Free Republic

In a move that could shake up the conservative-outside-group-world, former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is suing a conservative political action committee called Conservative StrikeForce PAC for allegedly raising millions of dollars for his campaign, and spending only a small fraction of that on his race. According to a report on the lawsuit: “(A) substantial proportion of the approximately $2.2 million that defendants raised through political fundraising in 2013 was directly attributable to solicitations invoking Ken Cuccinelli, as Virginia’s gubernatorial election was the marquee contested race of American politics in 2013,” the lawsuit states. “Defendants, however, have admitted that they...

Democrat Terry McAuliffe is projected to win the Virginia gubernatorial race, defeating Republican nominee Ken Cuccinelli in a surprisingly close victory. Fox News projected McAuliffe as the winner Tuesday night. The closely watched raced pitted a Tea Party-backed Republican and an establishment Democrat locked in an expensive, ideological battle whose outcome is expected to set a course for the 2014 and 2016 elections -- in large part forcing the GOP to consider whether a strong conservative candidate is the party’s best pick to win a national election. Cuccinelli, trailing late by single digits, tried unsuccessfully to use voter dissatisfaction with...

It is not the libertarians’ fault when a conservative candidate loses. As conservatives, we should avoid blaming others when we don’t succeed. That’s what liberals do. That, plus shred the Constitution and shovel our money to deadbeats. Libertarians are not conservatives, and we don’t have a right to their votes. But sometimes we share the same goals, and some of them are gettable voters for conservative candidates. We just need to understand that there is no one kind of libertarian any more than there is one kind of Republican. In the GOP, you have social conservatives, the moderate/RINO wing, the...

<p>RICHMOND, Va. (AP) - Sen. Mark Obenshain says he's going to outline his next steps in the nearly knotted race for attorney general.</p> <p>The Harrisonburg Republican has scheduled a news conference for Wednesday in Richmond. Unofficial state election results show Democratic Sen. Mark Herring with a narrow lead over Obenshain.</p>

Despite what the hysterical media will tell you, those distant blasts you heard last week rolling from New York City to Richmond were not cannon fire from the ongoing civil war within the Republican Party. They were the first shots fired in the civil war that is about to break wide open within the Democratic Party. The hyperventilating media have gone from simply jaundiced sideline observers to outright cheerleaders, breathlessly fanning the flames of discord within the GOP at every turn. Who knew The New York Times cares so much about Republican politicians from Texas and Utah? Of course, they...

Democrat Mark R. Herring widened his lead Tuesday over Republican Mark R. Obenshain in Virginia’s nail-biting race for attorney generalWith Herring up by 163 votes over Obenshain, the Democrat declared himself the victor, while Obenshain refused to concede. He said he will wait for the State Board of Elections to certify the Virginia-wide vote on Nov. 25. “Voters in Virginia have spoken, their voices have been heard and I am honored to have won their votes and their trust to become Virginia’s next attorney general,” Herring said in a statement. While the vote was close, he said, “Virginians have chosen...

The dust has settled (mostly) from last week’s elections, so I thought it time to present a very different assessment of what happened in Virginia than the snapshot I’ve seen from others. For example, Democracy Corps and Women’s Voices, Women Vote Action Fund distributed a wholly self-serving and unconvincing memo titled “Unmarried Women Cast Deciding Votes in Virginia Election.” It’s unconvincing, of course, because Republicans always lose unmarried women, regardless of an election’s outcome. Unmarried women are more liberal than most voters and are not part of any winning Republican coalition. NBC’s Domenico Montanaro and The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart...

Richmond, VA–Merely hours after the close of a bitter and divisive Governor’s race in Virginia that saw Democrat Terry McAuliffe pull out a win over Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, irregularities in voting data have emerged. According to mainstream media outlets McAuliffe supposedly defeated Cuccinelli in a razor-thin 47-46 percent victory to become the next Governor of the great state of Virginia. Immediately following the announcement, Cuccinelli’s office opened a full investigation into the legitimacy of the vote and quickly turned up surprising results. In 13 districts, multiple instances of intimidation at the polls were reported. Large black men wearing...

Virginia Republicans may have a strong candidate for the 2014 US Senate seat in Ken Cuccinelli. As reported in the Daily Caller, conservative writer and Congressional candidate Quin Hillyer gives voice to a movement to draft Ken to run against incumbent Democrat U.S. Senator Mark Warner. Yet it would be a problem for the 2013 campaigner Ken Cuccinelli to run for U.S. Senate, from what we saw in Ken's unsuccessful campaign for governor. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Ken Cuccinelli as a potential senator. Yet Ken will fail badly unless he fires his 2013 campaign strategists, consultants, and leaders,...

Politics is in the eye of the beholder. Post-mortems about the Virginia gubernatorial race are gushing forth about why Republican Ken Cuccinelli lost to Democrat Terry McAuliffe, a business-as-usual political retread from the Clinton crowd. They tell us more about who produces this punditry than about the reality of the situation. We're hearing that tea party activists killed Cuccinelli's candidacy with the government shutdown (according to The Wall Street Journal editorial page, they "stabbed him in the back") and that, once again, a socially conservative Republican candidate has shown he can't win women's votes. What I see is very different....

In an attorney general’s race that remains too close to call, Republican Mark D. Obenshain began today with a 17-vote edge over Democrat Mark R. Herring. But by afternoon, the pendulum had swung the other way when the numbers in four Richmond precincts were updated, putting Herring ahead by 115 votes out of more than 2 million cast statewide.

The pro-life movement has an opportunity to re-capture the Senate from abortion activists next year, but pro-life Republican candidates who are looking to win Senate seat in the mid-term elections need to be prepared for continued phony attacks accusing them of engaging in a so-called War on Women.During the Virginia gubernatorial election, the Planned Parenthood abortion business threw $1 million in false attacks on pro-life candidate Ken Cuccinelli at Virginia voters. They flooded their mailboxes with propaganda aimed at making Cuccinelli’s mainstream pro-life views look out of touch by falsely characterizing him as opposing birth control and contraception. Terry McAuliffe’s...

Politics is in the eye of the beholder. Post-mortems now gushing forth about why Ken Cuccinelli, conservative Republican candidate for governor in Virginia, lost to Democrat Terry McAuliffe, a business-as-usual political retread from the Clinton crowd, tell us more about who produces this punditry than what reality actually might be. We’re hearing that the Tea Party killed Cuccinelli (according to the Wall Street Journal editorial page they “stabbed him in the back”) with the government shutdown and that, once again, a socially conservative Republican candidate has shown he can’t win the votes of women. What I see is very...

Take a look at this map. It's a map showing the results of the voting in Tuesday's Virginia election for governor. All the solid red areas voted a majority for Cuccinelli. The small Dark blue ares went Terry McAuliffe (Yes, I know those are the most densely populated areas of Virginia). The rest were mixed. Notice that the map seems to be almost solid red. And yet, Ken Cuccinelli somehow very narrowly lost to his Democrat opponent. To me, something smells about all this and I suspect Ken Cuccinelli actually won Virginia, but certain things happened to ensure that that...

Hardly a commercial break went by in October when Virginia voters weren’t reminded of Ken Cuccinelli’s far-right views on abortion and other social issues. How much of a difference the deluge ultimately made after Cuccinelli’s surprisingly narrow loss against Democrat Terry McAuliffe is open for debate. What isn’t in dispute is that Democrats and women’s groups believe their “war on women” playbook worked. And they have every intention of using it again in 2014,

Nearly 10 percent of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s anti-gun group Mayors Against Illegal Guns retired from their job or were sacked in Tuesday’s elections, including the organization’s two leaders: Bloomberg and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino. Some 95 key members of the group that targets and criticizes lawmakers backed by the National Rifle Association are losing their title of “mayor.” According to an election review of Bloomberg's membership list of about 1,000, three quit the group, 69 retired from their jobs, and 23 were rejected by voters.On the retirement list: Bloomberg and Menino.Among the defeated members of Mayors Against Illegal...

So it turns out Terry McAuliffe and Ken Cuccinelli were able to draw away enough votes to keep Robert Sarvis from winning Virginia’s governor’s race. I hope the folks who put those guys on the ballot are happy. Last night, my Twitter feed had quite a few conservatives laying the blame on Sarvis for costing Cuccinelli the election (which really isn’t true according to polls, and it probably wouldn’t even had been a close outcome but for the Obamacare mess). So in the spirit of reconciliation, here are some tips from a typical third-party voter to major party movers and...

Call them the Sabotage Republicans. They have been busily at work in Virginia these last few weeks, sabotaging the gubernatorial campaign of Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. [....] Every time some Establishment GOP nominee loses the White House or a hot gubernatorial, Senate or other race — conservatives have been silent about this unending ability of Establishment Republicans to lose either close elections or win them by unnecessarily close margins.. Yet if one conservative — that would be Ken Cuccinelli this week — loses a race, Katie bar the door. Worse, up until now not much has been made of the...

For the guy who finished third in the Virginia governor’s race, Robert Sarvis had a pretty good night on Tuesday. Sarvis was the Libertarian candidate in the election who pulled in just over 6.5% of the vote. This wasn’t just a landmark achievement for a third party candidate in Virginia but in the entire American South. --------------------------------------------------------------------snip------------------------------------------- Based on the exit polls, the average Sarvis voter was a younger, well-educated, pro-choice white who did not identify with either political party. In particular, Sarvis did well in suburban Richmond and in the Shenandoah Valley. Sarvis’s weakest areas were in coal country...

Chicago — Observers in this land infamous for political tricks say a popular method of winning elections is to ensure all of your opponents are thrown off the ballot — the tactic the Daley machine used to first elect an unopposed Barack Obama to the Illinois state senate. Another: Throw a ringer into the race to draw votes away from your real opponent. That latter tactic seems to have been employed by Democrats in this week’s close gubernatorial race in Virginia. And it may have made the difference. There were many reasons Republican Ken Cuccinelli lost, ranging from his poor...