"This is an Earthquake": Virginia GOP Celebrates Democrats’ Implosion

Some Democrats - especially national level Democrats with oversize egos who ought stay out of state level politics outside their own states - continue to refuse to accept that they have been skillfully played by the GOP and its far right supporters as Virginia's political chaos continues.  A piece in Politico looks at the jubilation of the Virginia GOP as it watches the Virginia Democrats and national level busybodies tear their own party apart.  Indeed, the Virginia GOP sees its odds of success in the November 2019 Virginia elections improving markedly thanks to the Democrats self-driven implosion. Anyone who doesn't grasp that this was all carefully orchestrated and a key part needed for its success was Democrat stupidity.  The Democrats should have simply yawned at the Northam expose and perhaps the rest of the shoes would never have dropped.  But true to form, the Democrats acted just as expected and allowed themselves to be played for fools.

Democrats have grown bullish the past few election cycles about putting leftward-shifting Virginia permanently in their column. Then this week happened.

The scandals that engulfed the state government’s top three leaders have given Republicans renewed hope they can blunt the state’s leftward drift. It was no accident that this week Republicans decided to target Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, the state’s most popular politician who was not thought to be at risk in 2020. They think several newly-elected Democratic House members bungled their response to the first sexual assault allegation against Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax by, in some cases, waiting days to react— creating an opening for the GOP.

And Democrats worry that the state’s top lawmakers won’t be able to raise money or campaign this year when all 140 seats in the nearly evenly divided legislature are up for grabs.

It’s a rare moment of optimism for Virginia Republicans at a time when their party is down and out nationally, still hurting from the midterm elections when they lost control of the U.S. House.

“They were facing generational political Armageddon,” said John Fredericks, a conservative radio host who served as chairman of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign in Virginia. “This all changed in eight days. This is an earthquake. It’s a unique opportunity for Republicans.”

In Washington, Republicans see potential to gain some ground in a state where they’ve become accustomed to losing. Democrats have held all five statewide offices since 2013, and in 2016 Hillary Clinton won Virginia by five points.

Top officials at the National Republican Senatorial Committee met on Wednesday to discuss Warner, a popular two-term senator and former governor who, like other Virginia elected officials, had to navigate the thorny misdeeds of his contemporaries this week.

“In Virginia today, as opposed to two weeks ago, the political climate is totally and completely different,” NRSC Executive Director Kevin McLaughlin told POLITICO. “Whereas two weeks ago it was a reliably Democratic state, today everything is in flux. There’s nothing worse than uncertainty -- that’s a dangerous place for Mark Warner to be.” Republican strategists and activists were abuzz about their chances this November, when the party’s slim control of both state legislative chambers are in jeopardy in Virginia’s off-year elections.

Republican have a two-seat majority in the Senate, which has flipped back and forth between the parties four times during the past decade. Four Republican seats had been considered vulnerable this fall, compared to just two Democratic seats.

In the House, Democrats made massive gains in 2017 and nearly took control. They were favored to make more gains in the House, where Republicans hold a three-seat majority with one vacancy.

“The entire executive branch of Virginia is apprised of Democrats and all of them are embroiled in their own respective scandals at this point so yes, that has obviously done damage to them,” Republican House Majority Leader Todd Gilbert said. Still, he added, “The damage this has done to Virginia is a much larger issue than these secondary political implications.”

Even if they hang on, the three top leaders won’t be of much help to down-ballot Democrats. Normally they would be among the most powerful Democratic surrogates to appear at campaign rallies or raise money.

After this week, Republicans said they expect to recruit more formidable candidates, while Democrats wonder who they’ll have to run for statewide races in in 2021, the next time the seats are up. Fairfax and Herring had both been expected to run for governor.

Some Democrats dispute the consequences, saying the focus will quickly turn back to Trump and national politics.  “Six months from now, everything is going to be in the rearview mirror and the focus on D.C.,” state Sen. Scott Surovell said.

Other Democrats lamented they had only hurt themselves by acting so quickly on Northam, who said he was in his yearbook photo then reversed course, but did admit to donning blackface on another occasion.

“I’m sure there is some regret and remorse at what happened,” said Ward Armstrong, a longtime Democratic legislator who served as House minority leader.

The Bonfire of the Democrats

While Virginia is the immediate focus of the Democrats (in my view) politically foolish "no tolerance, no forgiveness ever" policy towards anything that might offend some fraction of the party base, as a piece in Politico lays out, the problem extends far beyond Virginia and will impact other states and most visibly, candidates  in the Democrat presidential 2020 primary contests.  Yes, the author is a Republican who is editor of the National Review, a pro-Republican publication, but he makes the valid point that what the Democrats are doing will likely guarantee that no candidate capable of winning the general election will get the nomination. From my many years in the GOP in the past, I learned that the entire purpose of a political party is to win elections and maintain your party's candidates in office so that they can further the party's policies and agenda.  You never push to remove an officeholder of your party unless they are guilty of true crimes or perhaps abuse of their office. These concepts are seemingly totally lost on today's Democrats, especially those under thirty based on what I have observed on social media.  To me, Democrats need to decide whether they want to win elections and further their governing policies or self-destruct and allow their political opponents to win the battle (and the war) and put in place the antithesis of what Democrats supposedly want.   Here are article excerpts:

All statewide officials in the Commonwealth of Virginia should resign if Democrats are held to their own standards.

Even if Gov. Ralph Northam didn’t appear in blackface in an image on his medical-school yearbook, he confessed to once darkening his face as part of a Michael Jackson costume.

Attorney General Mark Herring, who called Northam’s conduct indefensible, also used blackface once when dressing as an African-American singer.

Meanwhile, Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax has been accused of sexual assault and been harshly dismissive of the accuser (he reportedly said of her in a private meeting, “f--- that b----”).

If ever wearing blackface, even in the 1980s as both Northam and Herring did, is a career-ender, and if we are supposed to “believe all women,” then all three of these Democrats have to go.

Only Northam has been thrown overboard by the party, with Fairfax and Herring getting passes so far because Democrats don’t want to nuke the entirety of a state executive branch they control.

Regardless, Virginia is an indication of an inflamed and unforgiving Democratic mood that will define the party’s battle for the 2020 presidential nomination.

Democrats are about to embark on the first woke primary, a gantlet of political correctness that will routinely wring abject apologies out of candidates and find fault in even the most sure-footed. The passage of time will be no defense. Nor the best of intentions. Nor anything else.

Any lapses will be interpreted through the most hostile lens, made all the more brutal by the competition of a large field of candidates vying for the approval of a radicalized base. The Democrat nomination battle might as well be fought on the campus of Oberlin College and officiated by the director of the Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.

Being a progressive hero of long-standing doesn’t afford any protection. Consider Sen. Elizabeth Warren. She certainly deserves all the grief she gets for her laughable identification of herself over the years as an American Indian. But for the identity-politics Left, her fault runs deeper: In trying to rebut the allegedly racist mockery of her as “Pocahontas,” she herself committed a racial offense. . . . Cherokee Nation activist Rebecca Nagle told CNN last week that Warren needed to apologize “to the tribes that she has harmed and to Native people broadly.”

Sure enough, she apologized, and presumably will keep on doing it as long as she’s running.

In this environment, being a white male, particularly a white male not obsessed with gender and race, is a risk factor. This is a major vulnerability of Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose outright socialism is no defense.

Segments of the Left jumped on him this week for doing the same State of the Union response that he’s done for the past couple of years. This time was different because he’d be following the African-American activist Stacey Abrams, and somehow or other supposedly upstaging her. Activist Marc Lamont Hill called Sanders’ choice “racially tone deaf.” Never mind that Sanders had praised the choice of Abrams for the formal rebuttal.

In every presidential campaign, candidates have to explain and backfill to get with the party’s latest program. What will make this process so much more intense for Democrats is the belief that even past mistakes involving the choice of words or symbolism are affirmatively injurious of other people. And the belief that such mistakes represent deep sins to be repented.

Even Sen. Kamala Harris, who calls racism, sexism, and trans-phobia matters of “national security,” isn’t safe. She was once a prosecutor, after all. Reviewing her record, a New York Times op-ed writer said “she needs to radically break with her past.”

Who doesn’t? No one will be woke enough to emerge from this process unscathed.

While perhaps well intentioned - the saying goes that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions -  the Democrats' "zero tolerance, no forgiveness" policy is unworkable and is likely to paralyze the party and drive away good candidates.  If the Democrats want to be politically competitive, they need to rethink this idiocy. Otherwise, be prepared for many years of GOP rule.