Newly elected Virginia Lieutenant Governor, Justin Fairfax, greets the audience at his victory rally at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. (Photo: Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)
Trump thumped in Virginia — bigly
One year after President Trump rode a campaign of white nationalism into the White House, the American people struck back. Decisive Democratic wins for governor in New Jersey and Virginia, not to mention the Democratic victories for lieutenant governor and attorney general, are a clear sign of the electorate’s disquiet with Trump’s low-road Twitter presidency.
But three other signs come to mind in the afterglow of Election Day 2017. Here are my quick thoughts.
Borrowing pages from Trump’s white-nationalist playbook will hurt you.
Nothing was more disturbing and degrading of the presidency than Trump’s both-sides nonsense in response to the ugly white supremacist rallies in Charlottesville, where Heather Heyer was allegedly killed by a racist who plowed his car into a crowd of counter-protesters. That Ed Gillespie adopted Trump’s rhetoric on monuments to Confederate generals and tried to scare voters with loose talk of Latino gangs clearly was a bridge too far the people of the commonwealth. What’s even more pathetic is that a man with a stellar reputation and good name such as Gillespie threw it in the gutter to try to win on the backs of white grievance.
No, Democrats don’t need to have a progressive, Bernie-anointed candidate to win.
Tom Perriello lost the primary to now-Governor-elect Ralph Northam, a centrist anchored in the establishment. Perriello was endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who ran for president in the Democratic Party in 2016 but doesn’t see fit to join the party. But Perriello didn’t disappear. He worked hard on Northam’s behalf and not grudgingly. I couldn’t look at Twitter in the run-up to the election without seeing tweets from Perriello out on the campaign trail. Thus proving that a vanquished primary opponent who works hard to help his victor during the general election is essential.
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Related:
The shifts in Virginia voting that handed Trump an embarrassing defeat
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A look at the winners and losers of the top US races (AP)
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