Free Republic

The Republican Party’s loss of the Virginia Governor’s race has sparked extensive analysis searching for “lessons learned” while heading into the crucial upcoming 2014 Congressional elections. Conventional wisdom argues that the government shutdown drama hurt Ken Cuccinelli and his running mates, although later the flawed ObamaCare roll-out helped Virginia Republicans regain some lost ground. Facts Do Not Support Shutdown Hurt Cuccinelli But the facts don’t support the theory that the government shutdown and debt ceiling battle hurt Ken Cuccinelli. Virginians who voted in the November 6 elections about equally blamed both President Barack Obama and Republicans in Congress, according to...

<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>

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...

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...

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...

Yesterday, Derek Hunter declared that libertarianism has entirely lost its meaning, that the party has devolved into a catch-all for people who want to criticize the government without doing anything about it. He also assumed that any Republican candidate would be better than a Democrat for classical liberals. Hunter could not be more wrong. The Libertarian Party is still the face of “individual responsibility, small government, and free markets,” but how the LP arranges those priorities is changing. The Party needs to represent its constituency, appeal to young voters who largely have experience with Ron Paul, and has to emphasize...

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.

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....

There was a time I called myself a Libertarian. And there was a time I was a Libertarian. I just wanted to get government to leave me alone, to leave people alone and to go all crazy and limit itself to doing only that which is spelled out clearly in the Constitution. That was what a Libertarian was. But it’s not anymore. The word no longer has any meaning, no definition or parameters, certainly no coherent philosophy to speak of. And there’s no one to blame for that except Libertarians themselves. So what happened? By not even loosely defining...

The Republican establishment continues to undercut the campaigns of conservative candidates.  Ken Cuccinelli was just the latest.   In early 2013, a Texas-based Tea Party website posted a series of articles that documented how the G.O.P. establishment, at the county, state and national levels, had worked against six candidates supported by Tea Party organizations -- five running for House seats, and one G.O.P. nominee for a U.S. Senate seat. A seventh case detailed how the Chair of the Illinois State Republican Central Committee was chosen. It illustrates the "Illinois Combine" - the bipartisan collaborative formula going national these days.   The...

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...

Victory has a thousand fathers, as the saying goes, while defeat is always an orphan. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is making sure everyone knows he has a claim for paternity when it comes to the narrow victory won by Democrat Terry McAuliffe in Virginia’s gubernatorial race.Bloomberg hit the cable-news airwaves  the day after the Virginia election to argue McAuliffe’s narrow victory was proof the state’s voters were swayed by the $1.2 million he spent on TV advertisements  pushing gun control measures during the last days of the race.There’s just one problem. In the two weeks after Bloomberg got...

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...

Both Democratic and Republican strategists are dissecting Tuesday's election results for clues to what might happen in next year's congressional elections. State races in off years are not always good predictors of how a party will do nationally during congressional or presidential elections, but there are some important lessons to be learned. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's reelection win was predictable. He is a popular reformer who reached out to minorities and women running in a state that has had its fill of Democratic corruption and tax hikes. He's a conservative -- a pro-life Catholic who personally opposes gay marriage...

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...

The Virginia governor’s race was yet another example of the massive voting gap in a huge demographic: single people, particularly single women. According to exit polls, Republican Ken Cuccinelli won handily on the “hard” issues facing Virginia voters, and won most other demographic slices, but Democrat Terry McAuliffe won big with single people, crushing Cuccinelli by nearly fifty points among single women. A similar dynamic could be observed in the 2012 presidential race, where the Obama campaign made a very concerted effort to win over single women – so concerted that it sometimes appeared ludicrously clumsy to critics. Rush Limbaugh...

With Terry McAuliffe’s gubernatorial victory over Ken Cuccinelli, Democrats have now won seven of Virginia’s eight high-profile, statewide races since 2005 (three Senate races, two Presidential contests, and two of three gubernatorial elections). The lone exception, Bob McDonnell’s gubernatorial victory in 2009, provides an instructive contrast with the current contest. In 2009, Virginia voters were 78 percent white and 22 percent minority. In 2013, they were just 72 percent white and 28 percent minority—not far off the 70/30 split in the 2012 presidential election. There you have the key to McAuliffe’s victory: Despite performing much better among white voters than...

Republican Mark Obenshain held a 219 vote lead in the race to be Virginia's next Attorney General, with results in from all the state's 2,558 precincts.The count is even narrower than Bob McDonnell's 327-vote lead over Creigh Deeds in the 2005 race to be attorney general, but it's as certain to end in a recount.Meanwhile, of the four House of Delegates seats where less than 1 percentage point separated the candidates with a handful of precincts still outstanding last night, the GOP has held onto three. One race, where John Bell is challenging Del. David Ramadan, R-Loudoun is still neck...

“Bobby Jindal and his political team totally blew it,” harrumphed one advisor for Ken Cuccinelli the morning after a closer-than-expected loss. Cuccinelli, who narrowly lost last night’s gubernatorial election to Terry McAuliffe, was badly outspent in the days and weeks leading up to the election. The New York Times‘ Jonathan Martin described Cuccinelli’s plight as having been “close to abandoned at the end.” He was. As Politico’s James Hohmann reported, ”The Republican National Committee spent about $3 million on Virginia this year, compared to $9 million in the 2009.” And as the Roanoke Times noted, in 2009, the Chamber of...

Anti-gunners across the nation are reveling in the victory of Terry McAuliffe in the hotly-contested Virginia Governor’s race with claims that McAuliffe’s “F” rating by the National Rifle Association indicates the American people are rejecting the so-called gun agenda. But in reality, the McAuliffe victory proves once again the powerful roll that money plays in political elections in our fair nation. McAuliffe was expected to easily win the election, but ended up barely squeaking out a victory on election night despite dramatically outspending his opponent. In the days leading up to the Virginia election, McAuliffe outspent Republican challenger Ken Cuccinelli...