- Virginia outcome is helped immensely by in-kind contributions of the dominant media
Look at the media treatment of the win by Democrat Ralph Northam (by the way , supposedly an ANTI- sanctuary city guy). They want you to believe Trump was on the ballot and lost biggley. News flash. He was on the ballot there a year ago and lost by 5% to Hillary Clinton. Barrack Obama won the state in 2012 by about 4%. The Departing governor was a big time Democrat. So the state has actually been trending more Democrat all along, thanks to the encroachment of the federal gravy train bringing lots of voters to the Northern Virginia DC suburbs. Yet the defeat of Ed Gillespie, unconvincingly Trumpian, is a big loss for Trump who lost there?? Much of the state is quite dependent on federal bureaucratic money train, they fear losing it and were surely motivated. That impacted down-ticket races.
Mollie Hemingway reliably perceptive writer at The Federalist, but a bit too panicked in our more remote judgement offers an analysis of the race. Excerpts below. Reading the Washington Post analysis objectively as to intrinsic geographic party strength in the state and we see it as uphill battle for Gillespie who by demeanor or preexisting condition was never going to be able to pull off being a convincing Trumpian populist if that is what the media thought was necessary. The polls that showed Gillespie behind were correct. Democrats voted. Republicans voted. There were more of the former. Illinois is ruled by Cook county. What else is new.
The lost ground in the state house might also be reflective of a trend in that state, peculiar to its dependence or domination by suburban DC and environs. We need further analysis of which districts lost and their peculiarities, trends and candidate strengths. The state Republican Party might have made tactical blunders in its focus. It has happened before everywhere.
5 Takeaways On Virginia’s Election Sweep For Democrats
The amount of effort that went into this is huge. Everything went Democrats’ way in the 2017 election in Virginia.
By Mollie Hemingway
1) An Absolute Tidal Wave for Democrats
Democrats won all the top of the ballot races, but they also gained at least 13 seats in the House of Delegates. This was no small feat. Republicans previously held the House with 66 seats to Democrats’ 34. One of the switches includes the defeat of longtime conservative delegate Robert Marshall (R) by Danica Roem, whose claim to fame is transgenderism.
The gubernatorial race was the one that commanded most of the media interest, but a Democratic governor winning a pretty solid blue state is not the most shocking. The massive changes in the House of Delegates are another thing. The amount of effort that went into this is huge. Everything went Democrats’ way in the 2017 election in Virginia.
2) Top Of Ballot Republicans Lost, But In Interesting Ways
Ralph Northam beat Ed Gillespie in the governor’s race 53.9 to 45 percent — by nearly nine points. Justin Fairfax beat Jill Vogel in the lieutenant governor’s race 52.7 to 47.3. And Mark Herring beat John Adams 53.3 to 46.7 percent.
By comparison, Hillary Clinton won 52.8 percent of the two-party portion of the 2016 vote to Donald Trump’s 47.2 percent. Vogel and Adams were known as strong Trump supporters, whereas Gillespie was known as an establishment Republican who tried to embrace Trumpism without talking about Trump. Vogel and Adams performed state-wide roughly the same as Trump did, whereas Gillespie just got crushed. Gillespie only lost his 2014 Senate race to Warner by less than a percentage point.
What does it mean that Gillespie performed not just worse than Trump, and worse than he did in 2014, but worse than his top-of-the-ballot cohorts who were openly Trump-supportive? Many theories have been offered.
Some say his attempt at fusionism failed, and that you can’t be half a populist and expect voters to buy it. Others say he didn’t have the benefit of running against Clinton, a candidate who managed to lose nationwide despite having so many resources supporting her. Others say it’s just Gillespie himself — a seasoned swamp lobbyist and establishment figure running for office at a time when voters have had enough of that sort. But Gillespie performed quite well with downstate, traditional conservative Republican voters, failing to resonate in his own homeland of Northern Virginia. He only did a tiny bit better than Trump in the heart of the swamp — Fairfax County. That’s Gillespie’s home county!
No matter the cause, Gillespie didn’t do as well as Trump in a race where his running mate Vogel did slightly better than Trump had.
Washington Post’s in-state geographical analysis:
An enthusiastic, more polarized Virginia electorate gave Northam the win
Read it for the graphics and interpret what facts they present yourself. But keep in mind TRUMP LOST VIRGINIA so if Gillespie had done as well, he still would have lost Virginia. He was not the candidate to do better than Trump and the trend was against him, in part due to the media’s ability to aggravate the peculiar trend in Virginia.
R Mall
