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Virginia Insider Projects 'Republican Sweep' in State's Heated Governor Race

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With polls showing a tighter-than-tight race for the next governor of Virginia, even outsiders to the state’s politics have plenty of reason to be following it.

The country’s 12th most populous state is shaping up as a bellwether for the faltering Biden presidency. It has turned into ground zero for the national fight for parents to control their children’s education, and the outcome could well be a harbinger of what next year’s midterm elections could hold for control of the Senate and House of Representatives.

And on Monday, an insider of Virginia politics offered a prediction on the race that should have both sides sitting up and taking notice.

In an interview on “Fox & Friends,” Ken Cuccinelli, the former Virginia attorney general who was the Republican candidate for governor in 2013, said the time was ripe for a “Republican sweep” in the Old Dominion, putting the governor’s office, lieutenant governor’s office and state attorney general’s post in GOP hands.

Glenn Youngkin is the party’s candidate for governor, Winsome Sears is the Republican for lieutenant governor, and Jason Miyares is the GOP’s attorney general candidate.

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The Democratic candidate, Terry McAuliffe, has already served a term as governor (he defeated Cuccinelli in 2013). He’s a cog in the Clinton machine, a confidant of the former president and first lady who has come down firmly against the role of parents in public schools. During a debate in September, he declared that “I’m not gonna let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decisions.”

Since in Virginia that apparently means allowing schools to spew sexual filth at boys and girls still in their formative years, that’s pretty much the opposite of what most parents probably think about their role in their children’s schooling.

But it sums up pretty accurately how Democratic believers in the power of government approach the question.

Do you think the Democratic agenda is in trouble nationally?

The fact that a local question like school district policies is now a major part of the national debate says a lot about how out of touch Democrats are on issues that really matter. Under the Biden administration, it has come to the point where the United States attorney general has threatened to sic the FBI on parents, labeling them “domestic terrorists” for having the temerity to criticize their own elected school officials.

Virginia’s Republican candidate for governor, Youngkin, has come down equally hard on the side of parents in disputes with school officials.

“What we’ve seen over the last 20 months is parents coming together and asking, ‘Please open our schools, five days a week. Stop keeping them closed’,” Youngkin said at an October campaign stop, according to Politico. “‘Tell us what material is being used in the classroom or in the library — just tell us — so that we can choose whether we want it in our kids’ life or not.’”

That dichotomy has put McAuliffe on the wrong side for too many voters, Cuccinelli told “Fox & Friends.”

Obviously sensing danger, the McAuliffe campaign has brought in big guns like former President Barack Obama and Vice President Kamala Harris (in the form of a legally questionable video to be shown on Sundays in black churches). But, as Cuccinelli pointed out, the campaign has a major problem when it comes to turning out the key black voting bloc.

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Even former Virginia Gov. Douglas Wilder, the first African-American elected to a governor’s seat since the post-Civil War Reconstruction, has criticized the McAuliffe campaign as having given blacks no reason to cast their votes for him.

Asked during an interview Saturday with the Washington Examiner why black Virginians appear reluctant to support McAuliffe, Wilder responded, “The better question would be, ‘What reasons do they have to turn out?’”

And that likely means trouble for Democrats, Cuccinelli told “Fox & Friends.”

“And you name people who have come into Virginia for Terry McAuliffe, nobody’s had to come in for Glenn Youngkin,” Cuccinelli said.

“And by the way, former Gov. Doug Wilder, I think, really put the capper on a lot of this — as he is wont to do — when he pointed out the Democrat ticket hasn’t given black voters a reason to come vote for them, while the Republican ticket, led by Glenn Youngkin, has laid out a positive agenda from Doug Wilder’s perspective.”

McAuliffe, meanwhile, has resorted to attacking Youngkin on a now-abandoned tax plan that McAuliffe claimed would have cost the state 43,000 teachers. As Cuccinelli pointed out, even fact-checkers in the liberal media had to shoot that down. (When a Democrat can’t count on PolitiFact, he can’t count on much.)

There’s no guarantee that Cuccinelli is correct, of course. While Youngkin has gained ground in weeks to the point where polls show the race to be an essential tie, as NBC News reported, not every challenging election is going to go badly for Democrats. (Look at the astonishingly inept Gavin Newsom and his survival of a recall effort in California.)

But the danger signs are clearly there, and Democrats should be paying attention.

For President Joe Biden’s White House, meanwhile, reeling from self-inflicted wounds ranging from the disaster of the Afghanistan withdrawal to the continuing crisis on the southern border and economy-killing inflation, a defeat of his party in a state he won by 12 percentage points only a year ago would be a political repudiation in unmistakable terms.

A president who looks like a lame duck after only nine months in office would start to look crippled to boot.

And for Democrats nationally, held hostage by a far-left fringe that’s pushing disastrous public spending policies, an already grim midterm season next year will look like a yawning abyss if Cuccinelli’s prediction comes true.

Republicans need only a handful of votes to take control of the House of Representatives. They need a net gain of only a single seat in the Senate to take the upper chamber.

Considering the president’s party historically does poorly in midterm elections, the GOP’s chances already look good, but a victory in Virginia next week would provide some much-needed momentum, and proof that American voters aren’t fooled by the Democratic Party, its propaganda arm in the mainstream media, or its doddering, almost certainly corrupt figurehead in the White House.

When it comes to Virginia politics for the next week, the rest of the country is going to be on the outside looking in — and there’s a lot at stake.

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Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro desk editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He's been with Liftable Media since 2015.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He's been with Liftable Media since 2015. Largely a product of Catholic schools, who discovered Ayn Rand in college, Joe is a lifelong newspaperman who learned enough about the trade to be skeptical of every word ever written. He was also lucky enough to have a job that didn't need a printing press to do it.
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