‘It’s hard to overstate just how much is riding on Virginia’s elections…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Although several states will head to the polls next week to pick their local legislators, few races will be as closely watched as Virginia’s.
“It’s hard to overstate just how much is riding on Virginia’s elections and how they could influence the ultimate fortunes of Trump and Republicans,” wrote far-left actor Alec Baldwin in an op-ed Wednesday for USA Today.
Sharing the spotlight with the ‘bellwether’ state—yet another gauge of suburban, purplish, swing-state sentiment in the lead-up to next year’s contentious presidential election—will be its controversial governor, Ralph Northam.
After a racist photo in his medical school yearbook threatened to derail not only his own political career, but possibly all of the Democrats’ hard-fought gains in the once solid-red state, Northam went underground, obstinately refusing to step aside.
Since then, he has tentatively re-entered the political sphere. With Democrats hoping to reclaim the state capitol in Richmond for the first time two decades, in a race flush with outside money and interest, the minstrel-in-chief is now sure-footedly hitting the campaign trail.
But in addition to bringing a renewed focus on his own racist baggage, Northam’s administration has also become a test-case for radical policies including abortion, gun-control and slavery reparations, posing something of an existential threat to the fearful Republicans who remain in many rural parts of the Old Dominion.
A recent investigation by open-government advocates Judicial Watch revealed that Northam—who controversially appeared to endorse infanticide in a political scandal that preceded his blackface episode—had been fed abortion talking points directly from Planned Parenthood.
Judicial Watch also submitted a records request under the Freedom of Information Act for all of the correspondence from the governor’s office that related to his racist yearbook photo.
A Political Rogue
The state—which many denizens of the Washington, DC, swamp call home—is important not only because of its proximity to the nation’s capital, but also its consistently rogue, predictably unpredictable politics.
For many years, the political party of the sitting president would prove to be the exact opposite of the one Virginia voters sent to the governor’s mansion in Richmond.
In 2013, Terry McAuliffe—a longtime Clinton bundler and stooge for the Democratic National Committee—bucked the trend by defeating then-Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli during the Obama presidency in an election that raised the bar on outside campaign spending in the commonwealth.
Although McAuliffe’s own ethical record was spotty at best from his days securing Chinese donors for the Clintons, outgoing Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell became the unlucky subject to a bribery scandal (from which he was later exonerated) that hurt his prospective Republican successor.
But since that election, Virginia’s political landscape has continued to change, growing even bluer in the urban centers of Northern Virginia, Norfolk, Richmond and Charlottesville.
McAuliffe helped the process along by restoring voting rights to tens of thousands of felons, even though the state courts had ruled against him on the matter.
During the 2016 Democratic National Convention, the then-governor also helped mastermind the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, which launched a successful “sue till blue” redistricting campaign.
Led by former Attorney General Eric Holder, the NDRC succeeded in flipping several red congressional districts in Virginia during the 2018 election, as well as targeting roughly a dozen other states.
And in the last statewide election, in 2015, the once-solid red General Assembly narrowly maintained its majority after an even-split district resulted in the invocation of an obscure law, deciding the election by a name being drawn from a bowl.
That—and lots of outside political spending from left-wing megadonors—gave state Democrats the confidence they needed that they might finally reclaim the state capitol in 2019 for the first time since 1999.
However, the massive scandal early this year enveloping the top-three Democratic officials seemed poised to derail those hopes.
An Inconvenient Racist
In contrast to the carpetbagger McAuliffe, Northam ran as a folksy, homespun native with a bent toward the classical liberalism that long defined state politics in the 20th century.
But it seems the only common link between Northam and the Virginia Democrats of yore was their shared penchant for racism.
Northam’s yearbook photo—depicting a man in blackface and another in KKK regalia—ran in the 1980s when he was already well into his 30s.
It seemed clear that he would be destined for the dustbin of the state’s illustrious history, but a series of rape allegations against Lieutenant Gov. Justin Fairfax and a blackface admission by state Attorney General Mark Herring led left-wingers to rethink their priorities.
Many party-members and media allies immediately set about to downplay and diminish the embarrassing crisis.
That continues to this day, reported the Associated Press, which said Northam has found his voice again and reburied his sense of shame.
“I’m so grateful that Northam didn’t resign,” said Pat Gadzinski, who hosted a political event for Northam on Saturday’s at her Virginia Beach home. “I feel those were stupid mistakes he made as a kid. I think he’s done great things.”
The Associated Press said even the state’s Democratic black voters were putting party politics over principle when it came to forgiving the racist executive.
Asked about the damning yearbook photo and whether there were any lingering concerns about the governor, Virginia Beach resident Mark Wade told the AP, “Everybody’s got issues, everybody’s got devils or demons,” he said. “Especially Trump.”
Others, like Richmond Democratic candidate Larry Barnett said the scandal, which peaked in February, was “old news,” reported the AP.
“It’s good that he didn’t, that he weathered that difficult, humiliating storm,” Barnett said. “He’s actually a very effective governor and is doing a lot to use his own painful experience to bring about good things for Virginians.”
A Pawn of the Party
Media like the Associated Press, now rallying around Northam and sweeping his racist past under the rug, claim that even though his political career may end in two more years, helping Democrats to retake the state’s General Assembly will bring his legacy full-circle, back into resolutely positive territory.
Once again, it seems, the national party has stepped in, as it did with McAuliffe, to emphasize a bigger prize at stake than what happens in the commonwealth.
The AP reported that volunteers from as far afield as San Francisco had come to support Northam’s last-gasp canvassing efforts.
Democratic hedge-fund manager and current presidential candidate Tom Steyer pledged to put millions into the state races.
George Soros is also known to have invested in some of the local elections, where he sought to pit primary challengers against more centrist candidates in places like Fairfax County.
But the down-home country doctor, it seems, has been a political pawn far longer than many realized.
Judicial Watch revealed in its recent tranche of emails that Alexsis Rodgers, a policy director within the lieutenant governor’s office, used a Planned Parenthood email address while offering Northam and others political talking points to help weather a separate scandal on his controversial abortion remarks.
Northam, a former pediatrician, had said, after Democrat legislators proposed a partial-birth abortion bill, that it was possible a botched abortion might lead to a live birth, which the doctors, in consultation with the parents, would proceed to terminate.
Pro-life advocates were incensed by his cavalier attitude toward infanticide.
Rodgers offered Northam the following lines:
- “There is no such thing as an abortion up until birth.”
- “Making a decision about whether to continue a pregnancy is a complex and personal decision. Politicians have no place in this process.”
- “As a physician, I know how important it is to trust my patients and for my patients to trust me.”
- “These are complicated medical decisions that families deserve to make in private without political interference.”
Northam has since veered to the left on other issues, like gun control, seeking a special legislative session at which he proposed sweeping bans. Ultimately, he was thwarted by the narrow GOP majority.
Likewise, Northam’s racist scandal has compromised him considerably with black radicals in the state, some of whom offered their conditional support to him during his fall from grace only if he agreed to a laundry list of activist agenda items.
Northam also has continued to follow in McAuliffe’s footsteps by offering voting rights to more and more felons.
A controversy emerged during the 2018 midterm races when a convicted pedophile, newly pardoned by the governor, also became eligible to seek elected office, attempting to run in a tightly contested congressional district.
But for the Left Coast liberals flooding into the state, such things are mere collateral damage in the bid to undermine President Donald Trump’s re-election efforts.
“[W]ith impeachment under way, the stakes are phenomenally higher,” Baldwin wrote in his op-ed.
“There’s just no way a big win for Democrats in Virginia won’t be read as a referendum on impeachment, and no way the opposite outcome won’t be read the opposite way,” he said. “These things have a way of shaping the long-term electoral narrative.”
As an afterthought, the “30 Rock” and “Saturday Night Live star seemed to promise better returns for those who fell in line:
“And it might do more than that. It could make a substantive difference in the 2020 political landscape, not to mention in the lives of Virginians.”