Free Republic

A long and contentious campaign ended late Tuesday with a narrow victory by Terry McAuliffe. But as Wednesday dawned, many Virginians may still not know what to expect from the next governor, since negative ads during the campaign seemed to crowd out both candidates' platforms. McAuliffe likely has some challenges ahead. He's never held public office, and many Virginia lawmakers perceive him as an outsider. What's more, Republicans maintained their strong majority in Virginia's House of Delegates, which means McAuliffe will have to figure out how to cooperate with the GOP if he has any hope of success. We talked...

. Fellow Conservatives at Free Republic, It's a bittersweet moment that we face today. First, I offer a champagne toast to the patriot Ken Cuccinelli for his outstanding effort in Virginia. Second, I am quietly outraged by the numerous reports today that the Republican Party deliberately WITHHELD available funding for the Ken Cuccinelli campaign ... and instead gave it to the Chris Christie campaign, which didn't even need the money. E-mails and text messages have become the defacto form of communication in our moment of history. However, there is no substitute for a simple hand-addressed and written note. A hand-composed...

Every week, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich talks with contributor Eric Benson about the biggest stories in politics and culture. This week: Christie's 2016 prospects, Rand Paul's Jonah Lehrer problem, McAuliffe's underwhelming victory, and De Blasio's first challenges. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie won a landslide reelection yesterday, significantly outperforming the national Republican Party among black, Hispanic, and female voters. Christie has been viewed as too moderate to win a Republican presidential primary, but he's popular, pragmatic, and has lots of momentum. Is he the 2016 GOP front-runner? There is no front-runner for 2016. But the excessive valuation given...

<p>Both Reince Priebus and Mark Levin were on WMAL Tuesday…but not at the same time. RNC Chair Reince Priebus was asked to respond to comments Mark Levin has made that they’ve done next to nothing to support Cuccinelli in the VA. Gov. race. Priebus basically said that the RNC has spent 3 million on their ground game in VA which doesn’t just help Cuccinelli, but also other candidates on the Republican ticket.</p>

This is a map that I pulled from the Virginia State Board of Election site showing the unofficial results of the governor's race county by county, and city by city. Red = Cuccinelli, Blue = McAuliffe. The annotations and commentary are my own analysis of how McAuliffe managed to win this contest.

Ken Cuccinelli lost the governor's race in Virginia, but here's the thing — he didn't lose by that much. Only 3 points. Because the race came so close, far right Republicans blame the GOP establishment for not doing more to give Cuccinelli a boost. The Republican National Committee put $9 million into Gov. Bob McDonnell's campaign in 2009. This year, Cuccinelli got $3 million. Cuccinelli "was betrayed by his own party," Rush Limbaugh told listeners on Wednesday afternoon, but the betrayal was not a surprise. Limbaugh said: "In Virginia the GOP simply didn't want a Tea Party candidate winning there....

If we learned one thing from Election Day 2013, it's that we learned nothing at all. The most-watched races of the day left in their wake a myriad of mixed messages and differing priorities that demonstrate no clear trend and no unified direction driving America forward.

One of the Democratic Party’s most accomplished operatives and ally of Hillary Clinton beat conservative Ken Cuccinelli in Virginia, ushering in two new post-election certainties. First, we will hear from Democrats how this means the repudiation of the anti-Obamacare efforts by Republicans and the endorsement of the President’s “stay the course” message. Second, the victory of Democrat Terry McAuliffe means that Republicans had better nominate candidates far more moderate in the 2014 election season, now begun. To be more specific. We conservatives – and this writer is certainly one – made two major mistakes and we had better learn our...

I join a massive number of republican-voting citizens who have had it with the likes of you all, from Reince Priebus on down. You say you represent the party of small government and pro-family values. You act anything but. We are sick and tired of the party’s move to the left and to your empty promises of support for the party’s planks. We have tried to stay on, especially since the election of more democrats is killing our country, its culture, morality, and its economy. The democrat party is the anti-America Marxist party and you all seem to like their...

Breitbart News has confirmed that much of the credit for Terry McAuliffe’s narrow 47.9 percent to 45.5 percent victory over Republican Ken Cuccinelli in Tuesday’s election is attributable to a $4 million donation the McAuliffe campaign gave to the Democratic Party of Virginia, which used those funds to run a highly effective ground game for the party’s full slate of candidates. Ashley Bauman, press secretary for the Democratic Party of Virginia, told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview on Wednesday that "[w]hile we used that money [the $4 million donated to the Democratic Party of Virginia from the McAuliffe campaign]...

Democrat Terry McAuliffe won the Virginia governor’s race on Tuesday, in a surprisingly close victory over Republican rival Ken Cuccinelli -- who was heavily outspent and trailed in the polls for much of the race. With nearly all precincts reporting, McAuliffe was ahead with just 48 percent of the vote, to Cuccinelli’s 45 percent. Though McAuliffe previously held a double-digit lead, exit polls showed voters opposed to the federal health care law overwhelmingly backed Cuccinelli, helping him narrow the gap on Tuesday.

November 6, 2013 RNC: Hey, don’t blame us for Cuccinelli’s loss ALLAHPUNDIT ... Fun fact: The RNC spent $9 million to help Bob McDonnell win the governor’s seat four years ago. This year, in a much tougher election, they spent $3 million on Ken Cuccinelli, with Cooch so strapped for cash at the end that he had to abandon the D.C. media market the last two weeks. Not all of his money problems were the RNC’s fault — McAuliffe dominated Cuccinelli in fundraising (as expected) and centrist outside groups like the Chamber of Commerce ignored him — but the big...

Ken Cuccinelli is a friend and I am sorry he lost. In 2009, the Republican National Committee spent $9 million to win Virginia by a big margin. For the past 48 hours, the party bosses have been screaming to everyone about how much money they poured in this time in Virginia. We’ve had a few diarists at RedState document it and suck it up as gospel truth that the RNC did all it could this time. The RNC spent $9 million in 2009 to win and spent $3 million this time, pulling money out of Virginia, to lose by a...

Tuesday night and again Wednesday morning, NBC's Chuck Todd reported that New Jersey Republican Governor Chris Christie refused to campaign for Ken Cuccinelli, the Virginia Republican who narrowly lost his own governor's race to Democrat Terry McAuliffe. "They begged Christie, and you can make an argument," Todd said on Morning Joe. "That to bring a Chris Christie to Northern Virginia might have helped. But Chris Christie is worried about his own brand."

Boyd Marcus, the chief of staff for Cantor until 2003—who later teamed with another GOP operative Ray Allen to found the firm Marcus Allen, which Cantor employed until earlier this year—joined the McAuliffe campaign after Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling, with whom Marcus campaigned, did not win the GOP nominee in Virginia. “I was looking at the candidates, and I saw Terry McAuliffe as the guy who will work with everybody to get things done,” Marcus told the Associated Press in August when he joined McAuliffe’s campaign. Cantor employed Marcus Allen until the day before Marcus left the firm to work

They said he was “unelectable.” The RNC put only $3 million into this race. Ken was outspent by a margin of something between 4:1 and 10:1, if you believe the Associated Press. The Democrats poured everything into trying to lie to voters and portray Cuccinelli as an extremist — and they barely pulled this one out. Would another $3 million have swung 50,000 votes? The Republicans, starting with Bill Bolling, who undercut Cuccinelli as unelectable have egg all over their faces. This was a winnable election. How did we give this away to Terry McAuliffe? Some serious soul-searching should be...

1. The Obamacare rollout fiasco and Obama's lies hurt Democrats. You only have to look at Democrat Terry McAuliffe's narrow 48 percent to 46 percent margin in Virginia to see that. McAuliffe outspent Republican Ken Cuccinelli by a wide margin (as much as 10-to-1, some bloggers suggested) and was leading 46 percent to 37 percent in the last days of October in the Real Clear Politics average of recent polls on Oct. 31. In Virginia, the state that voted closest to the national average in the last two presidential elections, McAuliffe ended up with 48 percent, 3 percentage points behind...

McLEAN, Va. -- Democrat Terry McAuliffe beat Republican Ken Cuccinelli in Virginia's governor race, outraising Cuccinelli nearly two-to-one and dominating in the richest part of the state. What’s going on here? First, upper-middle class, white suburbs have marched steadily toward the Democrats for several decades. Montgomery County, Md., and Arlington, Va., switched sides. So did the wealthy New York suburbs in Westchester County, N.Y., and Fairfield County, Conn. Philadelphia’s “collar counties," once Republican bastions, are now Democratic bellwethers. Why are the white-collar suburbs moving to the Dems? “I think it’s the social issues,” Bill DuBose tells me at Greenberry's coffee...

How the heck did that happen? Most public polls leading up to Election Day had Democrat Terry McAuliffe coasting to victory, some by double digits, in the Virginia governor’s race. Instead he squeaked by, beating Republican Ken Cuccinelli by less than 3 percentage points. -snip- McAuliffe outraised Cuccinelli by almost $15 million, and he used the cash advantage to pummel him on the airwaves. A lack of resources forced the Republican to go dark in the D.C. media market during the final two weeks. The Republican National Committee spent about $3 million on Virginia this year, compared to $9 million...

Mark Warner is up for reelection in 2014. He won basically because his name was Warner and he was replacing a man named Warner who'd been senator for over thirty years. Warner voted for Obamacare. Let's begin to get behind a draft Cuccinelli for Senate campaign!! We can win the seat in Virginia with a solid conservative like Cuccinelli!