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. 

The Ugliness of the Republican Party Base

Not to sound like a broken record, I was a Republican activist for 8 years and held a City Committee seat for the Republican Party of Virginia Beach.  Back in those days the GOP wasn't pushing for special rights for Christian extremists and did not all but openly embrace white supremacists.  Sadly, those days are gone and today the party base looks like a mixture of a huge KKK rally and a gathering of snake handling Christian nutcases.   Worse yet, no Republican candidate has the will or ability to stand up to this mass insanity.  A piece in The Atlantic focused on Donald Trump's candidacy provides a snap shot of the mindset that is now widespread across the GOP base.  It is not a pretty picture and I again find myself wondering how these people can be so ignorant and blind.  The reality is that these are not nice and decent people even though I suspect most pat themselves on the back daily for being "god fearing Christians."  Here are article excerpts:

They seem so nice, your friends and neighbors. Your fellow Americans.

“In today’s time, if I’m a white person who’s proud to be white, I’m a racist,” says 44-year-old Kevin Stubbs, a land surveyor who shared his Marlboro Reds with an African American T-shirt vender on the way in. “Yet a minority can say that.”

“I do not feel safe,” says his fiancee, Loree Ballenberger, 42. “People are coming in across the border, and we have no idea where they are coming from.” She recently called her congressman to urge him to vote for a bill limiting Syrian refugees.

“I remember seeing Muslims around the world celebrating after 9/11,” says Chip Matthews, a 63-year-old retired carpentry teacher in glasses with tinted lenses. So what if it was the Mideast and not New Jersey? “The basic point, I think, is true,” he says.

“I look at the pictures of those refugees and they all look like able-bodied young men, 18 to 30 years old,” says his wife, Patrice Matthews, a 62-year-old retired school-district worker. Matthews doesn’t see why we have to be the ones to help these people. “It’s their country—they need to take it back,” she says.

I hear versions of the point about able-bodied young men from five different people. I hear, over and over again, that illegal immigration is the biggest problem we face. Almost everyone says their second-choice candidate is Ted Cruz, the senator from Texas; many express a wish that he and Trump would run on the same ticket.

“Just because he thinks illegal immigrants and terrorists should be deported doesn’t make him a racist,” he says. “He’s calling it as it is. You’ll never see CNN do that.”

“I’m against the anchor babies, and I’m against the Muslims,” says Kathy Parker, a tiny former elementary-school teacher with gold hoop earrings. “We can’t have churches in their countries—why should they have mosques in ours? He is the only one with the guts to speak out and say it.”

“We’re just tired of paying for people who don’t deserve to be here,” says Nina Lewis, a blue-eyed 33-year-old former sheriff’s deputy who is going back to school to be a veterinary technician.
They are, it is true, overwhelmingly white people. Do you have a problem with that?

The other night, at a Trump rally in Alabama, a black protester who shouted “Black lives matter!” was surrounded by white men who punched and kicked him. Far from apologizing for this, Trump is gloating about it: “What an obnoxious, terrible guy that was,” he tells the crowd in Myrtle Beach, who turn around and hiss at the press on his cue. In August, two Boston men said Trump inspired their vicious beating of a homeless Mexican immigrant. This week, a group of civil-rights protesters in Minneapolis was fired upon by four white men in masks and camouflage.

The people wave and make faces at the press as they go by. One gray-haired lady in a sweatshirt keeps pointing at her butt and sticking out her tongue at us as she ambles by. She has a savage look on her face.

Something tells me that these crowds are not what one would consider "gay friendly."   Their entire world view seems defined by those they hate: blacks, Hispanics, immigrants, non-Christians, I suspect gays, and a host of others.  Welcome to today's Republican party.

Karma Can Be A Bitch: Virginia Beach GOP Event Collides With Racist Travel Restrictions

Last year the Virginia Beach resort strip was in an uproar as an unofficial college weekend of students from historically black colleges descended for a weekend that in some instances turned raucous.  In response, as detailed in the Virginian Pilot, this year the Virginia Beach city government  - which leans heavily Republican - has announced that there will be severe restrictions on access to the Virginia Beach oceanfront to avoid a repeat of last year's congestion.   Of course, none of the restrictions being put in place by the Virginia Beach police department are utilized when the influx of students is from historically white colleges.

The irony?  The Republican Party of Virginia Beach which has had its problems with overt racism and seen a party chairman resign and a former chair disgraced due to crude racists "jokes" that reached the media is having its biggest fundraiser of the year for its affiliated women's' clubs - the Star Spangled Ball - this weekend at the oceanfront.  Now, the RPVB is worried that attendees may have difficulty getting to the event.

Karma can indeed be a bitch.  As for my familiarity with the Republican Party of Virginia Beach, I was the original incorporator of the entity when it incorporated and I served as its registered agent for a number of years until I finally severed all ties with the GOP because of its inability to separate Christofascist religious belief from the civil laws.  Personally, I hope the attendees of the Star Spangled Ball have one hell of a hard time getting to the event.

Infighting and Swamp Fever Dominate Virginia GOP

There are those who make the cry that the Republican Party can be changed from within.  It's a claim that I do not subscribe to given the manner in which the Christofascists/Tea Party crowd, white supremacist (who more often than not are one and the same as the Christofascists/Tea Party) and no tax lunatics have been allowed to infiltrate local city and county committees all across Virginia.  Of late, a few seem to finally be realizing that these folks are like a metastasizing cancer and efforts are being made to limit the ability of the extremists and outright crazy elements on local committees and at mass meetings to drive the GOP further into crazy land and/or select committee chairs and party candidates.  A nasty civil war has ensued with those trying to limit insanity being labeled as Nazis or worse.  A column in the Richmond Times Dispatch looks at the ongoing civil war.  Here are some column excerpts:

In increasingly Democratic Henrico, Republicans more often than not speak in one voice — a reminder of the control over the party apparatus by a local boy made good: Eric Cantor, the U.S. House majority leader and could-be speaker. But because of Cantor’s adversaries — his tea party primary opponent and others disdainful of Cantor’s more traditional brand of Republicanism — the latest mass meeting, to some, seemed mass confusion.

In recent weeks, this pattern has been playing out across Virginia as factions struggle for control of a Republican Party reduced to a regional presence by a string of Democratic statewide victories. The current infighting, in which Cantor loyalists figure prominently, is a preliminary to the main event in 2016: the battle for the GOP’s governing body, the central committee. It will be concurrent with the presidential race in purple Virginia.

In suburban Virginia Beach and rural Campbell and Buckingham counties, to name a few, Republicans have engaged in the parliamentary equivalent of hand-to-hand combat.

These battles — over leadership, organization and convention delegates — can be vicious. It’s because the stakes are comparatively low: dominance of local GOP committees, many of which have few members. That’s a reflection of the changing Virginia. Democrats are attracting the young, Asians and Hispanics. The Republican base is dominated by aging whites.

The internal combat is of the Republican Party’s own making. Elective Republicans openly court libertarians, home-schoolers and property rights advocates who have flooded the party since 2010. Their muscle is institutionalized by partisan gerrymandering, which forces Republicans further right, fueling partisan impasse — most recently, in Richmond, over spending and health care.

In Henrico, anti-Establishment Republicans narrowly rejected a Cantor loyalist, county GOP chairman Don Boswell, a former sheriff, to lead the mass meeting. Instead, these activists installed an interloper from Stafford County, about 60 miles north: Russ Moulton, former 1st District Republican chairman.  No friend of Cantor, Moulton has made a name for himself training tea partyers and Paulians in Republican rules and other organizational esoterica.

This way, this crowd is becoming part of the GOP fabric. But it also is a threat to comparatively mainstream Republicans such as Cantor. He favors open-to-all primaries for choosing a nominee because they minimize the right’s influence. Moulton and Co. prefer member-only conventions because they maximize it.

As Cantor’s enemies see it, naming Moulton as temporary chairman short-circuited any effort at slating and spotlighted momentum for Dave Brat, the congressman’s remaining opponent in the June primary. Further, it raises anew a nettlesome question for Cantor: If he can’t bring his party together at home, how can he do it in Washington? But then, who can?

Fred Gruber, a tea party guy from Louisa County, is running. He’s apparently not making friends by — according to Republican blogs — comparing his foes to Nazis. That’s always risky, more so when Cantor, the dominant political figure in the Henrico-anchored 7th District, is the only Jewish Republican in Congress.

This is another instance of the personal nature of Republican Party politics, and how it is magnified by the intimacy of caucuses, conventions and committees, all of which are about preserving the power of the few. Rivalries span generations. Grudges are nursed, not forgotten. Egos must be stroked.

In Virginia Beach, the Republican mass meeting was a rumble. More than 600 people were there in an Establishment drive, dependent on slating, to wrest the party from the upstarts. It may have worked.

In Buckingham, the new Republican leader is a pastor who longtime activists said they’d not heard of until he arrived at the mass meeting at the county agriculture center Wednesday.

As I have said many times, the Republican establishment created a Frankenstein monster when it allowed in the Christofascist, Tea Party and white supremacist focusing only on short term opportunity.   Now, the monster is proving difficult to kill. 

 
 

Charlie Crist Slams Republicans Over Extremism

Former Florida Governor Charlie Crist recently officially left the Republican Party and, after a brief flirtation with being an independent, has now found a new home as a Democrat. I can identify with Crist's decision to exit the GOP given the GOP's growing extremism and alienation of those who increasingly over time will become the new majority in America.  True, Crist has ulterior motives and may want to run for Governor under the Democrat banner, but overall, his reasoning is sound and parallels my own reasoning for resigning from the GOP over a decade ago when it became clear to me that the GOP base no longer accepted much less honored the concept of the separation of church and state  For way of background for newer readers, I held a city committee seat on the Republican Party of Virginia Beach for 8 years and was the head of the Alanton precinct, a GOP bastion.  Politico has a piece on Crist's denunciation of the extremism and toxicity of today's GOP.  Here are highlights: 

Former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist said Monday he did not feel “comfortable” being in the Republican Party today, blaming the party’s leadership for driving him and other “midde-of-the-road” Republicans out of the GOP during the past few years.

”I really think it’s the leadership of the party, more than the membership,” he said on MSNBC. “But what’s happened is, on issue after issue, whether it’s immigration, education, voter suppression — what the leadership of the party has done is say on immigration, we want deportation. When it talks about education, it’s talking about not funding it anymore. When they talk about voter suppression, they deny people the right to vote in a civil manner.”

The former governor, who officially became a registered Democrat on Friday, continued: “I think it [the change] started several years ago, two or three years ago. I left the party two years ago and became an independent, and I did so because of the fact that, you know, on all of those issues, it just wasn’t comfortable for me to be there anymore.”

I would argue that the change happened 10 years ago or more, not over the last 2-3 years - at least not in Virginia.  And what started the GOP in its descent into insanity and extremism was the rise of the Christofascists who slowly took over the party the local level like a metastasizing cancer.