Meet the GOP’s Gift to Tim Kaine and Democrats

With the exception of Glenn Youngkin who ran a deceptive campaign portraying himself as a moderate and a major gaffe by his opponent, Republicans running for statewide office have not done well since Bob McDonald won election. True, Youngkin pulled his ticket mates across the finish line, but I suspect that was a fluke and a repeat performance is unlikely since once elected Youngkin showed his true colors and his ticket mates are both extremists that play to the MAGA base and alienate suburban voters in the so-called urban crescent running from Northern Virginia down through Richmond and then to the cities of the Hampton Roads area.  Now, in 2024, the GOP candidate for U.S. Senate running against Senator Tim Kaine is a throwback to the GOP's failed pattern of running far right crazies that simply do not appeal to the suburban voters so crucial to state wide victory.  That candidate, Hung Cao has run a few ads but otherwise is largely missing from the campaign trail and appears to be offering a full MAGA style platform.  With Donald Trump urging the House GOP to shutdown the federal government and the hapless Mike Johnson unable to control his caucus and pass a spending bill, it's as if the Republicans are going out of their way to alienate Virginia's large number of federal employees and huge numbers of the members of the U.S. military who would suffer most in a shutdown.  Hung Cao may play well with the lunatic base of the Republican Party of Virginia, but as a column in the Washington Post lays out, he seemingly is a gift to Tim Kaine and Virginia Democrats.  Here are column highlights (for disclosure, I have known Kaine since 2002 and have contributed to his 2024 campaign):

After Glenn Youngkin won the race for governor in 2021, piercing the myth that Virginia had become a solid-blue splotch on the map of the South, Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine had every reason to be a bit anxious about which suburb-friendly Republican would seek to block his bid for a third term.

He got Hung Cao.  Kaine is one lucky man.

Look at the arc of Kaine’s Republican opponents through the years. First, in 2012, came George Allen, the former governor and senator who knew and loved Virginia, football and classic conservative policies. Kaine won, 53 percent to 47 percent.

Next, in 2018, came Corey Stewart, a proud bomb thrower who sneered at the “Virginia gentleman” notion that the state boasted a better brand of politics. Stewart, whose mantra was “I was Trump before Trump was Trump,” was the top elected official in Prince William County, where he won national attention for cutting off undocumented immigrants’ access to public services. Kaine dispatched him, 57 percent to 41 percent.

Now comes Cao, relatively new to politics, as is the fashion these days, a military man with 25 years in Special Operations, a Vietnamese immigrant who went to the top-shelf Thomas Jefferson High School in Alexandria and the Naval Academy.

Cao, 53, is running a mystifying campaign. He has turned down all but one invitation to debate Kaine. Cao is so scarce on the campaign trail that Kaine’s opposition trackers show a near-empty calendar for him. No one has even bothered to create a Wikipedia page for the man.

What Kaine has faced through the years isn’t an arc of Republican challengers. It’s a nosedive.

Cao’s supporters wonder where he is: “When are you coming to Henrico County?❤️” one woman asked on Instagram (where Cao has about 6,400 followers, compared with Kaine’s 110,000.)  . . . . A third urged Cao, “Come to Charlottesville! People need to hear your vision and story! Get into the lion’s den, it’s only half as bad as you imagine!”

Having Cao atop its slate this year does not bode well for the party of Donald Trump in the cradle of American democracy.

“The Democratic brand in Virginia during [Sens.] Mark Warner and Tim Kaine’s years in office has been moderate, centrist, relatively pro-business, inoffensive,” said Chris Saxman, a former Republican Virginia House delegate who now runs Virginia Free, a nonprofit that advocates pro-business policies. “Republicans used to have a great brand, too, with George Allen, John Warner, candidates who appealed to Virginia’s heavily suburban voters.”

Suburbanites just want stuff done, Saxman said: “They pay for things to work. That’s why they moved here. Then I go to Republican meetings, and all I hear is ‘We need someone more conservative.’ The environment just doesn’t exist now to attract the money you’d need or to attract a candidate with the talent and caliber of Tim Kaine.”

Saxman, who said he has reached out to Cao but got no reply, looks “at Hung’s campaign, and I’m going, ‘Are you running?’ I mean, nice guy, great story. But where is he? The campaign seems to be like a ‘Seinfeld’ show — a campaign about nothing. Why is he doing this?”

Cao seems to be appearing primarily at events starring Youngkin, Trump or others from the Trump orbit.

Cao told a TV reporter that he turned down most invitations to debate Kaine because “I don’t need more than one to defeat him.” Cao seems to think he can gain steam by posting on Facebook (13,000 followers, compared with Kaine’s 294,000) and X (about 71,000 followers against Kaine’s 935,000), where he slams Vice President Kamala Harris and dispenses tired Trump-lite riffs about purportedly dangerous vaccines or immigrants committing crimes.

Cao faces the same problem plaguing other lesser GOP candidates around the country. They mimic Trump’s rage and complaints, but because they lack the former president’s celebrity Teflon, their rhetorical excesses stick to them.

So when Cao calls Staunton, a west-central Virginia city that’s more populous than Fairfax City or Herndon, “Podunk,” or when he compares abortion to the Holocaust, or when he goes on a Christian nationalist’s YouTube show and frets that witchcraft has “taken over” Monterey, Calif., and “we can’t let that happen in Virginia,” he comes off not as a populist entertainer like Trump but as a strange, unknown extremist.

Cao paints Kaine as “a beta male” because the senator got stuck on I-95 during a snowstorm. Virginians “want hard men,” Cao said. “We need alpha males. We need meat eaters right now.” (For the record, Kaine is a burger and fries guy. We’re here for the essential issues of our times, folks.)

A Washington Post-Schar School poll this month found Kaine ahead of Cao 53 percent to 41 percent. As Harris pushed past Trump by eight percentage points in the poll, Cao seemed to be losing his preferred path to victory — being lifted by Trump’s coattails.

Cao might want to try an alternate route: He could campaign for the job.