Obama to Campaign for Terry McAuliffe

Back in 2009, Barack Obama did little to assist the Virginia Democrat ticket before it was wiped out by the GOP slate.  This year, perhaps having learned from that lesson and also perhaps sensing that an opportunity exists to utterly destroy the GOP ticket, especially Ken Cuccinelli, in the last week before the November 5, 2013, elections, Obama will campaign for McAuliffe in the hope of turning out minority voters and younger voters who historically have not gone to the polls as needed.  Here are some highlights from Politico:

President Barack Obama will campaign for Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe this weekend, giving a late boost to McAuliffe as he seeks to energize core Democratic voters in an off-year governor’s race, Democratic sources told POLITICO.

Obama is set to appear at a Sunday afternoon get-out-the-vote rally in Northern Virginia. It will be the president’s first campaign appearance for McAuliffe, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

McAuliffe’s campaign has been working to activate many of the same voters who carried Virginia for Obama in 2008 and 2012: young people, independent women and African American, Latino and Asian American voters. Some of those groups – particularly young and nonwhite voters — tend to participate at lower rates in non-presidential elections.

McAuliffe’s embrace of Obama is little surprise this late in the election, but it confirms that the political ground in the race has shifted since the start of the year, when Republicans hoped to win the governorship largely by running up the scoreboard among conservative Virginians hostile to the president.

It appears at this point that such a strategy is unlikely to produce a winning coalition for Cuccinelli, leaving little down side for McAuliffe or Obama in campaigning together.

Turn out is so, so important and I hope these groups that do not vote as heavily in state elections (which are always in off years) get the message and turn out and put the remaining nails in Cuccinelli's political coffin.