Why The Debate Over Northam’s Racism Is Good For Pro-Abortion Democrats

Republicans smell blood in the water in Virginia. Gov. Ralph Northam’s career seems to be nearing an end after the revelation of racist pictures in his college yearbook. With even Democrats calling for Northam’s resignation, Republicans are ready to take a scalp, but if the focus is on vilifying the governor and forcing his resignation, pro-life conservatives will have missed a valuable opportunity to frame the abortion debate.

Prior to the publication of Northam’s yearbook photo depicting one man in blackface and another in a klansman’s robes and hood, the furor was about Northam’s radio interview in which he defended a controversial bill that would have permitted abortion of full-term babies. The real scandal is that Gov. Northam advocated allowing babies to be born and left to die, not that he wore blackface 30 years ago as a college student.

Focusing on Northam’s actions form 30 years ago is hypocritical for Republicans, most of whom were arguing six months ago that college hijinx from the 1980s were irrelevant in performing a job today. Republicans were right to defend Brett Kavanaugh under similar circumstances last year but have now surrendered that point of moral clarity to the notion that there should be no forgiveness for past actions if the perpetrator is a member of the opposite party.

Forcing Northam out would likely be a Pyrrhic victory. The governor would be replaced by Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, a young, black Democrat who is described as “more progressive” than Northam. Republicans would give the advantage of incumbency to a man who could become another Democrat rock star.

The bigger issue is not what Northam did in 1984, it’s what he said last week. The issue of late-term abortion and infanticide is much more pressing and serious than whether Northam wore blackface 30 years ago. It is also an indictment of the entire Democratic Party.

While only a few Democrats would support wearing blackface, a large part of the party would support the abortion bill. It is on the issue of abortion, not blackface, that Democrats are extreme and out of the American mainstream.

I’m not normally a conspiracy theorist, but the speed with which the debate changed makes me wonder whether the Democrats themselves might have leaked the embarrassing picture of Northam. At the drop of a hat, Democrats shifted from an embarrassing defense of the indefensible to attacking one of their own for racial indiscretions. All of a sudden, no one was talking about the Democrat plan to let babies die.

It’s unlikely that the Democrats made a conscious decision to sacrifice Gov. Northam to the god of abortion, but the immolation of his career did create a distraction from the bigger issue. That’s a very good thing for Democrats.

Originally published on The Resurgent

Elections Should Be Wake Up Call For GOP

Despite the trope that “all politics is local,” it is difficult to see last night’s election results as anything but a rebuke to President Trump and the Republican Party. Exit polls indicated that resistance to President Trump was a large factor in the Democrat landslide.

Politico reports that half of Virginia voters said that their vote was about Trump. Thirty-four percent of Virginia voters said they were voting to oppose Trump while 17 percent were voting to support the president.

Forty-seven percent of Virginia voters strongly disapproved of President Trump and Democrat Ralph Northam won 95 percent of those voters. Starting with a disadvantage of almost half of the electorate meant that Republican Ed Gillespie needed almost unanimous support among other groups. He did not find it, however, losing 53-45 percent.

In New Jersey, where the outgoing governor is the unpopular Republican Chris Christie, 28 percent of voters said that their vote was against the president, whose approval rating in the state is at 36 percent. Only 11 percent were voting in support of Donald Trump. Democrat Phil Murphy carried the governor’s race over Republican Kim Guadagno by 55-42 percent.

Politico notes that Gillespie and Guadagno both won the segment of the electorate that said that President Trump was not a factor. However, the margins (15 points for Gillespie and six points for Guadagno) were not enough to overcome the strong anti-Trump bloc.

To cap off the Democrat victory in the Virginia gubernatorial race, the party also picked up at least 13 seats in Virginia’s House of Delegates. The landslide is the largest in more than 100 years and includes a trans woman (i.e. a man) and a former newscaster whose girlfriend was murdered on live television in 2015.

New Jersey is deep blue and Virginia is bluish purple these days, so Republicans may try to write off these losses to traditional voting patterns. That does not explain the loss of two seats in Georgia’s state House of Representatives, however. The two seats were in districts near Athens and have historically been solidly Republican.

The biggest takeaway from the elections is that President Trump has no coattails. Trump won because of Hillary Clinton’s unpopularity and lacks a mandate for his agenda. After starting with a popular vote defeat, Trump’s behavior while in office has caused support for his presidency and the Republican Party to erode.

Republican candidates in 2018 are between a rock and a hard place. Trump’s strong support in the GOP makes it difficult to distance themselves from the unpopular president. On the other hand, if they don’t move away from Trump, they face the possibility of losses in the general election.

Originally published on the Resurgent 

Never Trump wins Virginia lawsuit

(Michael Vadon/Wikimedia)

As Republican delegates prepare to make their way to Cleveland for next week’s Republican National Convention, a Virginia judge has given the Never Trump movement a breath of life. In a stunning ruling, a federal judge ruled that Virginia Republican delegates are not bound by the state law that requires them to vote on the first ballot at the convention for the winner of the state primary.

The decision stemmed from a suit brought by delegate Carroll “Beau” Correll against Virginia elections officials. Correll’s suit claimed that the law binding him to vote for Trump, the winner of the Virginia primary, was a violation of his First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and association. Even though Donald Trump won the Virginia primary, many supporters of rival candidate, Ted Cruz, were appointed as delegates to the convention.

The case, “Correll v. Herring,” will apply only to Virginia delegates, but Judge Robert Payne did cite precedent in his ruling that could apply to other states that have similar laws. In “Democratic Party of U.S. v. Wisconsin ex rel. La Follette” (1981), the Supreme Court ruled that state law could not override party rules for delegate selection. In that decision, Justice Potter Stewart wrote, “A political party's choice among the various ways of determining the makeup of a State's delegation to the party's national convention is protected by the Constitution. And as is true of all expressions of First Amendment freedoms, the courts may not interfere on the ground that they view a particular expression as unwise or irrational.”

In 1912, the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled, “expression of a preference for President by those voting at primary election ... is only morally binding on delegates to national party conventions.” In other words, delegates are not legally bound by primary votes, but may have an ethical obligation to follow the will of the voters.

The judge, Robert Payne, has served on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia since 1992. He was nominated to the court by George Herbert Walker Bush and received the unanimous approval of the Senate.

The ruling will likely encourage other Republican opponents of Trump to make a stand against the presumptive nominee at the convention next week. There is a movement afoot to change Republican Party rules that bind delegates. Kendal Unruh, the leader of the “Dump Trump” movement, said earlier this week in the Daily Wire that there were enough votes on the rules committee to “free the delegates.”

David Rivkin, the attorney for Correll, said in a statement after the ruling, “Today's decision should give comfort to all delegates that they cannot be punished for voting their conscience at the Republican National Convention.”

Read it on Conservative Firing Line

Why a hard line on immigration will lose the election

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Amid the Republican battle on illegal immigration and deportation of illegal immigrants, the effect of immigration policy on the general election is lost. The general election will likely hinge on the outcome of a handful of swing states, most of which were won by Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. In order to win the White House, the Republican candidate must flip the states of Florida, Iowa, Ohio and Colorado as well as win North Carolina, which was won by Obama in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012.

The hardline stance of several Republican candidates in the primary is almost certain to make it difficult or impossible for them to win these swing states in the general election. Losing even one of these states would put Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders in the White House. To understand why immigration may kill the chance of electing a Republican president, let’s take a closer look at the State of Florida.

The Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, recently published estimates of the racial and ethnic composition of swing state electorates. The group estimates that the largest minority voter group in Florida will be Hispanics with an estimated 20.2 percent of the electorate. Blacks are projected to increase to 15.5 percent of voters and Asians to 2.2 percent.

Pew Research puts the share of Hispanic voters for 2016 slightly lower at 18.1 percent. In either case, the Hispanic share of the electorate is steadily increasing. Exit polling also reported by Pew found that Hispanics made up 17 percent of Florida voters in 2012 and 14 percent in 2008 so a 2016 share of 18-20 percent is realistic.

While all minority groups are growing in the state, Hispanics make up the fastest growing group. In this year’s election, minority voters are likely to make up between 35 and 38 percent of the electorate. This would be a substantial increase over the 33 percent they represented in 2008.

Who do these groups vote for? Washington Post exit polls show information specifically for Florida for the past two election cycles. As is well established, Obama won virtual unanimity among black voters with 95 percent in 2012 and 96 percent in 2008.  

Among Hispanic voters, Obama won a less commanding majority. In 2008, Obama won the Hispanic vote by 57 percent to John McCain’s 42 percent. In 2012, the total was practically the same with Obama at 60 percent and Mitt Romney at 39 percent. In Florida, Romney lost by 74,309 votes out of 8.4 million votes cast. That is a margin of 0.8 percent.

Many observers believe that Romney lost the race with a comment in a primary debate in January 2012. In that debate, Romney stated that his plan for dealing with illegal immigrants was “self-deportation.” The election could have easily turned on the feeling of many Hispanics that Romney and the Republicans didn’t like them and didn’t want them in the country.

If Hispanics respond to an innocuous remark in a debate with a landslide for Democrats, the question that needs to be addressed is how they would respond to a policy of mass deportations and the elimination of birthright citizenship. Many conservatives believe that Hispanics and other legal immigrants will back conservative candidates with a hard line on illegal immigration because they resent the illegals who don’t wait their turn. Is this belief supportable by fact?

In August 2015, a Gallup poll found that two-thirds of Americans support a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants. Among Hispanics, support for what some Republicans call “amnesty,” runs even higher. Seventy-seven percent of Hispanics favor a pathway to citizenship for illegals.

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On the issue of birthright citizenship, most Americans favor keeping the Constitution and birthright citizenship as is by a margin of 57-39 percent according to an August 2015 Pew poll. Among Hispanics, 73 percent oppose trying to end birthright citizenship.

The same poll found that 72 percent of Americans believe that illegal immigrants should be allowed to stay in the United States. Only 17 percent favor a national effort to deport all illegals. The survey did not give statistics on the question for Hispanics, but did note that 60 percent of Hispanics saw an increase in deportations as a bad thing and that 46 percent were concerned that a close friend or family member could be deported.

For most Americans, immigration reform is not an important issue. Last week, Gallup found that the economy was the most important issue for most voters at 17 percent. Ten percent of voters name immigration as the most important problem, placing it in a tie for third place with jobs and unemployment.

Hispanic voters agree that the economy and jobs are the most important issues according to a Univision poll from last July. Unlike most voters, Hispanics rank immigration as another “hot button” issue.

“A lot of individuals and a lot of people in the Hispanic community feel that the extreme right-wing, anti-immigration rhetoric tends to be code for anti-Hispanic rhetoric, and that’s why it has such traction,” said pollster Fernand Amandi. He added, “On the question of a pathway to citizenship, Hispanic voters that we asked say that the majority are more likely to support a candidate for president that advocates for a position that includes a pathway to citizenship, when it comes to a comprehensive immigration reform plan.”

Using the “Swing the Vote” tool from Five Thirty Eight, we can see that a shift of the Hispanic vote by three points nationally would move Florida to the Republican column. Specifically, in 2012, Obama won Florida by 74,309 votes. That means that flipping only 2.6 percent of Florida’s Hispanic vote would have flipped the state to Romney.

Winning 43 percent of Hispanics should not be an unattainable goal for Republicans. George W. Bush won 44 percent of Hispanics nationally as recently as 2004. Chris Christie won the Hispanic vote outright in New Jersey, a solidly blue state, in 2013.

The immigration vote will be important in other swing states as well. Colorado has a Hispanic electorate that, at 15 percent in 2012, is almost as large as Florida’s. Virginia and Ohio have fewer Hispanics, but have large immigrant populations, many of whom are naturalized and can vote. These voters can be reasonably expected to oppose candidates with policies that they perceive as anti-immigration and unfriendly.

The American Immigration Council estimates that almost five percent of Ohio’s population are immigrants. About half of these Ohioans are naturalized and eligible to vote. About two percent of Ohioans were Hispanic. This is 60 percent of Obama’s margin of victory in 2012.

In Virginia, the AIC statistics show that immigrants make up 11 percent of the population. About nine percent of these are Hispanic. Again, half of these Virginians are US citizens who are eligible to vote. Again, this is more than half of Barack Obama’s margin of victory.

Almost all swing states have Hispanic and immigrant populations that could easily be decisive in the 2016 general election. By focusing on the divisive issue of immigration rather than topics that unite voters against the Democrats, Republican candidates may be making it impossible to win the election in November.

Read, comment and share on Conservative Firing Line and Freedom Daily!

Electoral map requires flipping four states in 2016

While moving toward the 2016 presidential election, Republican voters would do well to remember that the election is not a single election, but 50 state elections plus the final election in the Electoral College. When these individual state elections are taken into account, national polls are almost meaningless. What matters is the polling in the individual states.

To be more precise, what matters is the polling and the elections in a handful of swing states. In 2012, Mitt Romney needed to win several swing states to win the Electoral College election. These states included Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio, Colorado, New Hampshire and Iowa. Of these, Romney was only able to win North Carolina with President Obama winning all other swing states.

Below is the actual 2012 electoral map.

To win in 2016, the Republican candidate must hold onto every state won by Romney as well as adding several more states to the Republican column. The map below flips the swing states of Florida, Virginia and Ohio to the Republicans. It is worth noting that no Republican has ever won the presidency without winning Ohio.

In past elections, Republicans have hoped for victories in other blue states such as Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Nevada. So far these hopes have not been realized and at this point there is no reason to expect that 2016 will be different.

Moving these three states to the Republican candidate moves a total of 60 electoral votes, but this is still not enough to secure a Republican victory. A fourth state needs to be flipped to send a Republican to the White House.

There are several candidates for the state to bring the Republicans to 270 electoral votes, the number needed to win the presidency. The two most likely would be Iowa and Colorado, commanding 6 and 9 electoral votes respectively. Both states seem to have shifted to the right since 2012. In the 2014 midterm elections, both states replaced a Democratic senator with a Republican one (Joni Ernst and Cory Gardner)

The final electoral map shows the effect of adding Iowa’s six electoral votes to the Republican column.

Iowa’s six electoral votes would allow the Republican candidate to eke out a win in the Electoral College. The slim two vote margin above the required 270 is one of the most likely routes to a Republican victory.

The question that Republican primary voters should be asking is which candidate can deliver Florida, Ohio, Virginia and Iowa. A candidate that cannot deliver those four states is not going to win, regardless of how conservative he or she is.

The conservative leader, William F. Buckley, famously said that conservative voters should vote for the most conservative candidate who can win. Conservative voters should bear the electoral map in mind when deciding which Republican candidates are viable… and which are not. 

Elections hint at problems for Dems

Democrats are still celebrating the victory of Terry McAuliffe over Ken Cuccinelli in Virginia, but the elections on Nov. 5 should ring alarm bells for the Democratic Party. Chris Christie’s resounding victory in New Jersey showed that Republicans can be competitive in blue states while McAuliffe’s margin in Virginia was much narrower than expected.

The McAuliffe campaign raised and spent far more than Cuccinelli. Politico reports that McAuliffe outraised Cuccinelli by almost $15 million. The funding disparity meant that Cuccinelli was not able to air campaign ads in the final two weeks of the campaign.

The Republican Party has been criticized for not providing support to Cuccinelli, but the Politico article points out that the Republican National Committee spent $3 million on the Cuccinelli campaign while the Republican Governor’s Association spent $8.3 million. Dick Morris points out that Republicans tried to aid Cuccinelli when the race became competitive in late October, but at that point it was too late to buy air time for ads.

A bigger problem than the lack of money from political groups was Cuccinelli’s lack of fundraising prowess. The Cuccinelli campaign raised only $11.7 million compared to McAuliffe’s $28 million. The Washington Post notes that businessmen who previously supported Republican Bob McDonnell backed McAuliffe this year, making it difficult for Cuccinelli to raise funds.

The bad news for Democrats is that the mountains of cash that McAuliffe spent barely eked out a victory, even with a Libertarian candidate drawing Cuccinelli voters by a margin of two to one. As previously reported by Examiner, McAuliffe’s double digit lead in mid-October had all but evaporated by the end of the month. The likely reason for McAuliffe’s difficulties was the steady stream of bad news relating to the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Unless a dramatic change occurs over the next year, Obamacare may prove to be a drag on Democratic candidates in next year’s midterm elections.

Voter demographics in the Virginia race are also troubling for Democrats. Strategist and pollster Dick Morris points out that a major question in surveying the race was whether turnout would mirror 2012 or 2010. Exit polls show that turnout closely resembled the off-year election of 2010. The surge of minority Democrats that propelled Barack Obama to two election victories in Virginia did not materialize when he was not on the ballot in either 2010 or this week.

Ezra Klein of the Washington Post agrees. “A Republican looking at these numbers should feel disappointed by last night's election but hopeful about next year's,” he says, noting that the core demographics of Obama’s electoral success, women, minorities, and young voters, all decreased as a percentage of the electorate, as did the percentage of Virginia voters identifying as Democrats.

With Barack Obama off the ballot, his ability to get out the vote is considerably curtailed. Obama’s ability to rally voters may get worse as his approval rating drops with disappointment in Obamacare. A Gallup poll from Nov. 5 showed Obama’s approval rating at 39 percent, a historic low. If the makeup of voters in 2014 resembles the electorate in Virginia from this week, the Democrats may suffer a defeat similar to the 2010 Republican congressional landslide. Democratic hopes for winning control of the House are in jeopardy and with 20 Senate Democrats up for reelection Republican control of both houses of Congress is a very real possibility.

Chris Christie’s victory in New Jersey presents a different set of problems for Democrats. Although Christie is reviled by Tea Party Republicans as a “RINO,” the New Jersey governor has proven adept at reaching into traditional Democratic vote strongholds.

Exit polls from New Jersey show that Gov. Christie made deep inroads into Barack Obama’s core constituencies. Christie won women voters by 15 percent even though the Democratic candidate, Barbara Buono, was a woman. He also won Hispanic voters outright with 51 percent (compared to Buono’s 45 percent). Although Christie did not win the black vote, at 21 percent his percentage of the black vote was almost two-and-a-half times greater than Cuccinelli’s (eight percent).

Some Republicans would charge that Christie’s success is a result of abandoning traditional conservative principles. Christie claims to be a conservative and John Nichols wrote in The Nation that he is right. According to Nichols, Christie cultivates a moderate image to appeal to New Jersey’s voters, but his policies are in line with other Republican governors.

Nichols details how Christie has enacted Wisconsin-style “austerity” in New Jersey and clashed repeatedly with unions. He pulled the state out of a regional carbon emissions program, scaled back renewable energy targets, and vetoed a plan for early voting. Christie’s record on social issues is also conservative. He is pro-life and defunded Planned Parenthood from the New Jersey budget. He also vetoed New Jersey’s gay marriage law.

Christie’s conservative record is not perfect, however. As the L.A. Times pointed out on Nov. 5, Christie his support for in-state tuition for illegal aliens will trouble the right. He also dropped a state appeal to a New Jersey Supreme Court decision that allowed marriages to proceed and signed a bill banning gay conversion therapy. Christie also has a mixed record on gun control. Many Republicans will not easily forget or forgive Christie’s “bro-mance” with President Obama in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.

Nevertheless, a Gallup poll from June found that Christie is the most popular Republican politician. The poll found that Christie had approval ratings of greater than 50 percent with members of both parties as well as the public at large. No other Republican topped 50 percent outside the party. Even if Christie is not the Republican nominee in 2016, his success shows that Republicans can win in blue states without abandoning their principles.

Taken together, the two elections this week portend a difficult future for Democrats. President Obama’s legacy, the problem-ridden Affordable Care Act, could spell disaster for many Democratic candidates just as the president becomes unable to help them.

Originally published on Elections Examiner

Shutdown legacy, Libertarian spoiler may sink Cuccinelli in Virginia

In Virginia’s gubernatorial election today, current Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is expected to lose to former Democratic Party chairman Terry McAuliffe. Virginia, a hotly contested state in recent presidential elections, is an important prize for both parties. The state was reliably Republican until recent years when Virginians voted for Barack Obama twice.

After a dead heat for much of the spring and summer, the race trended towards McAuliffe in late summer. Polling data archived on Real Clear Politics and the Wikipedia page dedicated to the race show polls split between the two candidates between January and July. In September, Mr. McAuliffe began to edge away from Mr. Cuccinelli and in October he picked up a commanding, often double digit, lead for most of October. In recent days, two polls have shown Mr. Cuccinelli closing the gap, but still trailing.

The most recent poll, released on Nov. 4 by Quinnipiac, found McAuliffe leading 46-40 percent with Libertarian Robert Sarvis at eight percent. Another recent poll by Emerson College released three days earlier showed McAuliffe with only a two point lead.

There are likely two big reasons for Ken Cuccinelli’s impending loss. The most obvious is Robert Sarvis, the third man in the race. Sarvis, a lawyer and software developer is Libertarian candidate for governor. According to Real Clear Politics, Mr. Sarvis has polled between four and 13 percent in recent polls. In many of the polls, if the Libertarian percentage were applied to Mr. Cuccinelli, he would lead Mr. McAuliffe.

Third party candidacies damage the party that they more closely identify with because they draw voters from the same pool. The Republican and Libertarian parties are both competing for voters who oppose the Democratic big government agenda, Obamacare, gun control, higher taxes, and a host of other common issues. Since the Republican Party has the largest base, the Republican candidate ends up being hurt by the Libertarian. The Emerson College poll confirmed that Sarvis was drawing support from twice as many Republicans as Democrats.

Libertarian candidates do not have enough support to win. Instead, they can only act as a spoiler to prevent Republicans from winning. Many third party advocates are fond of saying that “a vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for evil.” In reality, a more appropriate aphorism would be that “the perfect is the enemy of the good.”

The second factor that will likely cost Cuccinelli the race is the government shutdown. Cuccinelli’s dive in the polls coincided with the run-up to the government shutdown. At the same time, Democrats surged in generic congressional ballots and a number of polls reported Republican approval ratings at historic lows. Polling in Virginia shows that Mr. Cuccinelli’s resurgence began in late October after a compromise on Oct. 16 reopened the federal government.

The Virginia race was contentious from the beginning with McAuliffe reprising Barack Obama’s successful “war on women” strategy against Cuccinelli. For his part, McAuliffe has been plagued by a string of scandals relating to his business dealings with an electric car company that took federal money and allegedly received favorable treatment from the government. Over the weekend, on Nov. 3, President Obama visited Virginia to campaign for McAuliffe. Given the president’s recent low approval ratings and Obamacare’s continuing difficulties, the trip may be as likely to hurt McAuliffe as help him.

In a last ditch effort to rally support, Cuccinelli has attempted to turn the election into a referendum on the Affordable Care Act. CBS News reported that Cuccinelli, who led the more than half of the states in a lawsuit that challenged Obamacare, told supporters, “If you want to fight Obamacare, if you want to tell Washington that Virginians have had enough of Obamacare, then I need your vote.”

The election will likely hinge on turnout, which is expected to be low. According to CBS News, the state believes that turnout may be as low as 30 percent.

Originally published on Elections Examiner