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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....

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.

The pro-life movement has an opportunity to re-capture the Senate from abortion activists next year, but pro-life Republican candidates who are looking to win Senate seat in the mid-term elections need to be prepared for continued phony attacks accusing them of engaging in a so-called War on Women.During the Virginia gubernatorial election, the Planned Parenthood abortion business threw $1 million in false attacks on pro-life candidate Ken Cuccinelli at Virginia voters. They flooded their mailboxes with propaganda aimed at making Cuccinelli’s mainstream pro-life views look out of touch by falsely characterizing him as opposing birth control and contraception. Terry McAuliffe’s...

Politics is in the eye of the beholder. Post-mortems now gushing forth about why Ken Cuccinelli, conservative Republican candidate for governor in Virginia, lost to Democrat Terry McAuliffe, a business-as-usual political retread from the Clinton crowd, tell us more about who produces this punditry than what reality actually might be. We’re hearing that the Tea Party killed Cuccinelli (according to the Wall Street Journal editorial page they “stabbed him in the back”) with the government shutdown and that, once again, a socially conservative Republican candidate has shown he can’t win the votes of women. What I see is very...

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...

Hardly a commercial break went by in October when Virginia voters weren’t reminded of Ken Cuccinelli’s far-right views on abortion and other social issues. How much of a difference the deluge ultimately made after Cuccinelli’s surprisingly narrow loss against Democrat Terry McAuliffe is open for debate. What isn’t in dispute is that Democrats and women’s groups believe their “war on women” playbook worked. And they have every intention of using it again in 2014,

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...

So it turns out Terry McAuliffe and Ken Cuccinelli were able to draw away enough votes to keep Robert Sarvis from winning Virginia’s governor’s race. I hope the folks who put those guys on the ballot are happy. Last night, my Twitter feed had quite a few conservatives laying the blame on Sarvis for costing Cuccinelli the election (which really isn’t true according to polls, and it probably wouldn’t even had been a close outcome but for the Obamacare mess). So in the spirit of reconciliation, here are some tips from a typical third-party voter to major party movers and...

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...

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...

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...

Ron Paul speaks at Ken Cuccinelli Rally 11/04/13http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTqE0aIPI4c Former Rep. Ron Paul speaks at Ken Cuccinelli's election-eve campaign rally in Richmond, Virginia.

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...

So sayeth the DC Caller: Conservative writer Quin Hillyer is the first person to openly make a full-throated case for Cuccinelli to throw his hat into the ring to take on incumbent Sen. Mark Warner, a popular Democrat in the Commonwealth. “The best news from Ken Cuccinelli’s hugely disappointing loss in Virginia’s gubernatorial contest yesterday is that Cuccinelli is now free to run for U.S. Senate against Mark Warner,” Hillyer wrote. “Not that Cuccinelli will want to hear this now,” Hillyer elaborated. “He has a large family, and his day job as state attorney general will end in the new...

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...

Exit polling just published shows that 30 percent of Virginians who voted for Democrat Terry McAuliffe classify themselves as pro-life. The fact anyone has to make the following point speaks volumes of the level of ignorance and delusion of these individuals: If you vote Democrat, you are undeniably pro-death. Abortion is the unholy centerpiece and altar of the Democratic Party, and their mountain of aborted fetuses is the only hill this party has been unwaveringly willing to die on. These "pro-life" Democrat voters are like atheists who profess a belief in Christ - obviously too stupid to even know what...

“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...

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...

Reagan conservative Ken Cuccinelli lost his bid for the Virginia governorship because the patrician, turf-protecting Republican Party establishment in his state wanted him to lose. It's really that simple.  Cuccinelli campaign strategist Chris La Civita suggested on election night Tuesday that the federal government's partial shutdown last month may have hurt his candidate in parts of Virginia where many federal employees and contractors live. He also suggested that Cuccinelli could have won if he had received more money from national GOP sources, which he said dried up as of Oct. 1. "There are a lot of questions people are going...

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...