A Silver Lining in Virginia's Election Results

While Republicans maintained their hold on the Virginia Senate and thus will likely block Medicaid expansion and other progressive measures proposed by Governor McAuliffe, they did not increase their overall seat count and saw loses in the House of Delegates and in other lower tier elections.  It also must be noted that since 2015 is an off year with low voter turnout, the GOP's ability to largely hold back losses does not mean that things will be rosy in the GOP bubble come next year, especially of the GOP nominates a lunatic as its standard bearer.  Over at Bearing Drift, Brian Schoeneman, one of the few sane Republicans left looks at the dark spots - that Democrats need to capitalize on - in the GOP's election results.  Here are highlights:

One of the reasons why your average voter has a tendency to hate politicians is that we often do our best to bring out the silver lining in even the darkest of storm clouds.  We will find the one or two good outcomes in a sea of bad ones and focus on those rather than on the big picture.  That’s a human tendency, especially when anybody’s job is on the line.

On the other hand, I’ve always been of the opinion that the truth is better than spin, and that as adults we should be willing to accept the bad with the good, because an unwillingness to confront things that didn’t go so well is an inherent obstacle to fixing those things the next time around.  Given that we’ve got a presidential cycle just around the corner, we need to look objectively at what happened last night in Virginia and have a long conversation about what it actually means.  So let’s throw away the posturing and be honest.

By any objective measurement, the GOP had a bad night  The only news story that most of America saw last night – the one that was blasted out by Politico, CNN and the non-Virginia news outlets – was that we held the State Senate, which threw a wrench into Governor McAuliffe’s long-term legislative plans.  Medicaid expansion is dead, as are his misguided attempts at turning guns into a political issue in a staunchly pro-gun Commonwealth. 

But what did the wins in the State Senate mean?  We maintained the status quo.  That’s it.

Maintaining the status quo in the Senate was a must win, and we won it.  But we gained no ground, and the millions poured into the Commonwealth by outside groups didn’t have an overall impact on the final outcome.  In the two races they targeted, they went 1-1.  The only people really pleased with that outcome should be the TV stations in Richmond and Northern Virginia.  On the House of Delegates side, we lost ground overall. 

Northern Virginia, however, should be concerned – our power in the House just dropped considerably.  We lost control of the House Transportation Committee and we lost two Republican seats that are now in Democratic hands, and thus marginalized.  And losing GOP incumbents in Northern Virginia before a presidential election is a bad thing – we lose the network, the lists, the activist contact with an incumbent.  All those things matter.  And now they’re gone.  

On the local level, the constant in-fighting and back-biting among different sectors of the Republican Party tore up areas that had previously been considered Republican strongholds.  . . .  Despite the feeling that this was a Republican year on the ground in Fairfax, all of our challenger candidates for Board of Supervisors lost and the open seat race in my home Sully District was a GOP loss, flipping that seat to the Democrats. 

The biggest loser of the night – by far – was the Republican Party of Virginia.  Early this morning, RPV sent out a self-congratulatory email that was long on self-praise but short on facts.  It was, if anything, an obvious attempt (and clearly pre-election results written) at turd polishing by Chairman John Whitbeck, going into this reelection campaign next year.  Despite the fact that we maintained the status quo and our messaging didn’t really work  . . . .

Whatever GOP momentum we may have built up was just released last night with a resounding “meh,” after losing a lot of races that folks thought we would do well in.  Let’s be honest – not flipping a single Senate seat Blue to Red is not momentum. As for RPV’s vaunted “Faces of the GOP” campaign – straight out of 2007’s Corporate Public Relations playbook – it was a disaster.  Of the 20 Republican races profiled, 14 of the candidates lost. 

Last night must be viewed by every Republican in Virginia as a wake up call.  The idea that we can win “base,” low-turnout off-year elections just by turning out Republicans should have died last night.  Wherever we nominated a candidate who didn’t reflect their district, we lost.  We lost two critical seats in Northern Virginia that will make next year’s presidential race harder to run.  And, most important, we saw obvious examples in Loudoun that the constant in-fighting between sections of the GOP has real world implications – and those implications are bad.  Bottom line – we had a bad night and we have a lot of work to do.

Will the Virginia GOP accept this message?  I doubt it since the Party more and more lives in an alternate universe dominated by the Christofascists, white supremacists and ignorance embracing elements  of the party base.

Is Obenshain Making Up NonExistent Problems So That He Can Steal Election?

Mark Obenshain - A Cheat and Liar?

I often say that no one lies more than the "godly Christian" crowd.  And more or less the same rule applies to extremist Republican candidates who wrap themselves in candidate a clock of religiosity even as they do violence to the true Gospel message.  Mark Obenshain, the failed GOP candidate for Virginia Attorney General, seems to fit this norm.  Why do I say this?  Because Obenshain is trying to allege that there were security issues involving ballots in Fairfax County even though the Republican Electoral Board secretary for Fairfax County Brian Schoeneman has stated that no such security issues exist.  The Daily Press looks at Obenshain's apparent effort to fabricate "problems" so that he can try to invalidate votes.  It's disgusting, but welcome to today's GOP.  Here are article highlights:

State Sen. Mark Obenshain, R-Harrisonburg, is asking the special court overseeing the recount of the attorney general's race to hold off counting a large number of ballots from Fairfax County because measures to keep them secure after the election were not followed.

His request involves part of some 115 boxes of election material out of the 869 now in the custody of the clerk of the Fairfax County Circuit Court. He asked the court to set those ballots aside and not recount them for now until the court decides whether the ballots were secure. 

Fairfax County Electoral Board secretary Brian Schoeneman said all the ballots involved were held in the board's warehouse.

"The good news is that those ballots were still secure," he said. "Our warehouse has security and is monitored and it's my understanding that the ballots were locked in the precinct carts, so no one could have accessed them. We're still determining why this happened, but it's most likely election officer error."

He said the problem was that two precincts did not follow the proper procedure. Instead of making sure their ballots were taken to the courthouse, election officials locked the ballots in their precinct carts and returned them to the Electoral Board's secure warehouse.

The voter registrar's staff discovered them and took them to the courthouse.  The two precincts, Virginia Run and Tysons, reported a total of 1,072 votes for Obenshain and 1,071 for Herring, according to the State Board of Election's official results.

Quentin Kidd, a political scientist at Christopher Newport University, said the motion follows a pattern in other requests by Obenshain's campaign to the recount court, such as access to electronic poll books.

"My guess is they are looking for any and every mistake," he said. The narrow margin of Herring's victory makes every ballot seem worth fighting over, Kidd said. That's especially so in Fairfax County, the state's largest locality, which gave both Herring and Gov.-elect Terry McAuliffe the votes they needed to win.

Let's be clear about one thing.  Obenshain ran a slick but totally dishonest campaign and lied non-stop about his extremism, pretending to be a moderate.  Now, the lying campaign having failed, he is lying again  in an attempt to steal the election from Mark Herring.  Do we really want someone so dishonest and amoral as Obenshain in the office of Attorney General?  I think not.   In my opinion, tawdry whore make many of the "godly folk" and individuals like Obenshain look like pillars of virtue.