The ongoing battle to flip the Virginia House of Delegates on Tuesday is a good preview of can be expected this time next year. Currently, Virginia’s Republican Party is in full meltdown mode over the likely Democratic takeover coming on Nov. 5. All 100 seats are up for grabs, and Democrats are just only delegate shy of breaking the GOP narrow majority (51-48), as well as an even narrower majority in the state Senate (20-19).
Virginia, as a state, has grown increasingly blue in recent years, and the state’s horribly gerrymandered map was thrown out in favor of a fairer one. Furthermore, most polls indicate that Trump is underwater in Virginia. The GOP’s strategy over the summer was to play it safe from the center, focusing their attention to local politics. Some politicians even carefully crafted campaigns that made them seem like Democrats. However, that strategy clearly has not worked, so candidates and their consultants are clearly spooked.
Now, instead of continuing to distance themselves from Donald Trump, Virginia Republicans have decided to pull a 180. In these final days before the election, they’re embracing the president’s playbook of viciously attacking their opponents—along with outright lying, as the Washington Post reports.
In crucial swing districts, from Northern Virginia to Richmond to Hampton Roads, Republican candidates are trying to turn out GOP voters while hoping they can hang on to the centrist images they cultivated all summer. To pull it off, they’re casting Democrats as extremists — invoking hot-button issues such as abortion and immigration that Republicans had largely avoided as they attempted to soften their connection to an unpopular President Trump.
The Post greatly toned down the reality: The schemes and attacks have been gross, and reeking of despair. In the 21st district (Virginia Beach), the Republican challenger to Democratic Delegate Kelly K. Convirs-Fowler is Shannon Kane. Kane’s Facebook profile still harkens back to earlier this summer, when she focused on local priorities and even sucked up to Democrats by saying she would work to help public school teachers. She even pretended to care about gun safety.
That approach didn’t work for Kane, so she channeled her inner Trump, and sent an extremely racist mailer that inserted an image of a smiling Convirs-Fowler into a picture with MS-13 gang members.
Kane stands by the mailer … because in GOP-land, you see, all Latin American and Mexican immigrants are violent gang members.
We’re just getting warmed up, but keep in mind that Virginia candidates can accept money up to the last minute—so if you are appalled by any of this, you know what to do.
Del. Tim Hugo, the Republican incumbent in HD-40 (Fairfax), has also learned a thing or two from Donald Trump. As the last GOP representative in the Washington, D.C. suburbs, he’s currently getting the challenge of his life from Democrat Dan Helmer.
Helmer, not Hugo, got the coveted endorsement from the district’s first responders and firefighters. The firefighters were clear about that, but that didn’t stop Tim Hugo from claiming otherwise. The Trumpian approach continued when Hugo’s Endorsements page vanished from his website, triggering this taunt from Virginia Democrats..
Hugo also mimicked Trump’s embrace of anti-Semitic tropes: A mailer he sent out was highly offensive, and was widely condemned, though only from the Democratic side of the aisle. Del. Alfonso Lopez accused Hugo of “copying the ugly and divisive Trump playbook,” while Del. Marcus Simon reminded Hugo that his opponent’s grandparents were murdered by Nazis during the Holocaust.
In HD-72 (Richmond), Republican Gaydonna Vandergriff is challenging incumbent Democratic Del. Schuyler VanValkenburg. Up until recently, Vandergriff’s campaign hid the fact that she was a Republican, and presented her as someone who could bring people together. That lasted until last month, when she flipped a switch and went full-on Trump. She came out as a climate change denier, and went after the media outlets that feature “dramatic” climate scientists as “fake news.” Vandergriff also accused her opponent of being a socialist who wants to kill babies at birth and prefers illegal immigrants over his constituents.
She sounds pleasant.
Bill Drennan is a Trump-loving Republican running against Democrat Suhas Subramanyam, in HD-87 (Loudoun). The incumbent, Democrat John Bell, is not seeking re-election. Drennan believes that equal rights for women is a dead issue, and referred to climate change as ”a religion … not based on science.” When asked if there was any kind of gun legislation he would support to end gun massacres, he equated shootings to women getting abortions.
That wasn’t even the craziest thing he came up with. To further emphasize his point comparing mass shooters to those who terminate pregnancy, he brought up placing ankle-bracelets on pregnant women as a mind-boggling false equivalency.
Brilliant.
Again all 100 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates are up for grabs this year, so there are too many to profile here. Let’s just hit a few that might be overlooked.
- District 76, Clint Jenkins: This should be a blue win, but Republican Chris Jones is the incumbent with a lot of power and money. People here vote for Jones, but shouldn’t. This is a winnable race.
- District 97, Dr. Kevin Washington: The district race this year has a lot of drama, involving shadow conventions, backstabbing, a bitter write-in campaign, and more. Read the whole thing here. Although this is a GOP-leaning district, there is a huge fight between Republican candidate Scott Wyatt and write-in candidate Chris Peace.
- District 30, Ann Ridgeway: The Republican incumbent was so incompetent that he didn’t file the paperwork in time, so Ridgeway is the only name on the ballot. So … yeah. We can totally win this one!
- District 66, Sheila Bynum-Coleman: How close is this race? Republican Del. Kirk Cox is House Speaker, and he’s never sweated before. This is the first debate he’s agreed to do in decades. Seriously—Cox hasn’t agreed to a debate against a Democratic opponent since his first campaign in 1989 (Virginia’s House of Delegates has no term limits). Even Democrat-leaning people in this district tend to vote for Kirk ...but they need to stop.
Click here for my analysis of Virginia’s state Senate races. The Republican candidates in those races are even worse than those vying for the House.
All of this is to say that Virginia deserves much better. In addition to repairing the Republican damage, how cool would it be if Virginia becomes the final state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment? 2020 could be the year, and the fact that it would occur under the Misogynist-in-Chief’s watch would make it that much more delicious.