Let’s not forget that Cuccinelli was elected attorney general in 2009 and managed to lose about 12 percentage points of support by… being himself once he got elected.
McAulliffe didn’t beat the spread He threw away votes by swinging hard left after he thought he had it in the bag.
Yeah, and Virginia is now a swing state. Good job guys. The solid south is now fraying at the edges.
It would never have been more than 5% if not for the shutdown. The shutdown was what gave McAulliffe that huge lead. The Obamacare.gov fiasco took a lot of wind out of that lead. Then he started going apeshit. I can’t tell you how many times got a push poll talking about global warming, it was pathetic how transparent it was.
Virginia is nowhere near true blue. If Obama had been running on an AWB during 2012, he would have lost Virginia.
Without the tea party, the Republican party becomes a regional party. There is a reason they are being so nice to these nutjobs, they don’t have the numbers without them. Its like the Democrats wouldn’t win elections without women. Except women are half the population while the tea party is around 20%.
McAulliffe would have won pretty much no matter what. McAulliffe has held a pretty steady lead since at least July. Cuccinelli was simply unelectable.
I think people are starting to realize that the tea party is a lot crazier than they thought
I don’t think that’s it. The Republican party has two main interests: Looking out for the well-to-do (who are all over the country), and social conservativism (which is concentrated in rural areas). The Tea Party is much more aligned with the latter than with the former, so it’s more accurate to say that the Tea Party is what’s driving them to become a regional party.
Not sure if you are serious here, the latest **conservative **IPCC report points at ocean rise as a big problem, places like Virginia are going to be affected a lot by it, putting a guy like Cuccinelli that denies that there is a problem would only lead to no efforts whatsoever made to mitigate the changes coming. The blind could not be expected to then offer good solutions when the problem shows up in force and then even more money is bound to be wasted when preparations are still less expensive.
Unfortunately a whole political party has decided that it is more convenient to be blind and give us a future that will make the Healtcare.gov issue look like a puddle compared to a warming ocean.
No, sir, the Tea Party is much more aligned with the former than the latter. It is an organization mainly of and completely for the well-to-do – not the megarich or Wall Streeters, but “local notables.” Its agenda is to protect their local power and their autonomy to treat workers however they like from federal interference.
Those might be the people organizing the movement, but they aren’t the ones delivering the votes. At its peak, something like 20% of the population identified as part of the Tea Party, and there’s no way that 1 person in 5 is a “local notable”.
Owing to some uncounted voting machines turning up, the Dems might take the VA AG’s office too.
Mark Herring, the Democrat, is up by 163 votes, now that all the ballots have been counted.
That doesn’t mean it’s over, of course: the State Board of Elections will review the count, and certify by November 25. After that, whoever trails can request a recount at state expense, since the margin will surely be well under the threshold of 0.5%.
Herring’s declared victory, but Obenshain’s not conceding. Not that I blame him; if I were trailing by 163 votes out of 2.2 million, I wouldn’t concede until the entire procedure played out.
Why is it that “found” ballots always benefit Democrats?
Do they?
That’s two. Is that always?
Plus you missed this one.
Here’s another case of found ballots:
And another.
Some get found too lateto be counted at all.
Mostly what I’m learning from reading these articles is that our voting system is riddled with incompetence. Where paper ballots are used, bags of them seem to get left in closets and side rooms in the hustle and bustle of the night and forgotten. Between this and the headache that electronic machines create, we need a better way of doing this.
But if you’d prefer to state outright that Democrats are somehow manufacturing false ballots that pass the intense scrutiny that “found ballots” always attract as you seem to be implying, please proceed.
Because only Republicans hide them?
Oh, there are lots of potential reasons:
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Democrats are making them up.
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The Republicans are hiding them.
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Districts with more Democratic voters probably have more lefties running the polling stations and they’re more likely to be disorganized and incompetent
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Districts with more Democratic voters are more likely to have their resources cut back by Republicans in charge of allocated voting stations, and thus are more likely to be chaotic and the poll workers overworked, increasing the chance of error.
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People are stupid.
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Something else.
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is my default position until evidence suggests otherwise.
Fairness, because if Republicans have the Supreme Court to bail them out it’s only fair that Democrats can find lost ballots? 
I’m going to vote hard for this one, with a dash of “two instances of something proves nothing.”
It could be that, it could also be that the kind of election shenangians big cities were famous for still occur, when needed.
Ah yes, the famous political machines of Fairfax County Virginia, Anchorage Alaska, and Bridgeport Connecticut. :rolleyes:
No, you mean, “Why is it that found ballots ‘always’ benefit Democrats?”
You may be right about all tha global warming stuff but so what? Are you trying to win a state election or advocate for federal policy?
You do realize that a significant part of Virgnia is coal country, right (its not like they drew teh west virginia border so that all the coal mines were on the West Virginia side)? The turnout in those counties was higher than expected.
Add to that, the gun regulation stuff in a state that might as well have Eddie the Eagle as its state bird.
So what? Most of the confederates that died at Manassass weren’t slave owners.
The world is ful of useful idiots.
I think it’s more likely that the results diverged from the polls because unenthusiastic conservatives deciding to hold their noses and vote for Cuccinelli or because it’s just hard to predict an off-year election like this, especially when a third-party candidate is a factor. I’m skeptical that McAuliffe really lost a ton of support by making a hard turn to the left in the last week.