The GOP is Now the Party of Neo-Confederates

Two things link the campaigns of Corey Stewart in Virginia (which thankfully failed) and that of Cindy Hyde-Smith in Mississippi which will be decided tomorrow: both are neo-Confederates.  In the case of Stewart, he unabashedly wore the neo-Confederate mantle.  A second piece in the Washington Post that dovetails with the previous post looks at the reality of what the Republican Party has become: a party of racists and neo-Confederates.   For my Republican "friends" who have used the myth of the GOP being the party of fiscal responsibility, the 2017 Trump/GOP tax bill that blew a gaping hole in the federal budget, that fig leaf has withered and is gone.  It's time they either flee the GOP or admit to who and what they really are.  Changing the GOP from within is no longer possible. Here are column excerpts:

The far left and far right have long been warning about neocons taking over the Republican Party. Turns out they are right. Only the “neocons” in question aren’t the neoconservatives — a small group of intellectuals, in whose ranks I have often been included, who have espoused a values-based foreign policy and a centrist domestic policy. Many of us have left the GOP in disgust over the rise of Trumpism. The neocons who are now in the ascendancy are the neo-Confederates who have been encouraged to come into the open by President Trump’s unabashed appeals to racist and xenophobic prejudices.

A defining moment in the Trump presidency was the violent rally by tiki-torch-carrying white supremacists in August 2017 to protest plans to take down a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville. Three people died, but rather than condemn far-right terrorism, Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides,” and he actually sided with the white nationalists in their desire to keep intact the “beautiful statues and monuments” honoring the Confederacy.

It is no surprise, then, that Trump will be in Mississippi on Monday to campaign for Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith in her Nov. 27 runoff election against Democratic challenger Mike Espy. Trump calls her “an outstanding person who is strong on the Border, Crime, Military, our great Vets, Healthcare & the 2nd [Amendment].” She also has strong ideas about the War Between the States . . . .

Hyde-Smith’s attachment to the Confederacy makes sense, given her upbringing. The Jackson Free Press reports that she attended a private, all-white “segregation academy” created so white parents would not have to send their students to school with African Americans. A photograph in a 1975 high school yearbook shows her as a cheerleader next to the school mascot, who is dressed as a Confederate general and waving a Confederate battle flag. Hyde-Smith sent her own daughter to another “seg academy.”

In 2014, Hyde-Smith was photographed posing with a Confederate hat and a rifle at the Jefferson Davis homestead in Biloxi. “Mississippi history at its best,” she enthused on Facebook. And just this year, she appeared to joke in a state still scarred by its history of lynching that she would be in the “front row” of a “public hanging” if invited to do so by a supporter.

Hyde-Smith is a neo-Confederate troglodyte and a former Democrat who now feels right at home in the Trump Party. She is hardly alone. The defeated Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Virginia, Corey A. Stewart, pals around with white supremacists, defends the Old Dominion as the state of “Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson” and says the Confederate flag “is our heritage, it’s what makes us Virginia, and if you take that away, we lose our identity.” This self-described “proud Southerner” was born and raised in Minnesota, suggesting that his reverence for the Confederacy is rooted in hatred, not “heritage.”

The same can be said of Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), the most openly white-supremacist member of Congress. He used to display a Confederate battle flag on his desk, even though 13,000 Iowans died while fighting for the Union.

While few Republicans are as flagrant in supporting white supremacy as King, many others dog-whistle to the same constituency. Gov. Kay Ivey was just elected in Alabama after running a commercial in which she bragged of standing up to “special interests” and people “up in Washington” who want to take down Confederate monuments. She also attacked “out-of-state liberals” for messing with the state’s heritage, echoing segregationist Gov. George Wallace’s 1960s-era complaints about “outside agitators.”

It is hard to remember that Republicans were once the Party of Lincoln. But in the 1960s they sold out their birthright to court Southern voters smarting over desegregation. . . . . with his pandering to white grievances, Trump has abetted the rise of the neo-Confederates.

Cindy Hyde-Smith's History of Embracing Racial Bigotry

The 2018 midterm elections in Virginia saw northern carpetbagger Corey Stewart run as a neo-Confederate candidate.  Thankfully, Tim Kaine crushed Stewart who lost by close to a 15% margin.  Virginia - at least in the urban areas - has moved beyond supporting Confederate values.  On Tuesday in Mississippi, a run off election for a Mississippi seat in the U.S. Senate will take place that pits a true believer in the Confederacy and Jim Crow laws against a black Democrat.  Despite a series of racist comments and actions, polls show GOP candidate Cindy Hyde-Smith leading her Democrat challenger by five points as of last Wednesday.  Mississippi is not Virginia - when I lived in Alabama years ago, we always were thankful for Mississippi because it was always worse than Alabama in pretty much every ranking - so the outcome of the election remains unclear.  What is clear is that Hyde-Smith (who has now been documented to have attended a segregationist "academy") embraces and represents the worst of Mississippi's past.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the legacy that Hyde-Smith seemingly supports.  Here are excerpts:

Cindy Hyde-Smith took time during Tuesday night’s senatorial debate in Jackson, Mississippi, to read an apology from her notes. “For anyone that was offended by my comments, I certainly apologize,” she said. “There was no ill will, no intent whatsoever in my statements.” She was referring to video from November 2 showing her respond to praise from a Tupelo cattle rancher, Colin Hutchinson, by remarking, “If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row.” Hyde-Smith rebuked the suggestion this was a reference to Mississippi’s history of lynchings and accused her critics of taking it out of context

Shortly after the “hanging” video surfaced on November 11, another video went public of her purportedly “making a joke” about suppressing unfavorable votes. “And then they remind me that there’s a lot of liberal folks in those other schools who maybe we don’t want to vote,” she said during a campaign stop in Columbus on November 3. “Maybe we want to make it just a little more difficult. And I think that’s a great idea.”

Either comment might be interpreted plausibly as a slip of the tongue, in isolation. Hyde-Smith is new to campaigns with national implications, having been previously appointed to the Senate, not elected. What might fly locally — as far as jokes and off-color remarks — invites more scrutiny with the country watching. But on Monday, Politico uncovered Facebook photos that Hyde-Smith posted in 2014, depicting the then-state commissioner of agriculture and commerce at the Jefferson Davis Home and Presidential Library, the former Biloxi residence of the Confederate leader and slavery proponent. She was wearing a Confederate soldier’s hat.

At this point, this is no accident. Mississippi history holds many lessons, good and bad. That its white governors and their foot soldiers among the citizenry fought a war to preserve the routine bondage, forced labor, and torture of black men, women, and children, is among the most damning, even without the century of segregation and terrorism that followed.

Public hangings are not neutral events anywhere, but in Mississippi, they and similar forms of extrajudicial torture and execution long served as tools of racist terrorism. The state led the nation in such violence over the course of nearly 75 years, with 654 incidents between 1877 and 1950, according to a database developed by the Equal Justice Initiative  . . . . “While one thousand white spectators watched, [Holbert and his wife’s] fingers and toes were cut off and large corkscrews were bored into their flesh,” Ifill wrote. “After a prolonged torture, the Holberts were burned alive. Three other black field workers who reportedly looked like Holbert were also killed that day by members of the posse organized to search for Holbert.”

Mississippi’s history of suppressing votes is equally brutal. Making voting “a little more difficult” for opposing constituencies often meant white citizens terrorizing black people into avoiding the ballot box altogether.

Activist Charles Cobb described in further detail the violence that often faced such efforts. “Right after the first attempt to register people to vote [in Indianola in 1962], nightriders came through the black community and shot up three houses, wounding the daughter of a neighbor of the person we were staying with.” Such stories are not rare. When journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones visited Greenwood in 2014, she met Silas McGhee, a local black man who had tried to register other black locals under Jim Crow. “At the height of the Mississippi civil rights struggle, a white man pulled up in a car and shot McGhee in his face when McGhee was sitting outside of a Greenwood restaurant,” she wrote. “The bullet barreled through his mouth, taking his front teeth with it.” And although suppressive efforts are more subtle today, they often achieve similar ends.

As for Hyde-Smith’s celebration of Confederate history, Mississippi’s own declaration of secession outlines the reasons for its rude departure in stark terms. “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world,” it reads. “Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth … These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.”

The  will be campaigning for Hyde-Smithis clear. That a candidate for U.S. senate has made such a persistent habit of winking at these gory strands of Mississippi history erases plausible deniability that she meant them innocently. Such gleeful treatment, further, leaves little doubt she finds them unimportant enough to be flippant about them at best, and worth celebrating at worst. There are likely those who appreciate this approach. Many likely sympathize. But nobody is required to give her the benefit of the doubt.

Polls currently have Hyde-Smith ahead by five points. Next Tuesday, Mississippi will have its answer.

Der Trumpenführer will be campaigning for Hyde-Smith in Mississippi.  One racist campaigning for another racist.

The Rise of "Revisionist" America

One of the numerous things that drives me to distraction is the ignorance of much of the American population when it comes to know accurate and true history, both of America's own past but perhaps even more so of the world at large. Hand in hand with this phenomenon is the inability of a startling number of Americans to identify countries in the world if given a blank map.  This ignorance sets the stage for revisionist ranging from Neo-Confederates who continue the lie that slavery was not the cause of the American Civil War to the Christofascists who push the myth that America was founded as a "Christian nation." If one is utterly ignorant of history - which too often gets short shrift in American public education -  the stage is set for a population easily duped by demagogues and liars  - a description that applies not only to Neo-Confederates, Christofacsist, and much of the Republican Party, but also to the liar-in-chief in the White House.  A piece in The Atlantic  looks at revisionist history being pushed by Trump and his enablers.  Here are highlights:

H. R. McMaster, Donald Trump’s former national-security adviser, used to warn of the dangers of “revisionist powers.” He had in mind countries like China and Russia that are newly ascendant and determined to amend to their advantage the global status quo: a decades-old, U.S.-led international system of free trade, military and diplomatic alliances, and liberal rules and institutions that govern how countries conduct themselves. But [Trump's] the U.S. president’s recent Europe trip, which whisked him from a confrontational breakfast with the secretary general of NATO to a conciliatory lunch with the president of Russia, made one thing clearer than it’s ever been before: The call is also coming from inside the house. Trump is a revisionist, even if many of his advisers may still conceive of the United States as the world’s leading status-quo power.

Trump’s revisionist streak was on display in Belgium when the president reportedly threatened to reconsider America’s involvement in NATO if the military alliance’s members don’t spend far more on their own defense. When Fox News’s Tucker Carlson questioned this week why the United States should be obligated to defend another NATO member if it came under attack—the commitment at the very heart of the alliance—[Trump] the president shook his head in disbelief and responded, “I understand what you’re saying. I’ve asked the same question … That’s the way it was set up. Don’t forget, I just got here a little more than a year and a half ago.” The implication was that he needed more time to shake things up.

The streak was on display in the United Kingdom, when Trump actively encouraged defection from the European Union by offering Britain a trade deal with the United States only on the condition that it make a clean break with the EU.

“We are cracking down right now on the European Union,” he told The Sun, in reference to the raft of tariffs he has imposed or threatened to impose on the bloc. He argued, as he has since the 1980s, that in certain ways traditional U.S. allies pose a greater threat to the country than longtime adversaries because they are essentially friendly pickpockets: exploiting America’s military protection and preferential treatment on trade to get rich at the expense of the United States. 

And it was on display in Finland, . . . At a joint press conference, [Trump] the American president refused to take Russia to task for interfering in democratic elections, or even to call out any specific instance of Russian bad behavior—be it committing and abetting atrocities in Syria or allegedly ordering the poisoning of a former Russian spy with a nerve agent in Britain. . . . Instead, Trump blamed rotten relations with Russia on “many years of U.S. foolishness. 

But whatever you call it—a reset, strategic renovation, or America First revisionism—Trump’s agenda of upending the international status quo is reorienting the United States as an actor in the world, even if [Trump's] the U.S. president’s ambitious plans have often been frustrated by resistance from his own advisers, Congress, and the inertia of a global system that the United States has invested in for decades. 

And if three of the world’s top powers—the United States, China, and Russia—are all acting like revisionists, that suggests the world is poised to change a whole lot, even as U.S. allies such as the European Union, Canada, and Japan strive to uphold the status quo. . . . At the moment, Europe “is not strong enough to uphold this system by itself,” Belin continued. It “still needs big allies like the U.S.”

Be very afraid.  America and the world is rapidly moving towards the same unstable international framework that set the stage for WWI and WWI - not that Trump and his Fox News viewing base have a clue of how dangerous this path will be.  They merely enjoy being the petulant bully that "shakes things up" with no long view of what they are potentially doing to themselves of the nation.  Ignorance is not always bliss. 

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.

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.   

California: A Cautionary Tale for the Virginia GOP

The Virginia GOP 2018 lineup of extremists primary candidates.

In last year's gubernatorial race, Ed Gillespie in the end ran a campaign based of racism and religious extremism with an added dash of tax cuts for the wealthy.  He lost by 9 points.  In this year's U.S. Senate race, all three Republican candidates for the Virginia GOP nomination are extremists and at least one, if not two, of them, in my opinion, needs a mental health intervention.  Cory Stewart is running on a neo-Confederate platform, E.W. Jackson is unhinged, thus leaving Nick Freitas looking at least slightly sane in comparison.  However, given the rabid dog nature of the GOP base nowadays, it is all to possible that the most extreme candidate could walk away with the nomination, much to the delight of Democrat incumbent, Tim Kaine. A cautionary tale for the Virginia GOP can be found in California where there is a possibility that the California GOP may not even be able to field statewide candidates this year.  Part of the reason is due to California's unique nomination process, but a larger part is the GOP's extremism.  A piece in the New York Times should be required reading for leaders of the Virginia GOP.  Here are excerpts:

For anyone wondering about the state of the Republican Party in California these days, consider this: There may be no Republican candidate for governor or United States senator on the state’s ballot this November.

It’s no secret the state’s Republican Party has been in a decline for 20 years. Its challenges have been aggravated by the election of President Trump, as he has pushed tougher policies on such issues as immigration and the environment, running up against strong and often bipartisan sentiment in California.

A field of Republican candidates for the United States Senate and governor is struggling against these headwinds as they seek to end a more than 10-year drought and elect a party member to statewide office. Under the California election system, candidates compete in an open, nonpartisan primary on June 5. The two candidates who get the most votes — regardless of party — advance to the November general election.

If Republicans fall short in capturing one of those two November slots next month, which members of both parties say is a strong possibility, it would apparently be the first election since 1914 where a major party had no candidate in either the race for senator or for governor.

“You would think that if Republicans are shut out, it will be time for some serious soul-searching.”

Two of the most powerful Republican members of the congressional leadership represent central California: Kevin McCarthy, a close ally of Mr. Trump, who is in line to become the next speaker should Republicans hold the House this November, and Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House intelligence committee. Both are popular in their districts and wield plenty of influence in Washington.

But the Republican Party holds no statewide offices. Democrats control both houses of the State Legislature. Party registration is on the decline. And one of the potential Republican candidates for Senate who some polls suggest has at least a theoretical shot of making it to the November ballot is Patrick Little, an extremist who has called for the country to be “free from Jews.”

There have been hard-line strains in the California Republican Party for years, centered around law and order, taxes and immigration issues. But this is also a state with a moderate wing.

A group of Republicans led by Arnold Schwarzenegger, the former Republican governor, and Chad Mayes, the former Republican Assembly leader, have begun a campaign to move the party to the center . . . But that effort has run up against Republican candidates and elected officials who have tied their success to Mr. Trump and his administration’s policies.

“Arnold Schwarzenegger and Republicans like Mayes are completely wrong,” Travis Allen, a Republican candidate for governor and member of the Assembly, said in an interview.

The division over the future of the party was on full display the other night at a forum sponsored by the North Orange County Republican Women’s Federated Dinner for Mr. Allen and another Republican candidate for governor, John Cox, a businessman — the only two Republicans in a very crowded field who appear to have a chance to capture one of the top two spots in the primary.

A few moments later, both candidates told the moderator that they firmly supported Mr. Trump’s call to build a wall along the Mexican border. . . . Mr. Mayes, who was ousted as the Republican leader of the State Assembly after he negotiated a Republican vote-delivering compromise with Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, on legislation to curb greenhouse emissions, said that sentiment threatened to further distance the party from voters.

Mr. Mayes added. “We need to come to grips with reality and understand the electorate in California has changed. We have to go to them. We are not going to win elections until we figure that out.”

The prospect that there may be no Republican candidate for Senate or governor this November casts both short-term and long-term threats for the party.

For this election, it could complicate efforts to draw Republicans to the polls in a year when Democrats are looking to oust as many as seven endangered Republican members of Congress. . . . For the long term, it is a reminder of just how little influence the party has statewide. Republicans failed to win a spot on the 2016 ballot for Senate as well.

One of the key points of contention with the Republican Party in the state is immigration. It has been a complication for Republicans since California voters passed an initiative pushed by the Republican governor, Pete Wilson, in 1994 to prohibit illegal immigrants from getting state social services. That initiative, which was thrown out in court, was seen as one of the critical reasons for the party’s decline, as the Latino population in this state has continued to grow, and as California became more Democratic.

Democrats make up nearly 45 percent of the total number of registered voters in the state. Republicans account for about 25 percent, just slightly ahead of the percentage of voters who declined to pick a party registration.

Trump himself has emerged as a critical issue as Republicans try to chart a path forward. Mr. Trump lost California by nearly four million votes, and he remains consistently unpopular overall. But he is popular with Republican primary voters, and candidates have lined up behind him.

Frankly, until the GOP ejects many of the Christian extremists and white supremacists from its base, I see little changing.  Hopefully, in both California and Virginia, 2018 will be a bad year for Republicans. 

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.