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>

The recent elections underlined a growing tension in political money circles: Business people are increasingly fed up with the activist wing of the Republican Party. It's a trend that will have broad implications for next year's midterm elections and the presidential race in 2016, political experts say. [Snip] And there's more to come. Business interests appear to be rallying behind moderate Republicans Brian Ellis, David Trott and Mike Simpson against tea party-approved challengers Justin Amash, Kerry Bentivolio and Bryan Smith for House seats in 2014 (Ellis and Trott are running in Michigan and Simpson is in Idaho). [Snip] "If the...

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...

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.

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...

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....

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus on Sunday defended the party's strategy in the Virginia gubernatorial race against attacks from conservative groups that it didn't do enough to help GOP candidate Ken Cuccinelli. Tea Party groups said the GOP establishment kept its wallet closed to Cuccinelli, the conservative attorney general who lost to Democrat Terry McAuliffe on Tuesday. Democratic party organizations, those groups said, spent more heavily on McAuliffe than the GOP did on Cuccinelli. But Priebus said the RNC invested heavily in Cuccinelli's "ground game," commenting that he was "proud" of the effort. "The RNC outside the presidential election...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...