VA-07: Roll Call reports that the radical anti-tax Club for Growth is trying to persuade GOP Del. Nick Freitas to challenge freshman Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger, with the Club’s vice president of campaigns predicting that if Freitas gets in “we will invest more money there than any House race in the history of the club.” This suburban Richmond seat went from 55-44 Romney to a smaller 51-44 Trump, and last year, Spanberger ousted GOP Rep. Dave Brat 50-48.
Freitas, who served with the Green Berets in Iraq, ran against Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine last year. Few Republicans had much optimism that Freitas could actually defeat Kaine, but some hoped that he’d win the primary in order to prevent Prince Williams County Supervisor Corey Stewart from taking the nod and dragging down the party in more winnable races. However, it was Stewart, a notorious Confederate fan boy, who beat Freitas 45-43. The GOP nightmare scenario went pretty much as scripted: Kaine defeated Stewart 57-41 and three GOP House members, including Brat, lost re-election.
However, while Freitas may have spared his party a few headaches if he’d won that Senate primary, he was hardly Mr. Reasonable Moderate. Freitas took to the floor of the state House of Delegates in March of last year and speculated that "the abortion industry" may be linked to mass shootings. Freitas said afterwards that, while he wasn't actually implying that legalized abortions lead to mass killings, children being born out of wedlock leads to "far-reaching social ills."
Freitas also used that speech to tell his audience that it wasn’t Republicans “that supported slavery, that fought women’s suffrage, that rounded up tens of thousands of Asian-Americans and put ’em in concentration camps, that supported Jim Crow, that supported segregation, or supported Massive Resistance,” concluding, “That was the Democrat [sic] Party.” Many of Freitas’ black colleagues walked off the floor in protest.