Sounds like Mr. Gillespie barely got the nom despite lots of money and many endorsement (and despite avoiding anything Trumpian). I’d like to thankfully note that the man he beat for the nom, Corey Stewart, campaigned largely on the promise to preserve the state’s racist & secessionist history (fuck him & fuck that).
Mr. Northam beat out former congressman Tom Perriello despite Mr. Perriello being endorsed by both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
Virginians: what do you think about these guys? What should the rest of the country know about this election contest?
Everyone else: what do you think of this election race? Can this reasonably be looked at as a possible future indicator of what 2018 may bring?
Yet another candidate backed by Sanders loses, and it wasn’t even close.
It’s an off off year election. Virginia has often gone the opposite party after a presidential election, so I guess there’s a mild correlation with the upcoming 2018 mid terms since the President’s party often loses seats.
It’ll be nice for the Dems to retain the Governor’s mansion since the state senate is pretty much split and the Republicans have an overwhelming majority in the House of Delegates
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Almost always, really. Terry McAuliffe was the first VA-Gov candidate of the President’s party to win in roughly forever.
Speaking of McAuliffe, a few days after he won, I described him here as “a faceless, soulless, unprincipled corporate hack with minimal ties to the state he was running in.”
Sometimes, you’re very, very glad to have been proven wrong.
It looks to me like the House of Delegates is where the real action is this year. There are Dem candidates for 87 out of 100 seats. It’s been decades since they’ve had candidates for more than 70 seats.
I don’t think they can recapture the House of Delegates (though I’d be glad to be proven wrong on that, too!), but I think their prospects are good for making a serious dent in the size of the GOP majority.
One remarkable stat, Northam got almost 304,000 votes, that’s almost more than Gillespie (160,000) and Stewart (156,000). That is excellent Democratic turnout in an off off year primary.
I liked both Perriello and Northam. I voted for Perriello but I will happily support Northam against Gillespie. I was very pleased to see that Democratic turnout in the primary was something like 50% higher than Republican turnout. Virginia is fast becoming a solidly blue state.
For a Republican Gillespie seems like a fairly decent guy. Bet he’s gonna get squeezed by the trumplodytes big time, perhaps even fatally (from a political standpoint, I mean).
I love that MS-13 are not just a gang, not just a violent gang, but a violent killer gang. I assume he’d have used more descriptors but he hit the character limit.
There’s a little more at stake here given that this is a primary, but even if Trump loses, he can say it was a blue state before and it’s a blue state now. The real test is how Trump-backed GOP candidates fare in districts that the GOP won in 2016 but were competitive. If those flip, it would be a warning sign for Trump and his brand of politics. Some pundits have posted that this might be like the 2006 election, when middler voters shifted overwhelmingly to the left out of disgust over the Iraq war and the growing scandals list (Mark Foley, etc). I’m not entirely convinced. The center was stronger then than it is now. Bernie voters could fracture the left and make it a weaker opposition and still cause the Dems to lose in spite of a weakened GOP.
One of the more boring Cabinet positions (HUD, Interior, Commerce, etc.) for the next Democratic President, a backup VA Senate candidate, and a break-in-emergency VP pick.
I haven’t been following the race, but I assume if Clinton was able to win the state, which also has two Democratic senators, then a Democrat who isn’t as polarizing as Clinton should be able to win a statewide election. Hopefully this logic isn’t proven wrong on Election Day.
