Will Cosol Energy Be Cuccinelli's Undoing?

Consol Energy money time line - click Image to enlarge

With Election Day just 2 days away here in Virginia, more attention than usual is focused on Southwest Virginia, an area of the state where Republican candidates typically dominate.  There is little belief that Democrat Terry McAuliffe will beat the extreme Ken Cuccinelli in the region.  But there is much speculation as to whether or not Cuccinelli will be able to achieve the victory margin to counterbalance the populous urban areas of Virginia where McAuliffe will likely win the day.  If Cuccinelli doesn't win in Southwest Virginia by the margin he needs, the loss may well be a self-inflicted one thanks to Cuccinelli's greed and willingness to accept bribes large contributions from the energy industry in exchange for legal favors.  Here are highlights from the Bristol News:

Southwest Virginia could be a deciding factor in who wins the governor’s seat in Tuesday’s election.

The region was supposed to be a safe base for gubernatorial candidate Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. Here, he should have been able to count on solid Republican support while the heavily populated regions around Northern Virginia and Tidewater cranked out the massive toss-up votes, likely to fall into the hands of Democrat Terry McAuliffe.

But the natural-gas royalties controversy, sparked by a senior assistant attorney general’s help to energy companies being sued by regional landowners, threw that plan into a tailspin.

As a result, state political experts are now echoing a similar refrain about the region becoming a must-win for Cuccinelli.

“If he can’t hold off Terry McAuliffe in Southwest Virginia, then it’s over,” said Geoffrey Skelley, of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.

Billionaire environmentalist and McAuliffe backer Tom Steyer seized on the royalties controversy when it broke months ago and hasn’t let go. “I do think this is an incredibly powerful story and one that could change opinions about [Cuccinelli’s] reputation,” he said.

His political action committee, the San Francisco-based NextGen Climate Action, has spent slightly more than $2.4 million on television spots hammering the Republican candidate as a sell-out to out-of-state companies, according to non-partisan political spending tracker Virginia Public Access Project.

Voters across the state have seen the spots a lot. Ads featuring pictures of the attorney general, gas drilling pumps and newspaper clippings have splashed across TVs in Southwest Virginia, near Washington, D.C., and in the Tidewater region.

The ads seem to have resonated with some regional voters, wrote Jesse T. Richman, political science associate professor at Old Dominion University.

Fanning the flames even higher is the more than $140,000 in cash dropped into Cuccinelli’s campaign coffers since 2010 by Pittsburgh-based CONSOL Energy, which owns one of the energy companies being sued.

Cuccinelli needs more than just a win in Southwest Virginia, said Harry Wilson, professor and political analyst at Roanoke College. He needs a resounding victory.  “If Cuccinelli doesn’t win Southwest Virginia then this will be a landslide of epic proportions,” Wilson said.

Simply put, the Republican candidate will count on the rural area as a base of stability while he slugs it out for votes in the state’s more densely populated urban areas. And he has to do it knowing the natural-gas royalties controversy might have muddied the waters just enough to pull that base out from under him.