Trump Targets Virginia Thanks to Democrat Predictability

In a piece at Smerconish.com, I wrote about the self-inflicted harm done to Virginia Democrats in the wake of a far right attack on the top state level Democrats:

The Republicans’only meaningful hope of avoiding a wipe out in November [2019] was to fragment and divide the Virginia Democrats, many of whom are united in the animus towards Donald Trump, and Trump’s supporters among elected officials in Virginia.   

Everything is up in the air, and far too many Democrats have lost sight to the reality that politics is all about having your team – flawed or not – in control of the state executive branch of government, especially if you do not hold control of the legislature. However, the divisions go beyond an effort at mutual destruction among Democrats. In my view, this GOP’s contrived firestorm has now spread to various LGBT advocacy groups around Virginia, many of which, in my opinion, foolishly took anti-Northam positions despite strong elements of support for Northam among their own financial donor base. 

Yes, the GOP far right played the Democrats masterfully,.  But the main fault, in my view, lies with DC Democrats and there ridiculous "no forgiveness ever" mantra and Senators Warner and Kaine and Congressman like Bobby Scott who rushed to judgment and allowed themselves to be played by the GOP (none of whom will concede they were played for fools).  Without this self-destructive over reaction, the GOP plan would never have worked.

Now, as Politico is reporting Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, is targeting Virginia for both the 2019 and 2020 elections. This ought to be a wake up call to Democrats who need to get their heads out of their posteriors.  Here are article highlights (note the disingenuousness of the openly racist Trump attacking Ralph Northam):

President Donald Trump is muscling into a blue state where Democrats are reeling: Virginia.

With a tenuous grip on states like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, the president is looking for opportunities to expand his electoral playing field. He’s set his sights on Virginia, a state Democrats have dominated in the past decade, but where the party’s three top officeholders are embroiled in scandals.

Leading the offensive is Vice President Mike Pence, who on Wednesday evening headlined a fundraiser in McLean for Republican state legislators up for election in November. Pence is expected to hold additional events for Virginia lawmakers in the coming months, and White House officials intend to use the 2019 elections to test whether they can make inroads in the state, which Trump lost by 5 percentage points.

Trump is keenly interested in the push. Before Pence departed for the fundraiser on Wednesday, the president asked him to deliver a message to state Republicans. “Tell them we think Virginia is in play and that I’m going to be there,” Trump told the vice president, according to one person familiar with the exchange.

The president [Trump] has repeatedly gone after Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam since revelations surfaced earlier this year that he wore blackface in the 1980s. The White House offensive in Virginia highlights Trump’s central challenge in 2020. His popularity is underwater in many of the states that powered his upset victory in 2016. In response, Trump has started tearing down Democratic candidates, while searching for blue states that he might turn in his favor. While Virginia is an early focus, campaign officials have discussed making a play in New Hampshire, Minnesota, Colorado and even New Mexico — a state that Trump lost by 8 percentage points. The conclusion by special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation that Trump’s campaign didn't conspire with Russia in 2016 has his political team feeling upbeat and confident that a cloud hanging over the president’s bid for a second term has been lifted. Within Democratic circles — and even some corners of the Trump campaign — there is deep skepticism the president can win the state, which has grown steadily more liberal in recent years. Republicans haven’t won a statewide contest in Virginia in a decade, and a Quinnipiac University poll released last month showed Trump with a 36 percent approval rating there. Democrats concede the firestorms surrounding Northam, Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax and state Attorney General Mark Herring are damaging in the short term. But they say the scandals will have faded in the minds of voters by November 2020. As the 2019 races get underway, Virginia Republicans are defending narrow majorities in both legislative chambers. National Republicans say they intend to use the contests as one measurement to gauge [Trump's] the president’s strength in the state, and that the outcome will help to shape the extent to which they invest there in 2020.

The GOP Should Be Scared by Virginia

Why did the Republican Party lose so badly in Virginia yesterday?  That is a question that pundits will be bickering about for days and weeks.   But to me, the GOP loss comes down to several factors, not the least of which is the reality in the age of Der Trumpenführer is that it is becoming increasingly impossible for decent, moral people to remain Republicans.  Both in the Virginia campaign and nationally, all the Republican Party has to offer is increasingly overt racism/white nationalism, the coddling of Christian extremists, and taking from the poor and middle class to give to the wealthy.  The entire GOP platform has become the antithesis of the Gospel's social message and outside of rural and ostensibly more religious areas, people are finding the GOP's message repulsive.  Ed Gillespie tried the tax cut promise which would have bankrupted Virginia in the style of what Sam Brownback did in Kansas.  Urban Virginia voters - who shoulder the bulk of the tax burden and basically support rural areas - said "No" resoundingly.   With Danica Roem defeating Bob Marshall, the GOP's use of god, guns and gays to mobilize voters is in its death throes in Virginia.   The other notable thing about the election is the degree of dishonesty in the GOP candidates. Gillespie, John Adams, and Jill Vogel (and many of the GOP House of Delegates candidates as well) lied with abandon and at times shockingly so. Rather than garner them votes (outside of white supremacists and evangelical Christians) the open and blatant lies disgusted far larger numbers of voters.  A column in the New York Times picks up on some of this and lays out why the GOP should be very worried after their playbook went down in flames.  Here are excerpts:

Although at times over the last week it seemed that Democrats were doing their damnedest to lose the Virginia gubernatorial race, they failed miserably in that endeavor, which is to say that they succeeded emphatically at the polls. Ralph Northam will be the state’s next governor.

That’s a gigantic relief, because a Northam defeat would have prompted a Democratic meltdown — and rightly so. In statewide races, Virginia is increasingly blue: Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump there by five points a year ago. And Trump’s ceaseless assault on propriety, decency and ethical, responsible government is supposedly firing up liberals as never before. Virginia on Tuesday was the place to demonstrate that.

The demonstration was impressive. Not only did Northam beat his Republican opponent, Ed Gillespie, by about nine points . . . but Democrats also performed strongly in other Virginia races. So strongly, in fact, that one Democrat, Danica Roem, easily unseated a longtime Republican incumbent in the House of Delegates and will become the nation’s only openly transgender state representative. The history that she made flies squarely in the face of the bigotry and divisiveness that Trump sows.

Just when we needed a sign that his America is not all of America, Virginia came to the rescue and gave us a vivid one. And I guarantee you that the Republicans up for re-election in 2018 saw it, shuddered and will spend the next weeks and months trying to figure out just how much trouble their party is in and precisely how to repair it. . . . . the returns in Virginia suggested that Trump antipathy is indeed real and that it is definitely animating.

Does it mean that Democrats can wrest one chamber of Congress from Republican control in 2018? Impossible to say. . . . But there are reasons for Republicans to be very afraid.  One is that Northam outperformed Clinton without being a particularly energetic, forceful candidate. . . . . He prevailed, handily.

Republicans should also worry that they’ve oversold themselves on the moderate-progressive divide in the Democratic Party and how severely Democrats would be hobbled by it.

Late Tuesday night, as the final votes were still being counted, Democrats were poised to pick up at least 13 seats, and taking control of the House was not out of the question.

In rooting for a Gillespie victory, the G.O.P. was looking for something larger: an assurance that a Republican in a swing state or swing district could find the right recipe for energizing Trump supporters without alienating Trump skeptics.  Gillespie’s answer was . . . . he parroted the president’s tough talk about criminals and immigrants and denounced professional football players who didn’t stand for the national anthem.

Beyond the returns, this was a governor’s race that made the skin crawl, which is to say that it was a sufficiently accurate mirror and microcosm of American political culture in the Age of Trump. . . . . Northam didn’t sell out his principles nearly as thoroughly as Gillespie did, and Democrats didn’t sink to Republicans’ level. In fact one of the most audacious tricks that Republicans sought to pull off was ginning up as much outrage over a loathsome Latino Victory Fund ad that ran on television just a handful of times — it showed a truck with a Confederate flag hunting down children of color — as there was over viciously negative commercials of Gillespie’s that blanketed the airwaves. These attacks essentially branded Northam, a mild-mannered pediatrician who served in the Army, as some unhinged leftie eager to give guns to pedophiles.

Gillespie’s campaign “has not been just a dog whistle to the intolerant, racially resentful parts of the Republican base; it’s been a mating call,” wrote The Washington Post in a blistering — and wholly warranted — editorial . . . 

Before this race, Gillespie was as establishment as an establishment Republican could be . . . Until the last few months, when he utterly transformed. The impression he left on voters was an ugly one, and he and the G.O.P. have nothing to show for it. That should scare Republicans most of all.

North Carolina GOP Continues to Suppress Minority Voting

Despite a federal court ruling that struck down North Carolina's 2013 election law that was carefully crafted to either disenfranchise minority voters or at a minimum suppress the minority vote, the North Carolina GOP is actively working to do precisely what the court ruling forbade.  While North Carolina is perhaps and extreme example, the actions of the North Carolina GOP are in keeping with GOP efforts to disenfranchise minority voters in order to increase the power of the GOP's shrinking white base.  Rather than recognize that more and more people are repelled by their racists and religious extremist agenda and reverse Robin Hood policies, the GOP instead attacks the voting rights of those who oppose them.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the insidious efforts underway in North Carolina.  Here are excerpts:

When a federal appeals court overturned much of North Carolina’s sweeping 2013 election law last month, saying it had been deliberately intended to discourage African-Americans from voting, something else was tossed out as well: the ground rules for this year’s elections in a critical swing state. In each of the state’s 100 counties, local elections boards scheduled new hearings and last week filed the last of their new election rules with the state.

Now, critics are accusing some of the boards, all of which are controlled by Republicans, of staging an end run around a court ruling they are supposed to carry out. Like the law that was struck down, say voting rights advocacy groups and some Democrats who are contesting the rewritten election plans, many election plans have been intentionally written to suppress the black vote.

“It is equal to voter suppression in its worst way,” said Courtney Patterson, the sole Democrat on the Lenoir County elections board.

He was referring to a proposal by the board’s two Republicans to allow 106.5 hours of early voting before the Nov. 8 election — less than a quarter of the time allowed in the 2012 presidential election — and to limit early balloting to a single polling place in the county seat of a largely rural eastern North Carolina county that sprawls over 403 square miles.

In a county where Democrats outnumber Republicans by better than two to one, and four in 10 voters are black, the election plan limits voting to a single weekend day, and on weekdays demands that residents, including those who are poor and do not own cars, make long trips to cast a ballot.

Actually, the roots of North Carolina’s latest conflict over voting seem apparent. Republicans and Democrats here are in hand-to-hand combat this election year as seldom before. Contests for president and United States senator are neck and neck, and the Republican governor, Pat McCrory, is in a tough bid for re-election. Two congressional races are unfolding in districts whose boundaries were ordered redrawn this year after a federal court ruled that they had been gerrymandered to dilute black voters’ influence.

While Republicans scoff at the notion that they have sought to suppress an overwhelmingly Democratic black vote, they make no apologies for pursuing every legal opportunity that exists to win elections.

[I]n a letter to The Raleigh News & Observer, which stirred a small sensation this month after it acquired an email that Mr. Woodhouse had sent to Republican election-board members and other party stalwarts after the court ruling that invalidated the 2013 law.

In it, he stated that Republican election officials “can and should make party-line changes” to the rules governing early voting periods, and urged them to oppose other measures — like Sunday hours for early voting sites, and polling places on college campuses — that are commonly said to aid Democratic turnout.

The federal appeals court ruling against the 2013 election law broadly said that given North Carolina’s history of racial discrimination in voting, Republicans could not roll back voting rules that benefited African-Americans without compelling reasons.

But when the appeals court ordered counties to restore the early voting period to 17 days, it left decisions about the number of polling places and their operating hours up to local election boards. The result is that some of the newly proposed election plans explicitly cut voting hours below previous levels, and outlaw Sunday voting altogether.

Democrats and voting-rights advocates call the cuts a conspiracy to depress black turnout. 

I increasingly find myself embarrassed to ever have been a Republican.  Like the Christofasacists, many in today's GOP are NOT nice or decent people.