through Virginia campaigning on his behalf.  The down side is that Cuccinelli is making the case for Terry McAuliffe and by extension the rest of the Democrat ticket that the GOP nominees are just too extreme.   Here are highlights from a piece in Politico that looks at Cuccinelli's desperate effort:

Ken Cuccinelli thinks his best hope for a comeback in the final three weeks of a Virginia governor’s race that has drifted away from him is to focus on driving up conservative turnout.

So a few hours after Hillary Clinton stumps for Democrat Terry McAuliffe Saturday in Northern Virginia, the Republican will campaign with Mike Huckabee next to Liberty University in the conservative stronghold of Lynchburg.

Cuccinelli has been trailing in the high single-digits in a string of polls. The latest, from NBC/Marist, put McAuliffe ahead by 8 points, 46 percent to 38 percent, with 9 percent backing Libertarian Robert Sarvis.

Cuccinelli’s narrow path to victory depends on galvanized conservatives showing up and low-propensity voters who handed the state to President Barack Obama last year – like African Americans and young women – staying home.

Cuccinelli is spending more time with conservative media. This week alone, he defended his staunch opposition to abortion in an interview with Newsmax and talked up his libertarian bona fides to the Washington Times.

Outspoken social conservative Jim Bob Duggar, from the TLC reality show “19 Kids and Counting,” promoted Cuccinelli on a bus tour with his family across the state this week. The tour was sponsored by the Family Research Council’s political arm, but Cuccinelli greeted the group in Richmond and his wife Teiro dropped by their stop in the D.C. suburb of Woodbridge.

The company Cuccinelli has chosen to keep has raised eyebrows across the political class.  “They’re not campaigning in places where you pick up independents and [conservative-leaning] moderates,” said an experienced Republican strategist backing Cuccinelli.

Others following his campaign operation closely say three factors have driven Cuccinelli to focus more on his base than Republicans in past statewide elections.

First, the candidate is an activist at heart, and he is temperamentally most comfortable appealing to fellow true believers.

Second, the libertarian candidate Sarvis could be a spoiler and his strong showing in the polls cannot go ignored. This explains why Cuccinelli is bringing Rand Paul and rolled out an endorsement from former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) last Friday night.

Finally, Cuccinelli, getting crushed in the air war, does not have enough money to run the kind of positive ads that might broaden his appeal. A filing this week showed that he started this month with only $1 million available. The size of his TV buys has declined each of the last four weeks.
Cuccinelli’s team is counting on very low turnout.

University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato said that spurring conservatives to the polls is Cuccinelli’s “last shot.” But it is, he said, a very faint hope.  “What else could he do at this point? This is it for him,” Sabato said. “They have this house of cards where all of their people turn out massively and McAuliffe’s go to sleep on Election Day, and it just never happens that way.”

“The evangelicals dominate a lot of the rural areas of Virginia, but they just don’t add up to more than a fifth of the vote anymore,” he added. “It’s not nearly enough.”

McAuliffe backers are playing the turnout game, too, trying to suppress conservative turnout for Cuccinelli and at the same time try to get moderate Republicans to defect.

Since Cuccinelli said at an Oct. 10 forum that he would not interfere with the law mandating that Medicaid cover abortions, especially in the cases of rape, incest and life of the mother, the Democratic Party of Virginia has been robocalling Republicans warning that Cuccinelli is going soft on abortion. It’s a blatant ploy at odds with the rest of their advertising.

Evangelical extremists are responsible for the nomination of Cuccinelli and his extremist cohorts, "Bishop" Jackson and Mark Obenshain and it is crucial that this entire ticket go down in flames.