Monday Morning Male Beauty

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Virginia on The Brink of Cementing Its Democratic Status

Click image to enlarge: Republican voting strength is increasingly concentrated in the areas
that have stagnated or which are losing population while the Democrat base grows in growing areas.

Virginia's elections on Tuesday, November 5, 2019, are getting a lot of national attention and many hope that the elections will be a reprise of the 2017 bloodbath suffered by the Virginia Republican Party which remains in lock step with Donald Trump, perhaps the most hated politician/demagogue in the Commonwealth - at least outside of knuckle dragging rural areas of the state which continue to see a continued downward spiral because of the backwardness and religious extremism of so many of its inhabitants that modern, progressive businesses find repellent.  A piece in Huffington Post looks at what's at stake on Tuesday - including but not limited to increased minimum wages, LGBT non-discrimination protections, gun control, women's rights, and actions to address climate change -  and and how Virginia appears to be finally seceding from the old Confederacy as states like Alabama descend further into right wing/Christofascist lunacy.  For Virginia to continue to prosper, it is imperative that Republicans lose control of both houses of the General Assembly.  Here are article highlights:

Democratic takeovers in both legislative chambers would have far-reaching implications for the state’s policies and politics. The party, which also controls the governor’s office, would have the chance to pursue a host of liberal priorities like an increase in the state’s minimum wage, laws protecting LGBTQ rights and abortion rights and tougher gun safety regulations.

It would also mark the culmination of Virginia’s years long transformation from a conservative state ― which once was the seat of the Confederacy ― to a progressive one that is not only reliably Democratic in presidential elections, but whose state politics are heavily influenced by a cohort of liberal Democrats that would have been unrecognizable even a decade ago.

“This could be a watershed election for Virginia,” said Quentin Kidd, director of the center for public policy at Christopher Newport University.

And don’t expect the Democrats in Virginia to be moderate quasi-Republicans. The state party has been winning its elections with candidates who are more progressive than the traditional Southern Democrats, touting policies like gun control.

“There will still be [Southern-style] Democrats in Virginia after November 5,” Kidd said, putting Gov. Ralph Northam (D) himself in that category. “But if Democrats win it will because of Democrats who are” more liberal.

Many of the top priorities for Democrats once in power would be the sort of socially liberal reforms for which there is broad support in the increasingly affluent, suburban state.

Tougher gun regulations would almost certainly swiftly become law. In the wake of a mass shooting in Virginia Beach that killed 12 people in May, Northam sought to pass a package of reforms to close background check loopholes for private sales and transfers and forbid the sale of assault rifles, high-capacity magazines and silencers, among other things. The Republican-controlled legislative chambers blocked the measures in a special legislative session in July. 

Legislation aimed at protecting LGBTQ residents from discrimination is also likely to pass very quickly. . . . “LGBTQ rights are on the ballot,” said Lucas Acosta, a spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign, which has contributed over $41,000 to Roem’s reelection and tens of thousands more on other Democrats. “Literally, it will take a flip of two seats and new leadership in the House of Delegates and the state Senate for LGBTQ residents to have the most basic protections.”  

Virginia Democrats would have the chance to adopt more expansive protections for abortion rights and ratify the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  

What makes this potential Democratic takeover different from previous legislative wins is that in addition to socially liberal legislation, the party is seriously considering bills that run counter to the state’s mighty business establishment. The clubby, ethically lax and business-friendly consensus in both parties is so ingrained in the state’s political culture, it has its own name: the “Virginia Way.”

But this time, not only have Democrats vowed to raise the state’s minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 an hour, many are also on record in support of repealing the state’s anti-union “right-to-work” law. Virginia was one of the first states in the country to adopt a law barring unions from compelling the workers it represents to contribute dues.

“We’ve been saying since 2008 that Virginia’s been trending purple, trending blue,” he said. “It could very well be the case that Virginia cements itself politically as a mid-Atlantic state after November 5.” 

Another sign of the shifting consensus against big business is a greater appetite among Democrats to take on the state’s twin monopoly electric companies, Dominion Energy and Appalachian Power. 

Forty incumbent Democrats and 47 challengers have pledged not to accept campaign contributions from the two monopolies or own stock in them, according to the progressive nonprofit Clean Virginia, which is seeking to combat their power.

Whether and how much a Democratic legislature is willing to act to combat climate change is likely to depend in particular on lawmakers’ willingness to buck Dominion, long one of the state’s most deep-pocketed campaign donors. 

With the support of Dominion and Appalachian, Northam has proposed a clean energy standard that would make the state 100% carbon-free by 2050. 

But some environmental advocates argue that the deadline for decarbonization is too late. Others worry that climate policies that fail to confront the monopolies’ power will simply extend their dominance into emerging renewable energy sectors, while hurting ratepayers and suppressing the sort of clean energy entrepreneurship that would help Virginia hit its climate targets sooner and more effectively.

“The idea that renewables, which are inevitable and should be mandatory, only come by a utility that has abused its monopoly is a false argument and one that Virginians should reject on the face of it,” said Brennan Gilmore, executive director of Clean Virginia. 

The explosion of the state’s northern suburbs outside Washington brought an influx of highly educated and racially diverse voters more likely to vote Democratic. As a result, Republicans have been losing ground in Virginia for the better part of a decade; their last statewide wins were in 2009.  

The election of President Donald Trump, who lost Virginia by 5 percentage points and repelled many of the educated professionals from the business-friendly wing of the state’s Republican Party, turbocharged that trend. 

The liberal anti-Trump “Resistance” raged as hot in Virginia as any state in the country, sparking a major uptick in candidates for elected office, young voter participation and volunteer door-knocking. What’s more, the exodus of socially liberal, suburban Republicans from the GOP in the Trump era created a vicious cycle wherein the state’s party increasingly catered to a right-wing populist base that further alienated it from swing voters. 

The result was a wave election in November 2017 that was the first real demonstration of Trump’s toxicity in battleground states. . . . . the enthusiasm didn’t let up. In November 2018, Virginia Democrats continued to capitalize on suburban discontent with the president, flipping three Republican-held U.S. House seats.

When Virginia voted for Barack Obama in 2008, it was the first time the state had voted for a Democratic presidential nominee since 1964. 

Some observers characterized that outcome as Virginia’s de facto political secession from the South, Kidd recalled.

Flipping the legislature this year with a more diverse, more progressive group of Democrats, he said, “would be a reaffirmation of that secession from the South ― and it would be on the shoulders of a newer America.”

Sunday Male Beauty

Why Pete Buttigieg Isn't Going Away

Republicans have one advantage over Democrats: their base is far less diverse and is united by its racism and religious extremism - plus a dose of severe greed among a significant portion of the wealthy. Democrats in contrast have a diverse base that often agrees on little with some elements easily manipulated and played for fools by Republicans and right wing religious leaders who cherry pick bible passages to induce low information voters (especially black voters) to either (i) vote for candidates that will further the GOP's white supremacist agenda, or (ii) stay home from the polls in a funk and by default cast a vote for anti-black Republicans.  A case in point: a recent Facebook exchange where a black male said he could never vote for Buttigieg since he is gay implying he'd stay home and allow white supremacist champion Donald Trump to be re-elected if it came down to that choice.  Talk about acting against one's own best interest.  Of course, this same individual demands that gays support his civil rights. This is but one example of the divisions within the Democrat base.

Where the Democrat nomination ultimately goes remains unknown, but one thing appears clear for now: Buttigieg is not going away any time soon.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the next phase of Buttigieg's unlikely campaign.  Here are highlights:

We’ve reached an odd moment in an odd Democratic-primary race. With less than 100 days until the Iowa caucuses, former Vice President Joe Biden is struggling to hang on to his lead in the polls and is short on cash. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts is making some people nervous that she’ll be Hillary Clinton and George McGovern rolled into one, and that nominating her means throwing the election to Donald Trump. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is recovering from a heart attack, and some observers believe that he has reached his ceiling of support. And while many voters keep saying they haven’t made up their minds yet, 14 other candidates are trying to convince voters and themselves there’s still a way to pull it off.

And then there’s Buttigieg. Several top Democratic officials who are not backing any candidate, as well as some operatives who are, have told me in the past two weeks that there’s a spot for him, but that the nominee can’t be him. They say the same things: He’s too young, too inexperienced, and unable to draw support from African American voters. They worry about the question that keeps coming up in focus groups and that reporters are beginning to ask: whether he’s struggling to win people over because he’s gay.

In Rock Hill, South Carolina, last weekend, I asked people at a Buttigieg town hall whether they thought he was ready to do the job. “Have you ever listened to him speak? He’s got brains, he’s got class, he’s got poise,” Chuck McKinney, a retired carpenter who’d driven in from Lake Lure, North Carolina, told me.

This is the point in the 2008 race when Barack Obama began an ascent that never stopped. He broke out at the Iowa Democratic Party dinner in November 2007.

Buttigieg’s campaign has leaned into the Obama comparisons for a while. On Wednesday, his team sent an email to supporters from Larry Grisolano, a consultant who worked for Obama and has been on Buttigieg’s campaign since the summer: “Pete’s campaign this year is rekindling the same excitement I felt at this time in 2007,” he wrote.

And notice how Buttigieg delivers his big finale on the stump these days: “I know hope went out of style,” Buttigieg said in Rock Hill on Saturday. He asked the crowd: “Do you have a sense of hope to bring about change for our republic?”

He’s a young veteran and a polyglot from the Midwest talking about a record of accountable local government. He is strangely fit for this political moment, but he’s also fitting himself for it constantly.

But the core brilliance of Buttigieg’s campaign is making the carefully planned seem nonchalant, like he’s ambling when in fact he’s in the middle of a plié. Every sentence is precisely arranged, the words weighted, playing off ideas like faith and security and freedom. Operatives on other campaigns grumble that he’s a construction, a “celebrity” who wows reporters looking for the hot new thing, but it’s working.

When I asked how his whopping total of 19,506 votes between two mayoral races could actually win a presidential election, he called that “an exquisitely Washington mind-set.” When asked whether he’s the epitome of white, male privilege, he turns it back with, “When it comes to identity, I am very mindful of the privileges that go with being white and being male. I also have the experience of belonging to a category of people in America that would have been assumed to be effectively ineligible for the presidency.”

[T]here’s the latest line that he appears so eager to push, he hit it twice at the October Democratic debate and has repeated it at nearly every recent public appearance: “I want you to picture what it’s going to be like, what it’s actually going to feel like in this country, the first day the sun comes up after Donald Trump has been president,” he said on the debate stage in Ohio. “It starts out feeling like a happy thought; this particular brand of chaos and corruption will be over. But really think about where we’ll be: vulnerable, even more torn apart by politics than we are right now.”

All the more reason not to go with Buttigieg, his doubters say. . . . Aha! Buttigieg says: Now is his time. Now more than ever, in fact.

“Look, they blew everything up, which means that there is a chance to build something new and better on the rubble,” Buttigieg said. “I mean, not to over-dramatize it, but I think about areas where buildings have been destroyed in the world, and then architecture of a new kind flourishes.”

He was an intelligence officer stationed in Afghanistan; he rarely ventured outside the wire, and mostly guarded transports when he did. “My vehicle, to my knowledge, was never targeted,” Buttigieg said, already preparing to turn it into the point he’s making. “So I don’t go around acting like I was out in the Korangal Valley. I’m somebody who did my part. But I think it’s an important contrast to draw with somebody who avoided doing his part when it was his turn.”

Over the past few weeks, Buttigieg has not-so-subtly presented himself as a Biden alternative. Sitting in a coffee shop in Concord, New Hampshire, in April, Buttigieg told me he didn’t think going deep on policy was a priority. He brought up an economic-development plan he wrote when first running for mayor that he said maybe a dozen people actually read. In September, he released his “Medicare for All Who Want It” plan, which has a policy paper behind it, but is basically appealing wordplay to get a message to people who will never read the whole thing, which is most people: “I’m not for eliminating private plans,” he said, “so I’m glad that we found a way in a headline to explain it.”

“He’s got workable ideas,” says Sherre Kearn, who works for the state government in Columbia, South Carolina, and had driven up to Rock Hill to hold a big Buttigieg sign last weekend. She says she voted for Sanders in the 2016 primaries because of his focus on health care, but now she’s backing Buttigieg because she thinks he’s talking about practical solutions to health care.

Buttigieg has been accused mostly by Sanders and Warren supporters of tacking to the center in the past few weeks, with accusations that he came in bold when there was nothing to lose but now wants to come across as acceptable when winning is theoretically in sight.

He had $22 million on hand at the end of September, and the money keeps coming in, but he’s still a long way from first place, and always has been. And many political veterans believe that if somehow Buttigieg does make it to a two-way race with Warren, he won’t make it further than that, given his inability to attract the African American voters that would really make him the Biden alternative, given that they have been his backstop.

Buttigieg makes this next point because it’s self-serving, but it also happens to be true: Each of the four Democratic presidents since World War II (not counting the two who took over for dead men) were young and inexperienced: John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Obama. Candidates who get called “presidential,” Republican or Democrat, tend not to become president at all.

Trump has already made an issue of Buttigieg looking young enough to get carded, and never having done much. Buttigieg welcomes that.

“He might make it about age and experience, but fundamentally, that’s an argument about judgment and wisdom,” Buttigieg said. “And I think in a judgment and wisdom contest, this president’s on pretty shaky ground.”

He has another line he uses often, about how if there aren’t the kind of big changes he says his presidency would bring about, then the American experiment could unravel.
How close to the brink does he think we are?  “Closer than we think,” he said.

More Saturday Male Beauty

Biden Confronts a Growing Threat: Pete Buttigieg

Like many former Republicans who have become Democrats by default - being an Independent leaves one with no ability to influence party politics and/or candidate selection - to me the most important aspect of 2020 is seeing Trump removed from office either through impeachment (not likely give the morally bankrupt Senate Republicans) or electoral defeat.  Thus, the overriding concern becomes one of which Democrat primary candidate can inspire voters and get them to turn out and vote Democrat.  Some friends want Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren to be the standard bearer, while I fear they are too liberal and could cause another Electoral College victory for Trump even as they won the popular vote. Others want Joe Biden who is seemingly popular with black voters but but totally uninspiring to younger voters. Then there's Pete Buttigieg, the other somewhat moderate Democrat who has a message of the need for generational change in leadership yet has in the view of some the albatross of being gay hanging over him - polls show 36% would never vote for him, yet this is probably the same 36% that would vote for Trump even if he molested a woman on video. Yet, in Iowa, Buttigieg seems to be rising.  Here are excepts from a piece in Politico: 

Joe Biden dropped to fourth place in Iowa, according to a new poll released Friday, his worst showing to date in the pivotal early state.  A few hours later, at the largest gathering to date for any 2020 event, it was clear why.

While Biden delivered a solid performance on stage before a crowd of 13,500 Democrats at the state party’s Liberty & Justice dinner, he was overshadowed and outshined by the candidate who just passed him in the polls — Pete Buttigieg.

At the massive state party event known for its catalytic effect on campaigns — it’s widely remembered as a turning point for Barack Obama’s Iowa fortunes in 2007 — Buttigieg captured the audience’s imagination, articulating a case for generational change.

“I didn’t just come here to end the era of Donald Trump,” Buttigieg said to a roaring crowd of supporters. “I’m here to launch the era that must come next.”

The South Bend, Ind., mayor’s speech offered an insight into his recent surge here, and why he is threatening to eclipse the former vice president in a state where Biden has been steadily losing ground since summer.

Ann Selzer, who heads the respected Iowa Poll, said her most recent poll showed 75 percent of those surveyed wanted a nominee who could inspire new voters to show up.

“Something I think is rather telling is those who want someone who represents a new generation of leadership,” Selzer said, noting that 57 percent of potential caucus-goers wanted new leadership versus 28 percent who wanted someone who had a long history of serving in government. “Who is that if it’s not Joe Biden?”

According to the New York Times/Siena College poll that placed Biden in fourth place in Iowa, the former vice president was showing little appeal among younger voters — only 2 percent of those under 45 years old said they planned to caucus for him.

Buttigieg, by contrast, has muscled his way into contention in the first-in-the-nation caucus state by steadily building crowds and rapidly expanding his presence in the state. In the last month alone, Buttigieg has doubled his staff presence while opening 20 offices across Iowa.

[T]he Indiana mayor is also swamping his opponents in digital advertising, something that’s been hard to miss in Iowa.

“I cannot overstate how many Buttigieg ads I see,” said Sinovic, pointing to data showing Buttigieg’s national digital spending numbers surpassing Biden almost five-to-one. “It’s just a massive outspending right now.”

Through his spending and organizing efforts, Buttigieg has managed to reshape the top tier into a 4-way contest that also includes Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

“You might expect that a frontrunner is going to lose some ground as other candidates become more visible,” said Selzer. “It’s not just that there’s not enough numbers to go around. It’s that he’s not wearing well. It’s the trend, it’s the decline.”

For her part, Warren, who had perhaps the largest display of support in the Wells Fargo Arena, seemed to take a swipe at Biden, with whom she had tangled earlier Friday after he criticized her plans to fund Medicare for All. “If the most we can promise is business as usual after Donald Trump then Democrats will lose,” Warren said. “Fear and complacency does not win elections. Hope and courage wins elections.”

Tom Vilsack, a former Iowa governor and ex-Dept. of Agriculture secretary, shrugged off Warren and Buttigieg’s rising poll numbers in the state, saying neither have truly been tested just yet.

“She hasn’t had a worst day yet — none of these campaigns have except for Vice President Biden,” said Vilsack, who served with Biden in the Obama administration and hosted a house party for him in July. “And the thing about Biden is he’s still standing. The question is will the rest of them still be standing after they’ve taken a punch? We’ll see.”

I continue to have a bad gut feeling that Biden is not the strongest candidate that some would have one believe. 

Saturday Morning Male Beauty

The Vindication of Never Trumpers

Recently I saw a Facebook post that had a simple message: good people do not support bad people. I'd expand that a bit further and say that decent, moral people do not support immoral people.   By and large, the Republican Party ignored this simple test of morality that shows much more about one's true moral compass than feigning piety, sitting in church pews on Sundays, and hating gays - the hallmarks of today's evangelicals whose loyalty to Donald Trump is steadily killing the Christian brand among the millennial generations only 49% of which now view themselves as Christian. Even as the majority of Republicans - especially its white supremacist, evangelical base - demonstrated total moral bankruptcy by its embrace of Trump, there were some Republicans (most now are former Republicans) who said "no" and became labeled as never Trumpers, a group that Trump has called "human scum" suggesting that he must have been looking in the mirror when he uttered the statement. A column in the New York Times looks at these never Trumpers and the manner in which they have been vindicated even as their former colleagues have proven their lack of true morality.  Here are column highlights:

Even by Donald Trump’s standards, his tweet of Oct. 23 — the one that called NeverTrumpers “human scum” — plumbed new depths in the debasement of presidential speech.

But what else has changed? If Robert Ballard, who discovered the wreck of the Titanic, were given the job of finding Trump’s moral bottom, he’d fail.

Far more revealing in Trump’s tweet was its first sentence. “The Never Trumper Republicans, though on respirators with not many left, are in certain ways worse and more dangerous for our Country than the Do Nothing Democrats,” [Trump] the president wrote, before warning of their scummy natures.

If the few remaining NeverTrump conservatives can still be that dangerous while we’re on respirators, we must be powerful indeed. Somewhere in eternity’s permanent exile, Leon Trotsky is smiling. . . . As a movement, NeverTrumpism is on life support. And [Trump] the president has greater reasons than ever to fear it.

Three years ago, on the eve of the election, the NeverTrump coalition was a wide one, ranging from hard-core conservatives like Erick Erickson and Ted Cruz to somewhat squishier ones like Michael Gerson, John Podhoretz, and, well, me.

Then Trump won. The guy who was supposed to lead his party to a catastrophic defeat became the man who, in the eyes of the right, uniquely figured out how to save the country from Hillary Clinton. The coarseness of speech and crudeness of character that were supposed to be his central flaws became evidence of his gutsy indifference to liberal reproach.

There were also those conservative policy and political victories. Regulatory rollback. Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and all the lower court judges. Increased military spending. The tax cut. Withdrawal from the Iran deal. An expanded G.O.P. majority in the Senate.

The NeverTrumpers scattered. Some became ex-conservatives. Others, full-on Trumpers. Still others, anti-anti-Trumpers — which only meant they were smart enough to see [Trump] the president for what he is and churlish enough to be angry at those who wouldn’t join them in capitulating to it.

Yet the NeverTrumpers never scattered entirely, and thank heavens for that. Every political system will always have a conservative faction, and every healthy democracy needs that faction to be rooted in some combination of classical liberalism and moral traditionalism. Trump’s G.O.P., whatever its political fortunes, is the opposite: a nativist party led by a libertine.

At some level, conservatives know this. Trump knows they know it. Which explains why he has turned his sights on Never Trumpers: What despots and demagogues fear most is their followers developing a conscience.

No wonder [Trump] the president chose to lambaste Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman as a “Never Trumper.” The combat veteran had the simple decency of being scandalized by what he heard from the president on the Ukraine phone call, and by what he knew of the discrepancies between what he heard on the call and the account of it released by the White House.

The decency of being scandalized is what being NeverTrump is centrally about, and why the movement remains important. It’s the opposite of the opportunism required to go along with [Trump] the president because you might get something out of him.

It’s the same sense of scandal that led to the first significant G.O.P. revolt against Trump since John McCain turned his thumb down on Obamacare repeal in 2017: The suppurating disgust even pliant conservatives like Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham feel at Trump’s cavalier betrayal of the Kurds.

And it helps explain why [Trump's] the president’s support with his base is slipping at last. A new poll finds Trump’s support among Republicans at 74 percent — an eight-point decline since September and the lowest since he was elected. Nearly one in five Republicans support impeachment and removal. So do 47 percent of independents. These numbers will not move in Trump’s favor if the truth about his “drug deals” (to borrow Bolton’s phrase) continues to come to light.

I doubt any of this will be sufficient to get at least 20 Republican senators to vote for Trump’s removal from office. But Trump knows that the number needed to spell his moral defeat on impeachment is four. If Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and one other Republican join the Democrats to convict, the political humiliation will be thunderous. And, as my colleague David Leonhardt has convinced me, it could devastate his re-election chances. If the administration thinks impeachment is such a political winner, they wouldn’t be fighting it this hard.

In the meantime, someone ought to print “Human Scum” on a limited-edition T-shirt. Given who said it about whom, it turns out to be a badge of honor. 

The real human scum are those who continue to support Trump either out of racism, homophobia and religious extremism, or simple greed and a focus solely on tax cuts. Any of those reasons for supporting Trump underscore a serious moral deficiency that feigned piety, condemnation of gays, avoidance of alcohol, and other evangelical forms of wearing religion on their sleeves will not wash away.   

Friday Morning Male Beauty

The Democrat Blitz in Virginia

In 2017 blog readers from around the country followed the Virginia elections, many seeking a ray of hope in an otherwise demoralized political world disgusted by the foul and corrupt individual in the White House.  Fortunately, Democrats created a political earthquake, won the governorship and both other state wide offices and came within a name drawing from taking control of the House of Delegates.  Next Tuesday, Democrats hope to finish the work left from 2017 and take control of both the Virginia Senate and Virginia House of Delegates.  Should this happen, not only would decades of Republican obstructionism and efforts at voter disenfranchisement fall away, but the Democrats would also control the 2020 redistricting maps. In addition, for LGBT Virginians we might at last see state law non-discrimination protections and see a statutory ban on voodoo like "conversion therapy" which should more properly be called a form of torture.  A piece in Politico looks at the Democrat effort in Virginia which many hope can be a precursor to a 2020 rout for self-prostituting Trump boot lickers.   Here are article excerpts:

National Democratic groups are spending unprecedented sums in the race for control of Virginia’s state legislature — the first test in a yearlong campaign to maximize the party’s influence in the states before the next round of redistricting begins in 2021.

After winning the governor's mansion in 2017, Democrats are shooting for total control in Richmond. And they see next week's elections as an early chance at redemption after a 2010 drubbing that left them boxed out of the map-making process in nearly every key state.

“I was in New York yesterday for a pitch to national donors — everybody wants to play in Virginia. They understand the significance,” former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a long-time national party power-broker, said last week. “Virginia’s future for the next decade is going to be determined this November.”

Cash-flush Democratic power players have flooded the commonwealth with upwards of $10 million, according to an analysis of outside spending. Among the top spenders: Everytown for Gun Safety, a Michael Bloomberg-aligned group, with $2.5 million; the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, the party's state-level campaign arm, with $1.3 million; the League of Conservation Voters with $1.5 million; and EMILY’s List with $2.1 million, its single largest investment ever in a state’s legislative races.

Virginia’s unique campaign-finance laws allow these groups, and major liberal donors like George Soros, to contribute unlimited amounts directly to individual campaigns, giving Democrats a formidable financial advantage.

Democratic candidates raised a collective $31.8 million by the end of last month, according to the analysis of financial filings by the nonpartisan Virginia Public Access Project. That's more than twice as much as they raised in 2015, the last time both chambers of the legislature were on the ballot.

In comparison, Republican candidates have raised a collective $21 million so far this cycle, trailing their Democratic counterparts by over $10 million.

Over the next 12 months, Democrats are seeking to make major inroads in state legislatures, which have the power to affect policy at the state level, in addition to election rules like district lines and ballot access. Republicans control the legislatures of 30 states, . . . 

In Virginia, Democrats have not had majorities in either chamber since before 2012, when Republicans took control of the map-drawing process — but they have a strong chance next week to flip both, particularly the state Senate. In 2017, control of the state House memorably came down to one race in Newport News when the Republican incumbent kept his seat after a tiebreaker in which his name was drawn from a bowl. The impact of the Democratic cash influx is abundantly clear in a northern Virginia state delegate district where Democrat Hala Ayala, a cybersecurity specialist who is one of the first two Hispanic women elected to the state’s lower chamber, faces a rematch with Rich Anderson, the Republican she beat in 2017.

Anderson pulled in over $280,000 by late October. Ayala, buoyed by a six-figure donation from EMILY’s List, has raised over $1.2 million so far. That investment has allowed her to spread her message wide.

Her ads have become so prominent on cable and digital platforms that Ayala said neighborhood children have referred to her as "that lady on my Twitter." Some approach her to recite the script of her spot that details her time working at a gas station while on Medicaid. "I'm ready to be a meme," she joked.

"Never before have Democrats had this kind of money," Ayala said. "Republicans have been well-funded, mostly by the NRA and all of these special interest groups that never served us any positive benefit."

Democratic presidential candidates have also shown interest in the Virginia elections. . . . And there's some indication that the grass-roots have also taken an increased interest in Virgina. ActBlue reported that donors in the third quarter of 2019 doubled their contributions compared to the third quarter of 2017.

Virginia is the only state with competitive off-year state legislative elections. Democratic strategists will have to likely work harder to keep a focus on down-ballot races in 2020, when the party will attempt to take the White House and Senate while defending its House majority.

In the past few years, some of the biggest names in Democratic politics have waged a nationwide campaign to prevent a 2010 redux.

Ahead of the post-2020 redistricting, Democrats are eager to break GOP trifectas in Florida, Texas, Ohio and Georgia. Another top target this cycle is North Carolina — where Republicans control both chambers, and Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper would have no veto power over the map if he wins reelection next year.