The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

It’s On You, Virginia

Posted on | November 2, 2021 | Comments Off on It’s On You, Virginia

Virginians today have the power to end Terry McAuliffe’s political career. A Washington Post reporter writes the pre-obituary:

NORFOLK, Va. — Eutopia Hall didn’t realize she had neglected to sign the bottom of her mail-in ballot for governor until the county board of elections returned the document to her, asking her to complete it. But as she sat looking at the paper, she wondered if it was even worth a second trip to the mailbox.
So little had changed since she cast a ballot for Joe Biden in 2020, she said, that “I started to not even press the issue.” Her job and community were still mired in pandemic restrictions. An increase in the child tax credit had brought a few more dollars into her home, but it was eaten up by costlier prices for gas and food and seemingly everything else, and a year after high hopes of significant change in her family’s situation, things seemed stagnant.
“I don’t think a lot of people have a lot of faith in Biden, like they were expecting at first,” said Hall, a 42-year-old nursing assistant. “I think it’s more of a bigger division than it was before. I thought it was gonna get better once the vaccines came out because there was so many people complaining about covid and wanting a cure, but then they came out with a vaccine nobody wants to take. Nothing has changed and we’re just stuck in the same place.”
A year ago, Biden won Virginia by 10 percentage points, riding a wave of antipathy toward President Donald Trump to place the commonwealth solidly into the Democratic column. But with the eyes of the political world back on Virginia for statewide elections on Tuesday, Biden’s sinking popularity has emerged as a key factor dragging down hopes of another party victory and making the state look, once again, more like a battleground than a Democratic stronghold.
A new Washington Post-Schar School poll of likely Virginia voters, which found Democrat Terry McAuliffe and Republican Glenn Youngkin in a toss-up race for governor, found that 53 percent disapprove of Biden’s job performance, while 46 percent approve.
Regardless of the final outcome Tuesday, the tight race in what many had believed to be a safe blue state underscores the extent to which Americans hold souring views of Biden looms over his party ahead of next year’s congressional midterms and the 2024 presidential election.
Interviews with nearly two dozen voters in this southeast Virginia region about three hours’ drive from D.C. found a profound sense of frustration that people haven’t seen benefits of Democratic control trickle into their lives or their wallets.
Tia Scott, of Norfolk, said her family has been pinched by rising prices everywhere, even as it gets harder to find a job that makes ends meet.
“The cost of living has been high, the cost of food is going up, and gas prices too, and jobs are still laying off people, saying it’s about covid,” said Scott, a 35-year-old customer service representative and mother of three girls. “I voted for Biden. Really, I was going to vote for anybody but Trump. But it seems like it was all talk. Now I see all the ads were just ads. Just because you say you can do all that stuff on an ad doesn’t mean you can do it.”
Particularly troubling, some said, is that nearly a year after a coronavirus vaccine was approved, mitigation efforts and covid restrictions remain a part of everyday life, the economy doesn’t seem to be working for the most vulnerable, and intraparty infighting has stalled progress promised by Biden and the Democrats.

The naïveté is remarkable. These people were apparently so full of Trump hatred that it never occurred to them to question Biden’s competence, or examine his campaign promises soberly. And notice that Eutopia Hall, who I presume to be African-American, says “they came out with a vaccine nobody wants to take,” which is an interesting assertion, coming as it does from someone employed in the healthcare field. The media keep pretending that Republicans are to blame for “vaccine resistance.”

McAuliffe concludes his campaign with lies:

“Guess how Glenn Youngkin is finishing his campaign?” McAuliffe told a modest crowd outside a Fairfax brewery Monday night at his final rally. “He is doing an event with Donald Trump here in Virginia.”
That was a lie. Trump wasn’t in Virginia and he never campaigned with Youngkin, though he did make the case for the GOP candidate — “fantastic guy!” — during a brief “tele-rally.”
Thirty miles away, at the Loudoun County Fairgrounds, a crowd several times the size of McAuliffe’s was waiting for Youngkin to take the stage. You got a hint of why McAuliffe was desperate to manufacture the fake Trump event. While McAuliffe has boundless energy — “Sleep when you’re dead!” he likes to say — his Monday audiences in Richmond and Fairfax, where we caught up with him, were modest and listless.
Youngkin’s were large and rollicking, with many of the trappings of a MAGA rally — a similar dad rock playlist, hats and flags and T-shirts paying homage to the former president — but, to the great disappointment of Democrats, not Trump himself. . . .
McAuliffe’s final message was almost entirely negative, focused on tying his opponent to Trump.

That is quite literally all they’ve got now — “Trump! Trump! Trump!”

Maybe getting walloped in Virginia will fix that problem for them.




 

Category: Election, Virginia

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