New Poll:McAuliffe Opens a Double-Digit Lead Over Cuccinelli

A new Washington Post poll embodies truly bad news for GOP nutcase and extremist Ken Cuccinelli.  I for one hope the poll is correct: it finds McAuliffe 51%-Cuccinelli 39%-Sarvis 8%.  As I cannot stress enough, however, that regardless of such positive polling numbers, everyone who opposes the extreme Cuccinelli-Jackson-Obenshain agenda needs to get out and vote on November 5, 2013, to insure that the GOP extremists and misogynists all go down in defeat.  Here are highlights from Blue Virginia on the new poll results:

Democrat Terry McAuliffe has opened a double-digit lead over Republican Ken Cuccinelli II in the race for Virginia governor, in a new poll capturing increasing dissatisfaction among voters with Cuccinelli's party and his conservative views.

According to a new Washington Post-Abt SRBI poll, McAuliffe tops Cuccinelli 51 percent to 39 percent among likely voters in the Nov. 4 election. McAuliffe led by eight percentage points in a poll taken last month. Libertarian Robert Sarvis, who has capitalized on voter unrest with the two major party candidates, is at 8 percent, according to the new poll.

[...]

McAuliffe's strong position also could boost Democrats' chances of sweeping statewide offices for the first time in a quarter-century - and make substantial gains in the GOP-dominated House of Delegates. According to the poll, the race for lieutenant governor is equally lopsided for the Democrat, while the Democratic candidate for attorney general is just three points ahead of the Republican - within the margin of error.

The other encouraging news is that the Post poll finds that both Democrat Ralph Northam and Democrat Mark Herring ahead of their GOP opponents:  Northam leads corrupt extremist wackjob E.W. Jackson 52%-39%, while Mark Herring leads Mark "votes like Jackson and Cuccinelli talk" Obenshain 49%-46%.

Meanwhile, remember how Cuccinelli was bringing in Tea Party heroes to rally his base?  Today Rand Paul spoke at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University on behalf of Cuccinelli.  What did Paul talk about?  On eugenics - yes, eugenics (WTF?!?!?) - and the movie Gattaca.  In fact, Rachel Maddow suggests that much of Paul's speach was plagiarized from the Wikipedia entry on the movie Gattaca (which bombed at the box office).

 

Larry Sabato's Review of the Virginia Gubernatorial Race - Bad News for Cuccinelli

Terry McAuliffe and Kookinelli

Elections are not over until the last ballot is cast and one never knows for certain what the out come will be.  Hence the need to push turn out all they way through election day no matter what the polls may be showing.  But so far, things are not looking good for extremist/religious fanatic Ken Cuccinelli, the GOP gubernatorial nominee who was anointed by a small far right faction of the Virginia GOP at a closed convention that was presided over by The Family Foundation and Tea Party elements.  All the latest polls show Terry McAuliffe up over Cuccinelli and moderate GOP defections continue.  Perhaps worse yet, Cuccinelli cannot escape his own record in the Virginia Senate and as Attorney General, which makes his charade that he's suddenly a moderate a near impossible sales pitch.  Throw in the extremism of his running mates, particularly the utterly insane "Bishop" E. W. Jackson, the ongoing Star Scientific scandal, and Cuccinelli's office's aid to gas companies seeking to screw Virginia landowners out of royalty payments and its more than a bit of a cluster fuck for Kookinelli.  Here are excerpts from Larry Sabato's "Crystal Ball":

As the calendar turns to September, the nation’s marquee race in 2013 is coming into focus: Terry McAuliffe (D) now has an edge over Ken Cuccinelli (R) in the Virginia gubernatorial race, and we’re changing our rating in the contest from toss-up to LEANS DEMOCRATIC.

The decision is based on several factors, all of which seem to suggest that the former Democratic National Committee chairman is leading the state attorney general.

McAuliffe has managed to make the prospect of a Governor Cuccinelli seem scary, while Cuccinelli has “only” succeeded in making McAuliffe look like a run-of-the-mill, self-interested wealthy political hack. In this wholly negative race, that sad distinction matters.

What’s kept Cuccinelli from painting McAuliffe in even less favorable colors? The Bob McDonnell scandal (to which Cuccinelli is connected by the GOP party label and gifts from the same supplicant), his substantially lesser fundraising, E.W. Jackson’s nomination for lieutenant governor, and the defection of a sizable number of moderate Republicans led by the lieutenant governor he left as road kill, Bill Bolling.

Recent polling from Quinnipiac shows the McAuliffe up 48%-42% over Cuccinelli, and an internal poll from the Democratic Party of Virginia showed a similar margin (48%-44%). That is backed up by other polling. The respected HuffPost Pollster average shows McAuliffe up by eight points (45.1% to 37.1%). 

Another 1994 [Senate race between Sen. Chuck Robb (D) and Iran-Contra figure Oliver North (R)] comparison: By nominating a candidate who was too controversial and too conservative to beat Robb, who was damaged by scandal, Republican activists snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. If he does not turn his fortunes around, the same will be said of Cuccinelli, a favorite of the right wing of his party who was nominated at a low-attendance convention.

We’ve been hearing rumblings that some members of the state’s corporate community think they see the writing on the wall in this contest, and while a fair number of moderate Republicans have endorsed McAuliffe, Cuccinelli has little if any prominent crossover support. The Quinnipiac poll showed Cuccinelli attracting only 1% of Democrats, but McAuliffe winning 6% of Republicans. That’s not an imposing crossover vote, but it could be large enough to matter if it materializes on Election Day.

Tellingly, the Cuccinelli campaign has not released any internal polling, and from what we can discern from the campaigns, there seems to be a general consensus that McAuliffe is leading, although perhaps not by as much as the Pollster average would indicate.

Looming over everything is the possibility of an indictment of Gov. Bob McDonnell (R). By now, the details of this seedy, greedy gifts scandal are well known. McDonnell and his wife benefited from their relationship with Star Scientific CEO Jonnie R. Williams Sr. to the tune of over $100,000 in gifts, such as expensive shopping sprees for First Lady Maureen McDonnell and $70,000 for a corporation owned by the governor and his sister — as well as the infamous $6,500 engraved Rolex watch for the 71st governor. Now federal officials are weighing whether or not to take action.

What happens if McDonnell is indicted? There will be a strong push to have him resign, and some Republican officeholders have quietly made it known they will support such a move. If McDonnell gives into the pressure, then Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling (R) will become the interim governor. 

If he becomes governor, Bolling will have three options: He can endorse McAuliffe outright (there have been friendly words and gestures between the two), he can remain neutral (which also helps McAuliffe), or he can give his open or covert assent to a gubernatorial write-in effort. Chuckle all you like, but Bolling is much easier to spell than Murkowski, and both McAuliffe and Cuccinelli have lousy favorability ratings. Any such effort would have to be well funded, and Bolling would have to make clear he would serve if elected. Disproportionately, a Bolling write-in campaign would likely help Cuccinelli by draining many anti-Cuccinelli votes from McAuliffe; this is a key reason why Bolling might not do it.

Believe it or not, non-indictment is the option preferred by many Democrats. They get to keep McDonnell to kick around through November, linking his gifts to Cuccinelli’s much smaller haul from the same source. They avoid the possibility of a Gov. Bolling write-in effort. And McDonnell — once a popular governor who might have been able to drag Cuccinelli across the finish line — is still neutralized because of the lingering taint. McDonnell will never be able to proclaim, “I’m innocent.” The facts are already obvious to all. His parting slogan will be, “I wasn’t indicted.”

A Democratic sweep?

Virginia has a short ballot — an innovation of the 1920s — and so only governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general are popularly elected. In the contest for lieutenant governor, Democrats have a highly probable victory. State Sen. Ralph Northam (D) should win handily over E.W. Jackson (R), an African-American minister who has a long trail of controversial statements but has never held public office.

The contest for attorney general is low visibility and may be the closest of the three races. State Sen. Mark Obenshain (R) is a former Senate desk mate of Cuccinelli, but he has been trying to steer his campaign in a more moderate direction, at least rhetorically. His opponent, state Sen. Mark Herring (D), insists that Obenshain’s actual legislative voting record is nearly identical to Cuccinelli’s. Obenshain is the most likely winner on the GOP slate, and Republicans normally have the advantage for this office, having won every election for it since 1993. But it is easy to see how Herring could win in a ticket election where mainly partisans show up at the polls and stay in one party’s column. Herring is also fortunate to be placed on the ballot after lieutenant governor, where the Democratic win could be sizable. For now, we’ll call it a TOSS-UP

As noted, it is critical that Democrats and moderates who view the GOP slate as poisonous continue to do all they can to turn out friends and family in droves on election day to send a message to the insane GOP base:  No longer can the GOP base nominate crazies and extremist and win in Virginia and by extension across America.  I want not only a Democrat sweep, but also a crushing defeat for the most extreme slate every nominated in Virginia's history.  The Family Foundation needs to be permanently exiled into the political wilderness.  The way for this to happen is to have the slate it basically nominated crushed on election day.  Having backing from The Family Foundation needs to become the kiss of death in Virginia politics.

Disclosure: Sabato and I were classmates as undergraduates at UVA.

President Obama’s Rapidly Diminishing Credibility

I have noted before that I keep having feeling of deja vue from 2009 in terms of the way in which Barack Obama and the Congressional Democrats  seem to be doing all in their power to upset the Democrat base and to hand the 2013 Virginia statewide elections to the GOP statewide ticket.  Little is being accomplished.  Worse yet, things are being said and done to demoralize the party base and make them feel that the average person is screwed regardless of which party holds the reins of powers.  Hence, why bother to go out in vote on election day.  Here in Virginia, turn out will be crucial in defeating the Christofascist slate of Ken Cuccinelli, E. W. Jackson and Mark Obenshain.  In light of today's disclosures on domestic spying on U. S. citizens, the New York Times editorial board has lost all patience with the Obama administration.  Here are some main page editorial highlights:

Within hours of the disclosure that federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.

Those reassurances have never been persuasive — whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism — especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability. 

The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive branch will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.

Based on an article in The Guardian published Wednesday night, we now know that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency used the Patriot Act to obtain a secret warrant to compel Verizon’s business services division to turn over data on every single call that went through its system. 

Essentially, the administration is saying that without any individual suspicion of wrongdoing, the government is allowed to know whom Americans are calling every time they make a phone call, for how long they talk and from where. 

This sort of tracking can reveal a lot of personal and intimate information about an individual. To casually permit this surveillance — with the American public having no idea that the executive branch is now exercising this power — fundamentally shifts power between the individual and the state, and it repudiates constitutional principles governing search, seizure and privacy.

It is the very sort of thing against which Mr. Obama once railed, when he said in 2007 that the surveillance policy of the George W. Bush administration “puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide.” 

Two Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, have raised warnings about the government’s overbroad interpretation of its surveillance powers.

On Thursday, Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin, who introduced the Patriot Act in 2001, said that the National Security Agency overstepped its bounds by obtaining a secret order to collect phone log records from millions of Americans. 

“As the author of the Patriot Act, I am extremely troubled by the F.B.I.’s interpretation of this legislation,” he said in a statement. “While I believe the Patriot Act appropriately balanced national security concerns and civil rights, I have always worried about potential abuses.” He added: “Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American.” 

Stunning use of the act shows, once again, why it needs to be sharply curtailed if not repealed.