“A former TV anchor whose girlfriend [Alison Parker, above left] was fatally shot on-air has claimed a stunning victory over a three-term incumbent state delegate in a rural Virginia election,” usatoday.com reports. “Chris Hurst, 30, supported stricter gun safety measures, but centered his campaign around other issues including an expansion of Medicaid and increased funding for schools. Hurst was one of several upset winners in state House elections Tuesday that could tip the majority to Democrats when the final recounts are completed.” Oh joy. But here’s the thing . . .
I reckon the Democratic victories in Virginia and New Jersey at the local and state level are, once again, a protest vote. Not against gun rights, ’cause most voters are not all that bothered about gun rights (as Mr. Hurst’s handlers rightly surmised). A protest against “establishment” politicians. A tradition as old as America itself, as fresh as Donald Trump’s surprise victory over the ultimate Democratic Washington insider.
That said, in this case, as in the case of New York Democratic rep Carolyn McCarthy, there’s a significant sympathy factor. A belief that elevating a survivor of “gun violence” to public office is just compensation for the pain and suffering they experienced. To help give their life meaning after a senseless tragedy.
Or maybe I’m reading too much into it, projecting my distaste for lionizing victimhood and restricting civil rights. Anyway, Virginia may be for lovers, but last night’s Democratic romp puts the state’s gun owners in deep sh*t.
Like I said. When you keep voting D you keep getting the D. I have no sympathy for morons who voted out of sympathy or protest.
I feel sorry for sensible people who are stuck behind enemy lines.
Being stuck behind enemy lines that are increasingly expanding is the perpetual concern I have. Colorado, Virginia, and Nevada use to be extra red states that have turned blue, yet blue states haven’t turned at all. Pennslyvania isn’t what I would call a “blue” state at the state level. PA may have voted Dem for president since 1988 until Trump last year, but at the local level, it’s mostly a Republican state out in the woods and mountains.
Remember the first hour of The Deer Hunter? That’s still PA today.
The problem is big cities continue to get bigger and more liberal in red states and the less urban/rural parts of those states aren’t growing to keep pace with the big cities.
There are two solutions to this problem: the first is people “stuck behind enemy lines” need to leave and move to states like North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Indiana, Ohio, Pennslyvania, etc. Being a member of the 30-ish percent that vote for the non-communist candidate doesn’t mean squat when that 30-ish percent isn’t represented. In those states, if the right guy or girl wins, you will be represented.
Basically, if we really believe in freedom and individual choice and not the central party, we need to give up our homes and security to maintain the pledge to each other of “our Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor.” We are the people that should be invading free states instead of being stuck in the Northeast or West Coast.
The other solution is simple: succession. Maybe not from the country, but from the state. 90% of Virginia should break away and form “New Virginia.” Northern California, rural Oregon, and Western Washington should break away and become “New California Republic.”
Hell, they’d probably be better off leaving the US entirely, but that’s another topic.
SUCCESSION: The assumption of power by one who replaces a dead or retired ruler.
SECESSION: The divorce of one polity from another.
And no, secession is not the answer. I have laid out the solution many times before.
It is City States.
In most of the Leftist states, the power and disproportionate influence is the result of massive urban population centers. The solution: any city of 750K or more is put up for a referendum by the remainder of the state in which it is located. Those living in that city are NOT permitted to vote (after all, if they are a good fit, the rest of the state will have no problem with them. If they aren’t they don’t get to have a say).
If the rest of the state approves their removal, that city becomes a City State. They are given 2 (and ONLY 2) electoral votes, and must become self-sufficient in terms of funding (should not be a problem, reading the CAFRs of most large cities, they make enough from their investments to run the entire state), resources, etc.
There is a 10 year probationary period, at which time the referendum comes up again. If the voters of the host state approve their re-admittance, they are brought back, with restrictions on their electoral influence. If not, the fission is permanent.
This is pretty much the ONLY non-violent solution. It gives the Leftists what they claim to want, and removes their unfair influence on the rest of the state.
GunDoc –
Secession absolutely is the answer.
Just creating the City States while keeping the “Union” in tact will not do anything to satisfy either the left or the right. The problem is there’s a giant hammer called “monopoly of force” in each state house and an even larger hammer in Washington D.C. politicians on either side of the aisle only want to control those hammers so they can smash whomever they will.
But let’s do a thought experiment. People on the right threaten violence if they feel that the left is encroaching too much. Likewise now that the pendulum has swung to the right you now see the left freaking out. What do you think would happen if, based on your proposed voting system, the country really did swing hard right and now all of the people in the City States felt politically victimized?
They would continue to freak out and that would stoke the flames of insurrection.
Let’s just come to grips and face it. A system of government that is essentially 51% rule and 49% get screwed is not a tenable system. People of all stripes feel that they are being coerced into things they don’t believe or hold dear and that’s because they are. The left or the right picks up that hammer and wields it against whom they will.
Secession allows for peaceful voluntary groupings. If the cities still want to separate and become bastions of liberal utopia fantasy – great let them – but why should that have any bearing on how the farmer 300 miles away lives his life? We are empire and empires always crumble. It’s inevitable either way and writing is already on the wall. Right now we’re fighting over the corpse and trying to make it a zombie.
No need…just let it die. Time to get back to voluntary and local rule.
Louisiana was blue now red, ditto arkansas, west virginia. Texas really didn’t become completely red until 1996. Wisconsin is red in most statewide offices, Michigan is right there. Kentucky was always democrat on the state level, now it’s increasingly red.
The GOP controls 2/3rds of state legislatures, 33 governors, POTUS, congress, Senate.
Gillespie lost because he was an establishment / Romney / McCain / Bush polesmoker. Let’s take the time to rub in the fact that the “true conservatives” are going to be responsible for more losses in the future until they stop supporting garbage RINOs. They all need to be kicked out and thrown back to the DNC where they belong.
No, Gillespie lost because he tried not to be an establishment Republican — but his ads playing to the conservative base backfired. He was trying to win the votes of Stewart’s supporters, but in the process he actually motivated more people to vote for Northam, in what was the largest Democratic victory in Virginia since 1975 (an 8.6% margin of victory with 1% going to the Libertarian candidate). In addition, the Democrats have gained at least 15 seats in the House of Delegates and reduced the Republican margin from 66-34 to, at best, 51-49, with the results for 4 currently Republican seats close enough to require a recount. And some of the worst losses were by “true conservatives” like Bob Marshall. This election was a disaster for Republicans in Virginia. This is the Republicans’ weakness — neither “RINO’s” nor “true conservatives” can win without each other’s support. “True conservatives” may be able to win primaries, but by trying to drive “RINO’s out of the party, they diminish their likelihood of winning general elections. If “RINO’s” are as evil as you suggest, then why would they support the very people who want to drive them out of the party? As long as the internecine warfare continues, Republicans will lose in purple states.
What election were you watching? Gillespie ran EXACTLY like a Romney/McCain RINO would, trying to be “moderate,” until the very end where he realized that it was getting nowhere.
The results? He won the exact same amount of support in NoVA as Trump, and then proceeded to lose the Trump side in both South and West VA.
I don’t think the GOPe understands now that they need Trump supporters FAR MORE than they need moderate RINO wannabes like Gillespie, and they will continue to lose if they run “moderate” candidates. They are dinosuars. Dead. People are tired of it. Bill Kristol and his ilk need to be removed and these garbage RINO’s need to be thrown out, because they will cost us more races by trying to be, “moderate.”
They will either bend the knee and accept that their Democrat Light open border BS is not going to win them anything, and get in line. Or lose. Plain and simple.
I was watching the election where, about every 10 minutes, I saw Gillespie ads purporting to link Northam to MS-13 gang violence and sexual predators, child molesters and child pornographers, accusing a guy who served 8 years in the Army (as far as I know, Gillespie was never in the military, but he was more than happy to smear a veteran) of not showing up for work, and trying to blame him for a bad investment decision made by a Virginia board that was defrauded by a Chinese company.* The gang violence and sexual predator ads were clearly aimed at trying to pull in the Corey Stewart base, and maybe it did to some extent, but it think that it probably motivated more people to turn out to vote against Gillespie. Do I like Northam? On some things, yes, and on others not very much, but I think the Gillespie ads probably hurt Gillespie more than they helped. How else do you explain that Northam got a higher percentage of the vote than any Democrat since 1977? It wasn’t because he was a charismatic candidate — in fact, he’s kind of boring, but he seems to be a decent person, and that showed in the fact that both his favorability rating and his vote-getting ability was much better than Hillary Clinton’s.
*And to be clear, I also thought that the Latino Victory Fund ad attacking Gillespie was reprehensible.
What I don’t understand is how the conservative wing of the Republican party can think that excluding all moderate candidates or positions from the party will grow its appeal to the electorate. They may think that their positions are the correct positions, but they don’t seem to understand that they can’t win elections with the numbers they have; they condemn compromise as weak and unprincipled and demand strict orthodoxy, but fail to understand that they are driving away the very people that they need to win. Believe it or not, there are a lot of people who are not Democrats who wouldn’t necessarily vote democratic if there were alternatives that appealed to centrists, but for reasons I cannot fathom, the face of the Republican party in Virginia has been people like Bob Marshall who seemed to have been more concerned with where his opponent went to the bathroom and transvaginal ultrasounds than solving transportation issues for Prince William County. (And transportation was apparently a winning issue for his opponent, outweighing any voter concern about her gender identity.)
That’s part of the election I watched.
There is also the fact that the “moderate” Gillespie won the primary, so apparently there are a lot of RINO’s in Virginia. If you want to purge them, then where does the Republican party get additional votes (and they need them).
“I don’t think the GOPe understands now that they need Trump supporters FAR MORE than they need moderate RINO wannabes like Gillespie . . .”
Exactly. Gillespie only espoused the Trump agenda toward the end of his campaign and then only as rather bald expedient. Even worse, he campaigned with “W” which told voters where his real loyalties were. The Trump campaign created a new populist/nationalist insurgency made up of disaffected Democrat. Republican , minorities, and first-time voters. Republican candidates cannot win without the insurgency’s vote.
I couldn’t have said it better, Porkchop. Democrats have learned to stick together and not cut off their noses to spite their faces. Republican turnout sucked donkey balls because the Corey Stewart backers gave us the middle finger and stayed home. Now we have an ever-emboldened Politburo in Richmond.
Thanks. But how does one explain the fact that Gillespie got more votes than any Republican gubernatorial candidate in Virginia history. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/11/08/the-shifts-in-virginia-voting-that-handed-trump-an-embarrassing-defeat/?utm_term=.75ef6065a98b On the one hand, he didn’t get as many votes as Trump, but on the other, even if he had, it still wouldn’t have been enough to get elected. That’s why it seems to me that the attempt to woo Stewart voters may have motivated more people to turn out and vote for Northam.
In addition, it probably didn’t help with women voters when the recording of Gillespie stating that he wanted to ban all abortion surfaced. Many women voters might well have been able to accept a more nuanced position, but not a call for an absolute ban. There are, I think, two issues that single issue voters cluster around on both sides of the divide: abortion and guns. I suspect that a part of the unexpectedly high turnout yesterday had to do with women reacting to the Gillespie recording. Part, though, was clearly a desire to vote against Trump, as the Washington Post article discusses.
Since I can’t respond to your other comments I’ll reply here:
All your words are pure conjecture. The fact that Gillespie’s Lt. Governor, who embraced Trump, and had literally no support otherwise, and on their own got more votes than Gillespie himself proves everything you said as kind of irrelevant.
Moderate Republicans need to stop trying to appeal to democrats or NoVA in general and stand for actual principles. If anything you said was actually a real issue then Romney and McCain and Jeb would be in the White House.
Not Trump.
So spare me the moderate garbage. Stewart would have done infinitely better than Cuckillespie did and everybody knows it. Either accept it and stop catering to NeoCon pipesuckers, or lose. That simple.
Vogel got ~50,000 more votes than Gillespie, and Adams got ~40,000 more votes than Gillespie, but even so, they both lost (52.7% to 47.3% and 53.3% to 46.7%, respectively). In addition, unlike those races, the gubernatorial race had a third-party (Libertarian candidate) who got almost 28,000 votes — I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that in the absence of a Libertarian candidate, those votes would have been more likely to go for a Republican than a Democrat.
If the reason for those disparities really is the difference between embracing Trump and not embracing Trump, then embracing Trump does not seem to help very much. In addition, even though Gillespie lagged behind Trump’s 2016 performance, he still won resoundingly in the same areas that Trump won, just not by quite the same margins. In any event, winning there by as much as 80% to 20% (Wise County) was still not enough to win state-wide.
Virginia is on borrowed time. 5 years from now, the Commonwealth will have a Maryland style “assault weapons and high capacity magazine bans”, “universal background checks”, and probably an open carry ban. The people of the gun simply cannot check the overwhelming statism and lunacy of the urban centers. Eventually, it will happen in every state. Virginia is easy to see because of the population density surrounding DC in the northern part of the state.
leviathan finally caught up to VA. the economic lunacy of the incoming legislators includes fight for $15 types, a self-professed socialist, medicaid expansion, increased funding for govt schools. these big govt types only know debt-financed budgets from their experiences with the Federal govt. there’s restraint on a state’s budget which will force massive tax increases. VA will become Illinois south.
what’s going to get kicked to the curb in VA now:
1. school choice
2. firearms
3. fiscal restraint
4. liberty, in general
Yuuuuuup, the Commonwealth in a decade will be indistinguishable from Maryland and the District. Much like Denver and the Front Range, the North Carolina Research Triangle and other large metropolitan locations the D.C. area has been flooded by economic expats from California, New York and the Northeast. All of them seem to be stricken with amnesia that the reason they left their respective homelands is the lack of employment opportunities.
There’s a pretty strong core of gun owners in Northern Virginia as evidenced by the presence of the Heart of Darkness itself (NRA HQ), the continued success of the Dulles Expo gun show and a number of guntry clubs but I worry that the transient population will begin to erode at that core.
The Californiaication of America continues.
Unfortunately we lost a lot of seats in the assembly. The 66 to 34 Republican majority held back that ass hat Mcauliffe so now with that gone the dems have a better chance of ramming through their tyranny. Thanks to all the GOP idiots who sat it out because they feel safe with their boy in the White House.
Having voted in the VA election and living in heavily Dem/Prog northern VA, I was surprised to see the heavy turnout at 3 pm on a cold, rainy day. Usually, off-year elections here are sparsely attended and I had some hope that we’d fend off the Dems and their minions. Not to be! They woke up and did a good job of getting their people out to vote. Anyway, now we not only have to contend with an anti-gun Dem/Prog in the governor’s seat and getting back the same ass-hat anti-gun attorney general, but we lost 12 seats in the House of Delegates, with other delegate contests still being contested through recounts. I’m hopeful that we may not lose our majority in the House. But, even if that happens we’ll still presumably have a majority in the Senate. For the last four years, anti-gun Gov McAuliffe has been unable to get anything done due to pro-gun majorities in the legislature, and the efforts of the Virginia Citizens Defense League. Things are tight, but I’m still hopeful. Should the Dems somehow start passing a spate of anti-gun laws (which the Gov will undoubtedly sign), then I’m sure non-compliance is an option, and we’ll have to figure out how to redress the situation in the next election. I’m thinking that the Dems may then be overconfident and stay home.
Tragedy survivors can be powerful public policy ambassadors, that’s true, but let’s remember that can cut both ways.
Dr. Suzanna Hupp survived the 1991 Killeen, Tx Luby’s massacre that claimed the lives of both of her parents, while her self-defense sidearm was locked outside in her truck as the law at that time mandated. She successfully crusaded for concealed carry in Texas, then went on to serve ten years in the state legislature expanding that freedom to carry.
My thoughts and prayers to the GOP.
Another liberal with no idea what the problem is that will try to fix it by banning guns. Maybe he should ban delivery trucks first and see how that goes!
Ummm…just heard Rush Limbaugh postulate that having 200000felons eligible to vote and a boatload of Moose-lims did ’em in. I know next to nothing about Virginia realpolitik. I have my hands full fighting the good fight in Illinoisistan…
In BOTH states, N.J. and Virginia, the local media outlets aka Fake News were heavily supporting Northam and Murphy giving them loads of favorable coverage thus they had much greater exposure, additionally both state’s GOP party offices and their candidates were filled with Romneyites/Bushie-types, limpwristed, mealy-mouthed, low-energy *ucks.
I’ve spent nearly five (5) weeks each summer in Va in and around the Roanoke-Lynchburg-Covington-Galax area for the last three (3) years, when Gillespie (now a 3-time loser) ran against Mark Warner for the open senate seat in 2014 I met TEA Party-types who were supporting Warner because he never went against guns as governor, his first act in the senate was to screw them over and co-sponsor an anti-2nd Amendment bill targeting so-called “assault weapons” and magazine capacities yet these voters couldn’t cast their votes for Gillespie.
With George Soros dumping millions into local and state races which is what he did in Va & N.J. this election the GOP better get it’s friggin’ act together, gopher-toothed Phil Murphy started HIS campaign EIGHTEEN (18) months ago, his commercials were everywhere during that time, Kim Guandano aka Guano on the other hand was nowhere to be seen even compared to when Chris Christie campaigned for the governor’s office eight (8) years ago. It’s time to “purge” BOTH the N.J. and Virginia GOP executive committees, county organizations, and local offices and replace the losers with WINNERS.
Just as I predicted voters fed up with the Republicans trying to take away their health care, take away their tax deductions while giving themselves a bill that will let them avoid paying all taxes and their plans to cut social security and other social programs has led to a land slide defeat last Tuesday, a Harbinger to come in the soon 2018 elections. All this spells big trouble for gun owners in the months ahead.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/republicans-suddenly-fear-disastrous-2018/ar-BBEJTlE?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=U143DHP
$1M plus campaign money for an 18k/ year delegate seat. LOTS of out of state money.
Hurst’s district is dominated by Virginia Tech and Radford University. It is not “rural” as far as where the majority of the population lives or where it works. They are mostly state employees and if you include Radford Arsenal, employees of fed.gov. I would just about guarantee that the entire faculties outside of the engineering and military sciences departments at VT voted for Hurst. Also another object lesson of why college students should not be allowed to vote in the dorm district. Nonetheless this “victor” is a bought and paid for Bloomberg shill. There should be an investigation of who paid his keep after he left the TV station, and who will be paying it now. He can’t be living on $18K/year. He will be dangerous in the future because he is a professional actor and will re-use his girlfriend’s killing year after year just to get himself a sympathy vote in an attempt to move higher in politics.
I guess by the time the recount for VA. Is done. The VA. Voters will now eventually experience what Massachusetts gun control (anti-2nd amendment) is like…Maybe they even experience having an overzealous authoritarian “Leftist ” state , and local PD. Where it’s easier to make good citizens into criminals than the PD to go after the real bad guys…
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