Virginia GOP in Denial About Election Day Disaster

The Republican Party of Virginia ("RPV") began to reject objective reality and began to dwell in a bubble years ago.  It started with RPV's embrace of Christofascists who were slowly but steadily voted onto local city and county committees and who alienated moderate members of those same committees and the party in general.  Now, with the embrace of white supremacists as best embodied by failed senate candidate Corey Stewart and Donald Trump.  The end result is that Virginia is quickly becoming a "blue state" where no Republican can win statewide office and where the GOP strangle hold on the Virginia General Assembly is greatly weakened and may vanish completely in November, 2019.  Sane people would realize that either the party agenda needs to change oe extinction may be on the horizon.  Not so with RPV as a column in the Virginian Pilot notes.  Here are column excerpts:

ANYTIME a political party gets shellacked on Election Day, it’s useful to ask whether the party has learned anything from the experience, and whether it is willing to fix its problems.

If the post-election message from Virginia GOP Chairman Jack Wilson to the party faithful is any guide, the answer is “not likely.”

Friday evening after the Nov. 6 midterm elections — contests in which Virginia Republicans gave up three seats in the U.S. House of Representatives (two of them in usually Republican territory), and got walloped in Virginia’s U.S. Senate election — Wilson sent an email to fellow Republicans statewide.

“Simply put, this Tuesday’s results were devastating,” acknowledged Wilson. He continued, “While some will want to play the blame game, we as a Party do not have the time to engage in that useless dialogue. Our defeated candidates are not to blame, every single one worked their hearts out and left everything they had out on the field. President Trump is not to blame.”

The contention that Donald J. Trump is not responsible for Republican losses here strains credulity.  Trump and his supporters are in full command of the Republican Party. He promotes a racially inflammatory agenda in place of traditional Republican principles that support free trade, strong ethics and family values.

Trump’s message continues to appeal in rural districts.  But in states with rapidly growing urban and suburban districts, such as Virginia, Trump and Trumpism are political liabilities.

Largely as a result of Trump, Virginia Republicans over the past two years have lost statewide elections in Virginia, lost those three seats in the House of Representatives and almost lost the GOP’s 20-year grip on the Virginia General Assembly in the 2017 state elections.

Statewide surveys show that Trump is deeply unpopular in Virginia, and the Washington Post-Schar School Election Day survey confirmed that Trump was top of mind with voters as they went to the polls.

The Washington Post-Schar School survey showed that 56 percent of women voted for Democrats in hotly contested congressional districts around the country this month. A CNN exit poll in Virginia showed that 64 percent of women voted for Democratic incumbent Tim Kaine in his U.S. Senate contest with Republican Corey Stewart, an unabashed Trump acolyte.

Despite the gender gap, Wilson’s letter makes no mention of urging the Republican Party to do more to appeal to women. That seems odd; women usually outnumber men at the polls.

[A]s long as Republican election officials around the country are regularly accused of suppressing the minority vote, and as long as the president stokes a strident anti-immigrant agenda, it’s doubtful black and Latino voters will soon embrace the GOP.

Some GOP strategists have openly said that as long as Trump is president, Virginia will continue to elect Democrats.

We won’t have to wait long to test that proposition. The Virginia General Assembly is up for grabs next fall. Results from the midterm elections show that Kaine won handily in about a dozen General Assembly districts currently held by Republicans, a worrying sign for the GOP.

But to capitalize on the opportunity in 2019, Democrats will have to motivate voters who seldom vote in low-profile legislative elections.

“Virginia has changed,” says [former Lt. Governor Bill] Bolling, “and the Republican Party is going to have to change if it wants to win again in a state that is much more diverse and much more moderate than it used to be.”  But Bolling is not calling the shots at the Virginia GOP anymore. The Trumpists are.

With luck, RPV will remain in its alternate reality and Democrats will gain control of the General Assembly in November 2019.  Perhaps if that happens, RPV will finally realize that embracing Christofascists and racists is a losing proposition long term. 

The Virginia GOP's Road of Self-Destruction

As I have noted many times, years ago, I was a GOP activist, an eight (8) year precinct captain and member of the City Committee of the Republican Party of Virginia Beach.  I also held a state board position by appointment from Republican Governor Jim Gilmore.  During the intervening years, I, my entire extended family, and many friends all fled the Republican Party of Virginia ("RPV") as the party embraced homophobia, swore fealty to a radical white evangelical Christian agenda, and more recently, embraced white supremacists.  "Moderate Republicans" are nearly extinct and have either fled the asylum the Virginia GOP has become or have literally died off.  Meanwhile, instead of striving to broaden its base of support, RPV has moved further and further to the far right, falling for the Chtistofascists/white supremacist fantasy that victory could be won if the party only mounted "true conservatives" as its candidates.  The result?  RPV has not won a statewide race in Virginia for almost a decade and 15 GOP House of Delegate seats were lost in 2017.  With Corey Stewart now the standard bearer for RVP in 2018, even the National Review sees little upside for the party.    Even Bearing Drift notes that Republican Reps. Dave Brat and Barbara Comstock are on the "flip list" and that Scott Taylor's seat is now a "toss up."  First, these highlights from National Review:

According to political experts, Virginia can be considered either the northernmost southern state or the southernmost northern state. Recent Democratic successes and shifting demographics seem to favor the latter view. The main areas of recent population growth have been Democratic areas — Northern Virginia, just outside the District of Columbia; the capital, Richmond; and Henrico County in the Richmond suburbs. Meanwhile, the population has declined in the southwest and in Hampton Roads, the former a Republican stronghold and the latter a battleground. From 2000 to 2010, Virginia’s Hispanic population, which tends to support Democrats, increased by 92 percent, with two-thirds of that growth concentrated in Northern Virginia.

One experienced Republican activist argues that “Virginia is more like a purple state with a roller-coaster pattern than it is a red state turning blue.” But Mike Murphy, a longtime GOP political consultant, says: “The state is turning blue, and the Republicans are responding to that by turning crazy. That is a cycle that will electorally wipe out the party, at least at the state level.”

Tucker Martin, a veteran political strategist with extensive experience in the state, tells National Review that there’s a disconnect between what Virginia is and what many Virginia Republicans believe it to be. “The Democrats are on home turf now, and Republicans need to branch out and create their own brand,” Martin says. “The problem is that the Trump era has made it almost impossible to do that.”

Over the last few years, these factors have converged to push Virginia from purple to blue. Even as its quickly changing demographics have favored the Left, a stripe of populist Republican politician has arisen on the right, appealing to a core of supporters who have driven the state GOP even further rightward, distancing moderate voters and, in some cases, encouraging Democratic engagement.

Enter Donald Trump, a political outsider much like Brat who surged onto the scene in 2015 to compete for the presidential nomination, appealing to many of the same parts of the GOP base that Brat had wooed. Though Trump’s strategy played well nationally, it wasn’t as successful in Virginia. The businessman even struggled to find a state politician willing to chair his state campaign until Corey Stewart, chairman of the Prince William County Board of Supervisors, stepped in.

Trump barely won the Virginia primary on March 1, with Florida senator Marco Rubio coming in a close second. Tellingly, Trump received only a plurality of the vote. This lack of widespread support was a sign of things to come. Virginia was the only southern state to go to Hillary Clinton, who won it by more than Barack Obama had in 2012.

Stewart’s far-right rhetoric occasionally slipped into outright support for white supremacists. In early 2017, he called anti-Muslim conspiracy crank Paul Nehlen (a primary challenger to House speaker Paul Ryan) one of his “personal heroes,” and his campaign paid Nehlen a fundraising commission for the use of his email list. Stewart also appeared during the primary with Jason Kessler, an organizer of last August’s neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville.

Recently, Stewart disavowed both Nehlen and Kessler, saying he had been unaware of their extremism. Shaun Kenney, former executive director of the state party, calls this claim nonsense, saying “everyone in Charlottesville knew what Jason Kessler was and knew what he represented.”

In November, Gillespie lost to sitting lieutenant governor Ralph Northam by nearly nine percentage points. Democratic candidates took 15 seats in the house of delegates, where Republicans had held a 66–34 advantage. One delegate race was deemed a tie, and a random drawing allotted the seat to the Republican, allowing the GOP to retain a 51–49 majority — literally dependent on the luck of the draw. The biggest story was turnout among Democrats, who voted at unprecedented, presidential-election levels: One analysis estimated that turnout among under-30-year-olds in Virginia was 34 percent, nearly twice  its 17 percent in the 2009 gubernatorial race. Nearly seven out of ten of those voters cast their ballots for Northam.

“Trump has made it a social value among those Democratic-leaning, younger voters to be against Trump and to demonstrate it by voting,” Murphy explains. “Trump has solved the problem the Democrats have faced for decades, which is how to get their younger, unengaged voters to show up and pull the ‘D’ lever.”

[E]xperts predict that Republicans can’t expect to win Virginia with only the segments of the electorate that Trump won. Stewart’s general-election campaign will be the test. While populist rhetoric undoubtedly appeals to enough of the base to hand primary elections to Trump and Stewart, Virginia is slipping away from the GOP: The Cook Political Report just moved Brat’s reelection campaign in the seventh district from “leans Republican” to “toss-up.” “The trend over the last 20 years has been that, as the Republican party pushes more to the right, Virginia has shifted to the left, and it’s created a chasm,” Martin explains. “Trump has broadened that chasm. Corey Stewart makes it a little wider. As a party, we need to look at ways to close that divide.”

So long as they remain the party of Corey Stewart, Virginia Republicans are likely to stand on the outside looking in.

Bearing Drift continues the dire picture for the RPV.  Here are highlights:

The Wason Center’s Rachel Bitecofer has published a new paper that will hearten Virginia Democrats. Nationally, the party is “primed to pick up enough seats to control the House.”

In Virginia, Bitecofer pulls no punches: Republican Reps. Dave Brat and Barbara Comstock will lose. And the state’s other race to watch, the 2^nd District, is a pure toss-up. And for Republicans, the bad news looks like it will continue for as long as Donald Trump is in the White House.

Part of the reason is “negative partisanship” — the negative attitudes, even extending outside of politics that members of the major political parties have toward the other party’s candidates. The negative feelings are stronger among those supporting the party out of power. All that negativity keeps them motivated.

The deciding factor for Democrats is getting their own partisans to the polls: Democrats lose Independents quite often, and in elections they win and they lose because they have a population advantage in many places and when their partisans turn out in high numbers, it trumps the combined loss of Republicans and Independents, assuming they don’t lose the latter group by wide margins.

[I]f it’s true, it could mean that races that were already going to be expensive and rough, such as Virginia’s 10^th, will be even costlier and much rougher than we imagined. The reason? Democrats will do everything possible to raise turnout among their base voters and to capture a good share of the true independents.

According to the Monmouth University poll of the 10^th — the only data we have so far –Democrats are already doing what’s necessary to reach both goals, long before the mud starts flying. In Monmouth’s “turnout surge” model, in areas where “Trump is unpopular,” Democratic nominee Jennifer Wexton leads Comstock 51 percent to 40 percent.

Another key to Bitecofer’s model, and another troubling sign for Republicans: the number of college graduates in a district. She looked at Virginia’s 2017 House of Delegates races and discovered this: Of the 17 Clinton districts in Virginia, Democrats won nearly all of them. They even picked up a seat in a district that broke for Trump. And the most significant factor explaining districts that flipped from those that didn’t (other than the district’s partisan advantage and challenger spending relative to incumbent spending) is the percent of college educated residents residing within the district.

Brat once complained,“women are in my grill no matter where I go.” Negative partisanship means they still are. The question is whether the energy can be sustained until November. Bitecofer argues it can and will be — and that it will continue far beyond then, as Republicans demonstrated when Barack Obama was in the White House.

The leadership of the RVP decided years ago to sell its soul to Christofascists and white supremacists (the two for the most part overlap, in my view) and mow it is repealing the whirlwind of tying its future to minority extremists.  The RPV deserves every misfortune that befalls it. 

Corey Stewart Brings Turmoil Virginia Republicans

Having a neo-Confederate white supremacist at the top of the state ticket this year has thrown the Republican Party of Virginia into chaos.  While some 55% of Republicans nationwide support Donald Trump/Mike Pence's cruel, inhumane policy of separating immigrant children from the parents, for many of the few remaining moderates I knew when I held a position withing the Virginia GOP, Corey Stewart's avoid racism is simply too much.  The irony, of course, is that they refuse to admit that the national party is little better except in the level of openness on the party's racism. When Stewart hopefully goes down to a humiliating defeat, one can hope that in Virginia the GOP may begin to realize that its base of Christofascist extremists and white supremacists is viewed with disgust by a majority of Virginia voters and the myth that "true conservative" candidates are the solution to the party's problems.  Here are excerpts from the Virginian Pilot:

Corey Stewart's Republican nomination for U.S. Senate from Virginia has prompted an identity crisis within the state GOP, with some donors and activists saying they are so turned off, they are willing to vote for his Democratic opponent, Sen. Tim Kaine.

Stewart, chairman of the Prince William County Board of Supervisors, catapulted to the U.S. Senate nomination - and nearly won the gubernatorial primary last year - by celebrating guns and Confederate statues, lambasting illegal immigrants, and associating with white nationalist Jason Kessler and Paul Nehlen, a Wisconsin candidate barred from Twitter because of anti-Semitic and racist posts.

His perch on top of the ticket has roiled Republican circles inside the state. On Saturday, the head of the Virginia Republican Party resigned his post. John Whitbeck declined to say why he was stepping down. "Other political opportunities have arisen for me that I am thinking about pursuing," he told members of the party's governing board at a meeting in Richmond.

Two other party leaders have resigned, but neither will say why. . . . . The Washington Post talked to more than 50 Virginia Republicans about the Senate race and found Stewart's Trumpian antics thrill supporters but turn off traditional donors and outside groups.

Bobbie Kilberg, a northern Virginia fundraiser and veteran of three Republican presidential administrations, said she will not open her checkbook - or home - to Stewart. . . . "I don't have to agree on everything with the people I support . . . but they need to be people with whom I believe I can work, who are reasonable and rational and have a respect for others."

Kaine - with his long Virginia history as a former governor and lieutenant governor, flush campaign account, and national profile - was favored to win in November even before the GOP nominee was chosen.

But Stewart is likely to put the seat further out of reach for Republicans, extending a losing streak for a party that has not won statewide since 2009.  The trend line is startling for Virginia, where Republicans held one of its two U.S. Senate seats for 30 years and the other for a dozen years before they lost their grip.

There's already evidence Republican voters are opting out of the Senate contest. In the primary in the 10th Congressional District represented by Comstock, about 2,000 fewer voters - 4 percent - cast ballots in the Senate race than in the congressional race.

The National Republican Senate Committee and the Koch-funded group Americans for Prosperity both said they would not put any resources into the Senate race and the Republican National Committee is focused elsewhere. "Virginia is not high on the list at this point," said Garren Shipley of the RNC.

Stewart's elevation has some lifelong Republicans questioning their political identity.  "I am extremely disappointed that a candidate like Corey Stewart could win the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate," former Republican lieutenant governor Bill Bolling tweeted on the night of Stewart's primary win. "This is clearly not the Republican Party I once knew, loved and proudly served. Every time I think things can't get worse they do, and there is no end in sight."

Richard Fox, 28, resigned as a regional chair of the Albemarle County GOP committee days after Stewart won the election, and will vote for Kaine or libertarian Matt Waters. . . . "Abraham Lincoln would be rolling over in his grave if he knew that's what the Republican Party has come to," Fox said.

Many of the party's most active Republicans won't support someone other than Stewart because, under party rules, they would forfeit their positions on the GOP's governing board or on local committees.

"We lost the governorship [in 2013] when we should have won it, and it's just been spiraling down," said former Republican congressman Tom Davis.

David Wasserman, a House analyst at Cook Political Report, said Stewart's message doesn't sell in what he termed "the new Virginia," where Trump lost by 5 percent.

"The new Virginia is diverse and professional and they see an economy that's working for them," Wasserman said. "They don't agree with the Trump Republican wing's dark portrayal of immigration. They don't have much use for Confederate monuments."

The only way to save the GOP, both in Virginia, is to crush it at the ballot box. Only then will there be a possibility for sanity to save the party or let it meet a much deserved death.

Corey Stewart Could Endanger Other Virginia Republicans

As a former Republican and activist within the Republican Party of Virginia, the selection of Corey Stewart as the party senate nominee underscores the sad reality that the Virginia GOP has become as insane as a rabid dog. As recently as 15-20 years ago, Stewart would have been hard put to be elected to a a city or county committee.  Back then, of course, moderates were still the norm within the Party.  Now, with evangelical Christian extremists and white supremacists (the two groups are difficult to differentiate) controlling the base, insanity and bigotry are the norm.  One can only hope that Stewart goes down to a horrific defeat and kills the delusional myth that Republicans have not won statewide office in Virginia for nearly a decade because their candidates were "too liberal."  Two pieces look at the likely consequences of Stewart's selection.  One is found in Bearing Drift, a conservative site, which argues there is no conservative case for supporting Stewart and refers to Stewart as the "Gauleiter of Prince William County" (for Fox News viewers, "gauleiter" is a political official governing a district under Nazi rule), and the other is in the New York Times.  First highlights from Bearing Drift:

Back in February 2014, I penned a piece warning about the rise of the nativist alt-right in Republican politics. . . . The Republican Party of Virginia . . . . has descended into a parody of itself, finally lifting from the dust the battle standard of Massive Resistance and waving it proudly in the hands of one man: Corey Stewart.

Let us be clear where things stand.  Our chairman, John Whitbeck, is best known for his jokes about Jewish people at party gatherings.  For an unprecedented 11 times, Whitbeck defended Fredy Burgos, a man whose anti-Semtism and fondness for Augusto Pinochet were abundantly clear, but never worthy of countenance until this publication forced his hand.  Yet while removed by State Central Committee by a margin so close as to be an embarrassment unto itself, Burgos was in fact rewarded for his troubles, earning a role as vice chairman of the Fairfax GOP, a full 1/8th of the Commonwealth of Virginia.

The litany of stupid and the obtuse only becomes worse.  The current executive director proudly boasts of how Governor Northam has betrayed his “heritage” on social media and openly shares material from known alt-right operatives.  . . . members and activists have abandoned the party in droves.

It gets worse.  Proudly, the alt-right brags about electing two Republican congressmen (Brat and Garrett), proudly they take photos next to our candidates pledging themselves to their cause (Stewart), and the mewling from erstwhile conservatives in protest is barely audible — protecting access to power over their own conscience, excusing weakness for prudence.  It’s folly.

In 1993 nearly 25 years ago.  Back then, the Republican Party was the party of free minds, free ideas, and a free society.  Free speech was sacrosanct; free trade was the pillar that destroyed Soviet communism.  Around it all was a wholesale commitment to family and the American entrepreneurial spirit — that equality of outcome could never be guaranteed, but equality of opportunity was our first and foremost responsibility as a polity. So when is it enough? Was it enough when in 2014 Dave Brat abased himself before the likes of Breitbart.com — the self-declared mouthpiece of the alt-right?  Was it enough when the alt-right spiked the football in 2016 with cries of “Hail Trump!” as they celebrated their election night win?  Was it enough when in 2017 they earned invitations to town halls in Charlottesville?  Was it enough when three people — two of whom were Virginia State Troopers — died during the August 2017 alt-right rallies in Charlottesville?

Is it enough now when their groomed and chosen candidate — financed by the likes of Chris Ekstrom and run by Rick Shaftan — rides the wave of white nationalism?  To a party nomination contest?  And wins?

Let’s be clear about what happened.  The future of the Republican Party of Virginia fought the past, and lost. 

For 25 years, I have believed — perhaps erroneously — that the Republican Party was the best home for my beliefs as a conservative, as a Virginian, and as a Catholic. With the nomination of Corey Stewart?  That is now an impossibility.

[W]hatever the threat political socialism presents to the American republic, the answer cannot, is not, and never will be white nationalism.  My children deserve a better future than this; their children deserve a better future.  If the great story of America is to be abruptly ended in a syrup of debt and moral relativism, I would much rather go down standing athwart history yelling STOP! rather than participate in the moral contagion of a once great party. [W]e are watching in real time as the party of freedom descends into a party of rank and bitter nationalism. . . . So unless you stand up and do something now? Get used to this sound and become comfortable with its grip.  It will have you and the people you love by the throat soon enough.

The sound referred to is a clip of a Hitler Youth singing "The World Belongs to Me."  I suspect many more will be exiting from the Republican Party of Virginia.

The piece in the New York Times looks at Stewart's ugly history and the possible reverberations for others on the GOP ticket in November.  Here are excerpts:

He [Corey Stewart] once stood proudly before a Confederate flag, declaring it was not a symbol of hatred, but “about our heritage.” After the march of torch-carrying white supremacists in Charlottesville last year, which led to the death of a counterprotester, he criticized “weak Republicans” who “couldn’t apologize fast enough.”

As officials around Virginia have grappled with whether to remove Confederate statues, he has compared those politicians to leaders of the Islamic State. Now Corey Stewart, a county official who for years has played to the hard-right fringe, captured the Republican nomination for Senate in Virginia.

He did so in a low-turnout primary on Tuesday when many centrist Republicans apparently stayed home, unhappy with a three-way race among candidates all professing strong loyalty to President Trump and given to fiery culture war pronouncements.

[Stewart] received a congratulatory overnight tweet from the president, who called Mr. Stewart’s Democratic opponent, Senator Tim Kaine, “a total stiff.”

Tellingly, though, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the party’s campaign arm, said it would not support Mr. Stewart, who lags far behind Mr. Kaine in fund-raising and has a history of cozying up to white supremacists and anti-Semites that threatens to make him an albatross for down-ballot Republicans. . . . The real worry for national Republicans — and the hope for Democrats — is that Mr. Stewart’s nomination may cost some incumbent Republicans in Virginia their seats in Congress.

“For the G.O.P. candidates in the down-ballot House races in Virginia, having Stewart on the ticket is going to be a very tough challenge,” said Mark Rozell, dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. “Somehow they will need to separate themselves from the more extreme elements of his message, while at the same time not alienating the Trump Republicans whose votes will be needed.”

Virginia Democrats quickly moved to join Mr. Stewart at the hip to other Republicans in competitive House races.  “There is no place to hide — you are either running with Corey Stewart and you condone his vile politics, or you don’t,” said Susan Swecker, the state Democratic chairwoman.

Mr. Stewart could especially hurt Representative Barbara Comstock, a Republican defending a seat in affluent Northern Virginia that is emblematic of how the state has been shifted from its once-fixed Republican moorings by an influx of immigrants and college-educated professionals.

The center of gravity for the Republican Party in the state has shifted “from the country club to the country,” as one Republican strategist, Tom Davis, put it.  “Every candidate will be asked if they support Stewart,” said Mr. Davis, a former congressman from Virginia. “This is more nuanced than the media would have you believe, but in high-education areas, it is a killer.”
 If the turnout pattern repeats in November, at least two other Republican House members besides Ms. Comstock could also be in trouble: Dave Brat and Scott Taylor. “Stewart’s fearmongering and division-sowing campaign will turn many Virginians to the Democratic ticket,” said Schuyler VanValkenburg, a Democratic state legislator who lives in Mr. Brat’s district, the Seventh.

Mr. Taylor, a former Navy SEAL who represents the Second District, centered on Virginia Beach, will face Elaine Luria, a former Navy commander.  “My opponent will either embrace Corey Stewart, be silent or distance himself from him,” Ms. Luria said in an interview. “Virginia favors equality, diversity and economic opportunity for all. Corey Stewart’s race-baiting rhetoric is offensive to everybody in Virginia.”

In January 2017, Mr. Stewart met with and praised Paul Nehlen, an outspoken anti-Semite who is now making his second run for Congress in Wisconsin. Mr. Stewart was also endorsed last year by the white nationalist Jason Kessler, who later helped organize the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville.

It is pitiful - and frightening - what the Republican Party of Virginia has become.

Neo-Confederate Cory Stewart Wins GOP Primary to Face Tim Kaine

GOP U.S. Senate candidate Corey Stewart with supporters.

The base of the Republican Party of Virginia has shown to the world just how insane it has become as neo-Confederate Corey Stewart defeats the "GOP establishment" candidate Nick Freitas in the Virginia Republican U.S. Senate primary .  One can only assume that Tim Kaine and Democrats are celebrating the Virginia GOP's selection of a true extremist as Tim Kaine's challenger in November.  Time and time again the delusional far right base of the GOP whines that the GOP loses elections by nominating "moderates" as its candidates.  If Stewart goes down to a devastating defeat, perhaps this myth will be put to rest once and for all at least in Virginia. Last year when Stewart almost defeated GOP gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie for the nomination, he rain on a platform that included tax cuts for the very wealthy and a quasi-return to the Jim Crow laws.  Stewart is also a devoted supporter of Donald Trump who remains highly unpopular in Virginia. The Washington Post looks at this blow to the credibility of the Virginia GOP.  Here are highlights:

Corey Stewart, the Prince William County executive who shocked the GOP a year ago by nearly winning their party’s nomination for governor, won the Republican primary for the Senate seat currently held by Democrat Tim Kaine.

Stewart was running against Nick Freitas, a state delete and military veteran, and pastor E.W. Jackson, who five years ago shocked them by upsetting better-known (and less controversial) candidates to become their nominee for lieutenant governor.

Kaine has stocked more than $10 million for a race that rarely appears on GOP midterm maps.

The Virginian Pilot has more extensive coverage.  Here are excerpts:

A conservative provocateur and supporter of President Donald Trump won Virginia's Republican primary Tuesday in the U.S. Senate race, and he has promised to run a "vicious" campaign against incumbent Tim Kaine.

Republican Corey Stewart beat state lawmaker Nick Freitas and Chesapeake minister E.W. Jackson. Stewart had long been on the fringe of the state's GOP; now the win makes him the standard-bearer of a deeply divided party that hasn't won a statewide race in nearly a decade.

A one-time state chairman of President Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, Stewart nearly won the 2017 Republican nomination for governor, despite being heavily outspent.

The Prince William County Board of Supervisors chairman and attorney has courted controversy throughout his political career. He was fired from the Trump campaign after staging an unsanctioned protest at the headquarters of the Republican National Committee, which Stewart said wasn't sufficiently loyal to Trump during the presidential campaign.

Stewart campaigned heavily last year on preserving Virginia's Confederate monuments and is an immigrant hard-liner who boasts of the number of immigrants in the country illegally who have been deported from his county.

Several higher-profile Republicans floated the possibility of running against Kaine, but they did not follow through after Democrats scored huge victories in November in state-level elections. That left establishment Republicans to rally behind Freitas, a libertarian-leaning former Green Beret and two-term state House delegate.

Freitas largely ignored Stewart until the campaign's final days, when he criticized him for associating in the past with racists, including Paul Nehlen, a Republican challenger to U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan who has been suspended from Twitter after a series of racist and anti-Semitic posts.

None of the candidates raised much money, though Freitas was helped by large last-minute spending from a super PAC aligned with U.S. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and the tea party group Americans for Prosperity.

Stewart embodies what the Republican Party has become: racist, isolationist, and extreme.  It is noteworthy that Stewart last almost all of the so-called urban crescent which is a key to carrying Virginia statewide.  Hopefully, he will suffer a crushing defeat that will make Ed Gillespie's loss in 2017 pale in comparison.   

Virginia GOP Activist Quits Republican Party over Trump

As regular readers know, in my view, being a moral and decent person and being actively involved in today's Republican Party are mutually exclusive.  You simply cannot be both.  And I make this remark as a former GOP activist myself before the Party transformed into the racist, moral cesspool that it has become.  Indeed, Millennials other than evangelicals seemingly agree with me and shun the GOP by super majorities.  Now, a young rising star in the Republican Party of Virginia has resigned and left the GOP citing Donald Trump's racist comments about Africa and Haiti as the final straw.  One can only hope that those dwindling number of moral Republicans will follow suit.  Here are excerpts from the Washington Post:

A young Republican activist from Northern Virginia who was seen as a potential rising star quit the party Tuesday, citing President Trump’s “appalling comments” about Haitian immigrants and what he called a nativist streak in his home state.

Kyle McDaniel, 28, served on the party’s State Central Committee for two years and has worked as a top aide for Fairfax County Supervisor Pat Herrity (R-Springfield), who said he had hoped McDaniel would eventually run for public office.

But McDaniel said he harbored increasing reservations over where the party has been heading. On Tuesday, he sent a letter of resignation to State Party Chairman John Whitbeck that described events he “could no longer stomach,” including Trump’s reported reference last week to Haiti as a “shithole” country and the defense by some party leaders of this summer’s rally by neo-Nazis in Charlottesville that led to the death of a 32-year-old woman.

McDaniel also cited an unsuccessful effort by himself and other younger Republicans to remove or formally censure a member of the state party’s 11th Congressional District Committee in Northern Virginia, who, among other things, called Islam “a death cult created by Satan.”

Although McDaniel is not a marquee name in the state party’s leadership, the news of his departure touched a nerve among some officials, who said they worry that Trump is causing deep fissures in the party, especially among younger Republicans. In Northern Virginia in particular, anti-Trump sentiments run high, helping to fuel a wave of Democratic victories in November.

“We can’t even count or imagine how many people would be part of our ranks who just take a look at what’s going on and say ‘No thanks’, ” said Stephen Spiker, 32, another member of the 11th Congressional District Committee. “For the younger demographic, it’s a bridge they can’t cross.”

“We wish Mr. McDaniel the best in his future endeavors but he owes every member of his party an apology for repeating the Democrat talking points that Republicans are a bunch of racists,” Whitbeck said in a statement.

 

Herrity said he hoped McDaniel will someday return to the Republican fold. “I still think he will run for office one day,” he said. “I would hazard to predict he’ll do it as a Republican.”

McDaniel, who works as a real estate agent in Alexandria, said that isn’t likely.  “I’m totally out,” he said. “I’ll support candidates I agree with, but as far as any party affiliation, I’m out. I’m independent.” 

My message to Mr. Whitbeck: look in the mirror - you are a bunch of racists.  I've often speculated as to when KKK robes would be handed out at the start of GOP city and county committee meetings.  Kudos to McDaniel for walking away. 

Quote of the Day: Some Virginia Republicans See a Blue Wave Coming

As noted in a prior post, so far the only announced Republican challengers to Senator Tim Kaine can easily be categorized as "far right," "extremists" and with other adjectives which will likely totally alienate moderate Republicans and independent voters.  The Virginia GOP base - nowadays largely comprised of Christofascists and thinly veiled white supremacists - will likely love these unhinged candidates.  As a post at Bearing Drift (which calls itself the "conservative voice of Virginia") notes, last month's Virginia election results combined with Alabama's shocker on Tuesday ought to have set off alarm bells and sirens within the GOP.  The piece then goes on to predict that the Virginia GOP will not get the message.  Here are the money quote:

[Roy Moore] lost a race in a state that has not elected a Democrat statewide for over 25 years. He had the endorsement of the President of the United States, the off-and-on endorsement of the Republican National Committee, and he handily beat a primary opponent who also had the endorsement of the President and the RNC. Most of all, he had Corey Stewart and Cynthia Dunbar from Virginia in Alabama aggressively campaigning for him. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, what went wrong was that Roy Moore is behind the times.  He didn’t keep up with what is happening in the Deep South:

-Donald Trump is about as popular as loud flatulence in church.

-The Republican Southern Strategy is deader than Jim Crow.

-Democrats have an equal claim on God, guns, and family values in the South.

-You can’t balance the Federal budget by raising taxes on the middle class and cutting entitlements spending.

-Most voters are a lot smarter than the average politician thinks that they are.  That is why 40% of them are Independents and will not blindly vote for the Republican or Democrat without reason.

Yes, Roy Moore is behind the times and his political life is most probably over.  The same thing can be said of the Republican Party of Virginia if they don’t wake up and join the 21st century.

 I particularly like the "loud flatulence in church" comment - even though it is completely true!!

Extremist E.W. Jackson to Run for U.S. Senate from Virginia

Next year's Republican primary for the GOP nomination to run against Senator Tim Kaine is shaping up to be one of crazy versus crazy.  Failed GOP gubernatorial candidate Corey Stewart has already said that he will be running - most likely on a neo-Confederate agenda - and now self-proclaimed "bishop" E. W. Jackson is reported to be preparing for a run for the GOP nomination as well, in Jackson's case most likely as a Christian Taliban candidate.  The lunacy will no doubt be off the charts, but such is the nature of today's Republican Party of Virginia that sane and normal individuals are simply not welcome.  We last saw Stewart when he nearly defeated Ed Gillespie in the 2017 GOP gubernatorial primary.  Jackson, of course, lost resoundingly to Ralph Northam in the 2013 Lt. Governor contest.  Tim Kaine must be smiling if this is the best the GOP can field against him.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at Jackson's insanity/ego driven announcement.  As for Jerry Falwell, Jr.'s, remarks, if there is a swamp that needs draining, part of it is located in Lynchburg and goes by the name of Liberty University.  Here are article highlights:

E.W. Jackson, a firebrand minister who says yoga leads to Satan and gay people are ill, plans to announce he is seeking the Republican nomination to challenge U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) next year, according to Jackson’s finance director.

Jackson will announce his candidacy on Dec. 11 in the Chesapeake area, said Steven Thomas, who said he is raising money for Jackson’s campaign and filled the same role during Jackson’s 2013 losing bid for lieutenant governor.  A website registered to Jackson was updated Tuesday and announces “EW Jackson for U.S. Senate.”

Jackson has a history of controversial comments from calling gay and lesbian individuals “very sick people” to suggesting the practice of yoga invites Satan to possess one’s soul.

He will face Corey Stewart, the bombastic Republican official from Prince William County who ran for the GOP nomination for governor earlier this year in the mold of President Trump. Several other Republicans are weighing whether to jump into the race.

The Senate field is expected to solidify this weekend when Virginia Republicans gather for their largest annual event — dubbed the Advance — at an Allegheny Mountain resort in western Virginia.

In an interview on WAMU radio last week, Virginia GOP Chairman John Whitbeck said the party will remain neutral, but noted, “It’s not going to be just Corey Stewart in this race by himself.”

Stewart, who declared in July, on Tuesday announced the endorsement of Jerry Falwell Jr., the influential head of Liberty University and ally of President Trump. . . .  Trump needs Stewart “in the U.S. Senate to help clean up the swamp in Washington,” Falwell said.

In response to the endorsement, Stewart said,“Virginia’s awakening is happening, and Mr. Falwell’s endorsement is proof positive conservative Republicans will take back Virginia.”

In addition to Stewart, the only other candidate who filed federal paperwork to run as of Tuesday is Ivan Raiklin, an Army veteran who recently jogged an average of 22 miles a day to bring awareness to suicide among veterans and to kick off his campaign.

Republicans turned off by Stewart’s approach are looking to another candidate, Del. Nick Freitas (Culpeper), who said Tuesday he is considering a run for the nomination.

The two-term state lawmaker is former head of the Culpeper County GOP and moved to Virginia in 2009. He served in the Army special forces as a Green Beret and is currently a defense contractor.

John Norton Moore, an international law expert who has taught at University of Virginia School of Law on and off for a half century, is also considering a run, he said in an interview Monday.

Freitas, Moore, Raiklin and Stewart will host small parties in hotel suites at the GOP retreat, a sign to party activists that they are interested in running for public office.

Transgender Bathroom Bill Killed in Virginia House Committee

As previously noted, all but two of the LGBT targeted bills - all the pro-gay bills and all the other anti-gay  bills - were effectively killed last week by a House of Delegates committee that tabled the bills for "further consideration."  Today, one of the surviving anti-gay bills - a bill targeting transgender individuals that has garnered negative media coverage for Virginia across the globe - was itself killed in a House of Delegates committee.   GayRVA looks at this welcomed development.  Here are brief highlights:

A bill which would have forced transgender Virginia students and citizens to used the restrooms aligned with their birth gender in all public buildings was killed in a House committee meeting today.

HB 781 aimed to require the Director of the Department of General Services and all state school boards to implement policies for every “public building on property that is owned, leased, or controlled by the Commonwealth and every public school restroom, locker room, and shower room that is designated for use by a specific gender” to be used solely by those whose “anatomical sex matches such gender designation.”

If anyone, including students, violates this policy, they would have been charged a $50 civil penalty, though that part was later amended to remove students from paying the fee.

It goes without saying that the hate merchants at The Family Foundation, Virginia's leading hate group supported the discriminatory and animus motivated bill:

“Every student in Virginia has a fundamental right to body privacy, opening restrooms to members of the opposite sex would directly violates students’ constitutional right to privacy,” said Chris Fruend, spokesman for the conservative Richmond group The Family Foundation. He pointed to Federal Courts, like the one in Norfolk, who struck down part of transgender student Gavin Grimm’s complaint against his school board which passed a policy forcing him into a women’s restroom or a gender neutral bathroom.

“We can teach our children to be compassionate to each other without forcing young school-aged children into vulnerable interactions with the opposite sex in restrooms and locker rooms,” Fruend said, calling the bill common sense.

Fruend and his foul mistress, Victoria Cobb, cannot stand religious freedom for anyone but themselves and their fellow Christofascists.

Will the Virginia GOP Shoot Itself In The Foot In 2016?

As the prior post noted, the attitudes and demographics of the nation are changing and the GOP is faced with shrinking appeal among voters and, but for gerrymandering, Republicans would hold far fewer seats in legislatures across the country. This trend is playing out here in Virginia and one sees time and time again the most extreme elements of the Virginia GOP base desperately clinging to the party's increasingly obsolete agenda of fostering right wing religion and subtle - and sometimes not so subtle - racism.  2016 could be a bell weather year for the Virginia GOP where a refusal to change course could be extremely damaging.  A piece in Outside the Beltway looks at the situation.  Here are highlights:

At the end of this week, the Central Committee of the Republican Party of Virginia will meet to put together plans for the party’s nominating contests in 2016 and, as Norman Leahy and Paul Goldman explain, they could end up making a decision that will make Virginia rather irrelevant to the nomination process next year and harm the Republican Party in the General Election:

[U]nlike most states, Virginia allows its state parties to choose the method of nomination. Recently, Virginia Republicans have made a mockery of the party’s presidential-nomination process. Normally, the state party and its local committees help presidential aspirants get on the ballot. Pro-Clinton Democrats are helping her rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), get on the ballot in New Hampshire. A real party wants to maintain the image of encouraging a free and open nomination contest.

Not so in Virginia. In 2012, only two of the many Republican presidential candidates managed to qualify for the primary because of the state’s restrictive ballot-access law. The traditional help went only to establishment favorite Mitt Romney. Barely 265,000 Republicans bothered to participate in this farce, a drop of 400,000 from the Bush win in 2000. 

The 2012 fiasco made Virginia a cable-news punchline. . . . state GOP leaders NOW seem eager to choose an insular convention system for 2016.

This isn’t a new territory for the Republican Party of Virginia, of course. In 2013, party activists with ties to the Tea Party and the Gubernatorial campaign of Ken Cuccinelli used their power on the committee to force a convention to pick the party’s 2013 statewide candidates rather than a primary.

Jackson lost the Lt. Governor’s race by a huge margin which made clear that even many mainstream Republican voters in the Commonwealth who voted for Cuccinelli could not support him,. Now, virtually the same group of activists who pushed for a convention in 2013 are arguing the party should do the same thing when it picks its Presidential nominee.

Given that Virginia has had a series of close elections since 2008, one would think this is an important concern for party leaders. Additionally, as with the caucuses we see in states like Iowa, conventions can be expensive and inconvenient, especially for people who have families. This means that fewer people participate in your convention, and thus the nominee you pick is more likely to represent a narrow segment of the party that may not play well with the electorate in the fall.

[I]n order for Republicans to win the Presidency they would need to win every state Mitt Romney won in 2012 as well as Ohio, Florida, and Virginia along with at least one other state that President Obama won in the last election. This makes Virginia crucial to the outcome of the election, and anything that the state Republican Party does to potentially make the state less competitive in the fall will have a big impact on the race.  If the committee members are smart, they will stick with a primary. Given the rigidity of the activists who seem to be driving the car in the RPV at the moment, though, don’t be surprised if they do the incredibly foolish thing of choosing a convention.

Conventions are favored, of course, by the Christofascists and other extremists in the Virginia GOP base who seek to insure that extremist candidates who share their insane values - or who will prostitute themselves to them - get the nomination.  They want as little public involvement as possible.

The Virginia GOP's Continued Circular Firing Squad

Over 20 years ago, I was elected to the Republican City Committee for Virginia Beach.  The party then was a very different organization and sane moderates were still in the majority despite efforts by Christofascists to infiltrate and hijack the party.  Now, the moderates are gone and to be in the GOP one needs to be either (i) a far right Christian extremist, (ii) an open racist, or (iii) driven by greed and a desire to deny benefits to the poor and destitute and allow the nation's infrastructure to collapse.  Not surprisingly, fewer and fewer voters in high turnout elections find the GOP agenda appealing.  Yet do those in the leadership of the Virginia GOP believe they need to change the party agenda?  Of course not.  They are such fanatical ideologues (and so beholden to the extremists at The Family Foundation) that they simply need to "be more unified."  The fact that their agenda is viewed as poisonous and that the state's demographics are changing don't register in their warped minds.  A piece in the Richmond Times Dispatch looks at the Virginia GOP's ongoing circular firing squad.  Here are excerpts:

Without a victory in a statewide race since 2009, the Virginia GOP would have to overcome increasingly challenging demographics to deliver the state to Republicans in the 2016 presidential election.

Republican Party of Virginia Chairman John C. Whitbeck, elected in January to serve out the term of retiring Pat Mullins, has made it his mission to modernize the party without diluting its conservative principles.   “We don’t need to change who we are, we don’t need to reform our belief system and our platform. That’s not going to happen,” Whitbeck said in an interview.

 

The big challenge for the Virginia GOP, should it opt for a convention, is to represent the range of opinions within the party, said Stephen J. Farnsworth, a professor of political science at the University of Mary Washington.   “From the point of view of creating a broad-based party with a lot of public support, conventions really don’t get you there,” Farnsworth said. “A few thousand people who participate in a convention are going to be far more ideologically extreme than the much larger population that would participate in a primary.”

UMW’s Farnsworth said the convention-versus-primary debate is just one indicator that the conflict within the Virginia GOP is not just a difference of opinion between candidates, but a more permanent cleavage.  "The idea that Eric Cantor was not conservative enough to win a Republican nomination is a significant departure from were the RPV stood 10 years ago,” Farnsworth said.

Whitbeck rejects the notion that a conservative candidate cannot appeal to mainstream voters.

Beyond fundraising, Virginia Republicans face another daunting numbers game. State voter turnout spikes above 70 percent in presidential elections, which maximizes Democrats’ advantage in Virginia’s increasingly diverse population centers of Northern Virginia, greater Richmond and Hampton Roads.

In 2008 Barack Obama carried Northern Virginia by 234,079 votes. He ran basically even in the rest of Virginia, winning the state by 234,527 votes.  In 2012 Obama again swept the four counties and five cities in Northern Virginia, this time by a total of 231,244 votes. Republicans improved their vote totals in rural sections of the state, but Obama still carried Virginia by more than 149,000 votes.

In 2016, if the Democratic presidential nominee — presumably former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton — again comes out of Northern Virginia with a cushion of more than 200,000 votes, the Republican nominee will be hard-pressed to offset the margin.

The population centers that hold the largest segment of the state’s voters continue to grow more diverse. For instance, the state’s most populous locality — Fairfax County, with more than 1.1 million residents — was 69.9 percent white in 2000 and 63.6 percent white by 2013.  In that span the county’s Asian population rose from 13.1 percent to 18.4 percent. Its percentage of Hispanic residents rose from 11 percent to 16.2 percent.

While aware of the state’s voting patterns in recent presidential elections, Whitbeck says Virginia Republicans do not need to reconsider their message.  “It’s all about our presentation, that is the issue.

When your agenda is anti-black, anti-Hispanic, anti-gay and anti-women, its hard to see how you change your "presentation" so that the voters you attack and malign - and seek to disenfranchise - are going to vote in support of your policies.   The Kool-Aid continues to be consumed by the gallons at RVP headquarters and city and county committees across Virginia.   A form of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting somehow to achieve a different result.  Until the GOP, and especially the Virginia GOP, decides to move into the 21st century and face demographic change, I hope their losing streak continues and come the next census, many of their gerrymandered districts will dissolve.

The Virginia GOP's Fight Against Democracy

Not only does the Virginia Republican Party support a theocracy of sorts - despite the prohibitions in the U.S. Constitution against an established religion - but it is increasingly anti-democratic as reflected by its efforts to disenfranchise as many voters as possible (minorities are the favorite target) and the efforts of the Christofascists/Tea Party elements to turn nominations into coronations by a select few who support the theocratic, anti-democracy agenda.  Sadly, in the highly gerrymandered districts pushed through by the Virginia GOP, the party extremists continue to win in elections.  In statewide contests, however, Virginia's changing demographics make victory for GOP candidates increasingly elusive.  The Virginia GOP's solution?  Double down and get even more extreme.  An editorial in the Washington Post looks at the phenomenon.  Here are highlights:

THE FIX was in from the start when Virginia Republicans picked their ticket for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general in 2013. 

Hard-line conservatives who control the state party apparatus decreed that the nominations would be determined not by primaries but by a convention, a mechanism well suited to limit the number of participants.

In the event, just 8,000 of the Republican faithful showed up — representing perhaps half of 1 percent of the party’s sympathizers in the state — and the right-wing ticket they picked was swept in the fall by the Democrats, who held much more widely attended nominating primaries.

Virginia has not elected a Republican to any statewide position since 2009, nor has it elected one to the U.S. Senate since 2002. 
 
That string of losses has coincided with venomous internecine divisions in the Republican ranks, in which hard-liners generally have prevailed by forcing nominating conventions, most of which have yielded hard-line candidates.

Rather than rethinking that losing strategy, Virginia’s conservative activists now seem inclined to double down on it. They are pressing for the GOP to hold a convention rather than a state-run primary to choose a presidential nominee in 2016.

That move would be designed to favor more ideological candidates, such as Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas or Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, and handicap more moderate candidates, such as former Florida governor Jeb Bush.

In addition to giving more extreme candidates a leg up, the effect would be undemocratic. Tens of thousands of moderate Republicans — the sort of voters who might go to the polls for a primary but are unlikely to travel dozens or hundreds of miles to a convention — would be excluded.

Tens of millions of Americans might not be committed to one party or the other, but surely most would favor more participatory elections and more moderate candidates. By pressing for a process that would produce neither, hard-line Republicans are pursuing a losing strategy — not just for themselves but also for voters.

Unfortunately, the Virginia GOP is becoming akin to a insane religious cult - something not surprising given the reality that The Family Foundation for all practical purposes authors GOP policies in Virginia.  Until the Christofascists' stranglehold on the Virginia GOP is broken, expect things to become progressively worse.