Free Republic

THE VIRGINIA ELECTIONS will send analysts and candidates scurrying to fine tune their messages and expectations for 2018. Let’s look at 15 of them: • Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe was able to hand over the governorship to a fellow Democrat, Gov.-elect Ralph Northam. McAuliffe’s approval rating in exit polls was 14 points higher than President Donald Trump’s. McAuliffe surely will be considering a 2020 presidential run. As a major fundraiser, he will suck up a lot of support and money from other potential moderate candidates. But it’s far from clear that Democrats would want as their presidential nominee the politician...

Well....today is the day...Election Day in Virginia. Virginia voters "all", the future of our nation is in your votes today. If you turnout in massive numbers and cast your votes for Republican Ed Gillespie to become the next Governor of Virginia, you will accomplish three great positive things immediately, for your state and for your country This election is a "critical path one" because it can set the tone and direction of all politics in the USA for the next ten to twenty years. If your elect Ed Gillespie as your Governor, he brings, beside his election, two things with...

Has the ground shifted in the biggest election of this off-year with less than two weeks to go? Until this month, Republican candidate Ed Gillespie consistently trailed in polls for the Virginia gubernatorial election to Democrat Ralph Northam. Gillespie scored a one-point edge in a mid-month Monmouth poll, but now shows a commanding eight-point lead in a Hampton University survey:

WINCHESTER, VA. — The melodic sounds of a street musician’s trumpet echo through every corner of this old Virginia town as locals shop or make their way to lunch. Daren Johnson has been blowing his horn at the pedestrian mall in the shadow of the Shenandoah Valley Civil War Museum for over an hour. He performs for two reasons: “To make some extra cash and to share a little bit of lightness. We are exhausted as a country,” he said, “a direct result of last year’s election.” Johnson and his wife were tireless volunteers for Hillary Clinton last year. They...

On paper, Democrat Ralph Northam holds a small but fairly consistent lead in the polling of Virginia’s gubernatorial race. The most recent survey, from Emerson College, puts Northam ahead of Republican Ed Gillespie, 49 percent to 44 percent (with a margin of error of 5.5 points). But Democrats don’t feel confident at all. Last week Paul Krugman wrote about the race in a tone of panic: For whatever reason, however, Virginia isn’t getting nearly as much play in national media or, as far as I can tell, among progressive activists, as it deserves. Folks, right now this is where the...

Former presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton is hitting the campaign trail again — this time to raise funds for Virginia Lieutenant Governor Ralph Northam. Northam, who is running for Governor of Virginia, faces a tight race against Republican candidate Ed Gillespie. Clinton took a break from her book tour to support the Democrat with a fundraiser next Wednesday. Given Clinton’s election loss, coupled with a recent poll from Rasmussen Reports that shows 61 percent of American voters believe the former secretary of state should retire from politics, it is perhaps something of a surprise to see Clinton once again pick up...

Oh, here we go with the minimum wage stuff again. And more proof that the $15/hour initiative really isn’t the end of the road. Frankly, Republicans should ask in response to these Democratic minimum wage proposals why can’t it be $40/hour or $100/hour? We all know that the $15/hour goal is a ruse and for Montigue Magruder, who is running for Virginia House of Delegates, he wants a $26.80 minimum wage (via Brandon Morse):(VIDEO-AT-LINK) He also wants to jack up the minimum wage to $26.80, a height that even Bernie Sanders hadn’t the stones to suggest to his followers. Magruder...

Note: This article contains coarse language and graphic content. President Donald Trump triggered an avalanche of criticism for his handling of the deadly violence by far-right white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, earlier in August. Demonstrator Heather Heyer was killed when a car plowed through a march in protest of the “Unite the Right” nationalist gathering in Charlottesville. The vehicle was allegedly driven by James Alex Fields Jr., who is now being charged with second-degree murder and is the subject of an FBI civil rights investigation. Trump received political blowback for not calling out white supremacy by name immediately after the...

ATLANTA (AP) — President Donald Trump’s widely criticized response to white supremacist violence in Virginia has left Democrats in a quandary: how to seize the moral high ground without getting sucked into a politically perilous culture war. Democrats have denounced Trump for blaming “both sides” for deadly protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, and, more recently, for defending Confederate monuments. But the party faces a complex task: While addressing race and history in ways that reflect the party’s values, Democrats also need to focus on issues like jobs and the economy that resonate with a wider range of voters, including white independents,...

Your daily reminder via Survey Monkey and Axios that virtually all issues are partisan now. Since our national future of Antifa reds slugging it out with alt-right brownshirts in running street battles looks increasingly assured, we might as well start tracking reaction polls like this: Watching media coverage, you’d think Trump is nearly alone in believing “both sides” share fault for the Charlottesville violence. Turns out, most Republicans have his back… Far more blame “the far right groups” for Charlottesville (46%) than “the counter-protesters” (9%), but a remarkable 40% concur with Trump’s assertion that both were equally responsible. “Beneath the...

A prominent Republican senator delivered a stinging rebuke Thursday of Donald Trump’s short time in office, declaring he has not shown the stability or competence required for an American president to succeed. Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, also said Trump “recently has not demonstrated that he understands the character of this nation.” During comments to local reporters after a speech to the Chattanooga Rotary Club, Corker called for “radical changes” in how the Trump White House operates. His remarks, which were posted on Facebook, came two days after Trump declared at a New York...

Fort Worth Rep. Kay Granger on Wednesday lined up with President Donald Trump, condeming violence coming from “both sides” and raising concerns about a rush to remove Confederate monuments. Speaking with North Texas conservative radio host Mark Davis on Wednesday morning, Granger was asked whether in the wake of clashes between white nationalists and counter-protesters last weekend in Charlottesville, violence perpetrated by left-of-center activists was being ignored. “[W]e need to recognize it and talk about it because it’s on both sides,” said Granger, who said people on both the left and right are guilty of escalating their political activism to...

A group of congressional Democrats wants Congress to officially censure President Trump in the wake of the clashes in Charlottesville sparked by a neo-Nazi and white nationalist rally. Led by Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York, a senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, the censure resolution says Mr. Trump did a disservice to the country when he blamed “many sides” for the violence that erupted. The lawmakers, though, go beyond Charlottesville, saying the president “has surrounded himself with, and cultivated the influence of, senior advisors and spokespeople who have long histories of promoting white nationalist, alt-Right, racist and anti-Semitic...

Councilman Mark Whitaker says he wants city leaders to consider banning racist groups from protesting in Portsmouth. Whitaker sent an email Tuesday to City Council members, City Manager Lydia Pettis Patton and City Attorney Solomon Ashby requesting that the group discuss the issue at the Aug. 21 public work session. The councilman said he made the request in light of “the tragic events in Charlottesville and other issues across the country involving White-Supremacist, White-Nationalist, Neo-Nazi, and other hate groups with a history and pattern of perpetrating violence on citizens.” On Saturday, a white-supremacist gathering in Charlottesville turned deadly when a...

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The Green Party of the United States is calling for vigorous prosecution of white supremacist groups responsible for the violence, injuries, and deaths that occurred in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday, August 12. Greens said that the violence inflicted on anti-racist counter-protesters, including a car driven into a crowd that killed one person and injured more than two dozen others, was a deliberate act of domestic terrorism. The Green Party strongly condemns the white supremacists and their rally and violent actions and expressed solidarity with all those who participated in the counter-demonstrations. White supremacist and neo-Nazi organizations thrive...

One of the things we've learned over the past year is that events like the violence in Charlottesville, Va., are often viewed very differently in different places. Places like rural white communities that make up President Trump's most loyal base. One such place is Mineville, N.Y., a tiny Rust Belt town in the Adirondack Mountains north of Albany, where on Sunday afternoon we found Christopher LaMothe sitting on a bench. In these small towns, events like what happened in Charlottesville are also portrayed differently in the conservative media. When Trump first responded to the deadly violence in Charlottesville, he blamed...

Former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci had harsh words for President Donald Trump's reaction to the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, this weekend. Scaramucci spoke to ABC News Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos on ABC News' "This Week" today in his first television interview since his whirlwind 11-day stint in the White House. "I wouldn't have recommended that statement," Scaramucci said of Trump's words on Saturday from Bedminster, New Jersey. "I think he would have needed to have been much harsher." "With the moral authority of the presidency, you have to call that stuff out," Scaramucci said, referring to Trump's seeming...

‘I mean, this is not hard’ The Democratic mayor of Charlottesville, Va., Michael Signer, is pinning blame directly on President Trump for the white nationalist protest and related violence that occurred in his city this weekend. The blame for these events, he said, falls "right at the doorstep of the White House and the people around the president." On Sunday he appeared on CNN's State of the Union and accused Trump of intentionally courting white nationalists. Here's a transcript: TAPPER: You said you place blame for these terrifying events -- quote -- "right at the doorstep of the White House...

A new poll shows Republican Ed Gillespie and Democrat Ralph S. Northam tied in the November race for governor, a significant improvement for Gillespie over a poll last month showing him trailing Northam by 8 points. They each have support from 44 percent of Virginia voters, with Libertarian Cliff Hyra at 3 percent and another 9 percent undecided, according to a Monmouth University poll released Monday. A Quinnipiac University poll in June had Northam up by 8. Monmouth University's Polling Institute also found that low approval ratings for President Donald Trump may be hurting Gillespie, because if Trump were not...

Having lost a series of tantalizingly close congressional elections, the Democratic Party has now placed the fate of its collective psyche in the hands of an unassuming, soft-spoken pediatric neurologist. Virginia Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam says he feels no enhanced pressure to win his gubernatorial race this fall, even though his will be most high-profile contest since Democrats lost the much-watched special election in Georgia’s 6th District. “You always feel pressure,” he told HuffPost in an interview. “If you’re not feeling pressure then you’re not out there to win. And we plan to win in November.” But while Northam may...