Received this e-mail today from former presidential candidate, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D. MA), in support of Terry McAuliffe’s (D. VA) gubernatorial campaign:
The Virginia Governor’s race is coming down to the wire, with The Cook Political Report now calling it a toss-up — and the stakes could not be higher.
On the one hand, Democrat Terry McAuliffe has put forward plan after plan to help Virginia families — from protecting voting rights to increasing teacher pay.
And his Trump-endorsed opponent? The Washington Post said Glenn Youngkin is “undermining democracy” by “playing footsie” with Donald Trump’s so-called ‘big lie.’
These are difficult times for so many in Virginia and our country. We need to elect leaders who will stand up for working families and our democracy.
That’s Terry McAuliffe, and he needs our help.
Please donate if you can to Terry’s campaign today. Early voting is already underway in Virginia, and Terry needs our help so he can get out the vote in the final weeks of the campaign.
Your support is especially important because Terry’s opponent is trying to use his vast personal wealth to buy the race.
In fact, Glenn Youngkin outraised Terry at a recent filing deadline only because he wrote his campaign huge checks totaling more than $4 million.
The Virginia governor’s office shouldn’t be sold off to the highest bidder. Our democracy is not for sale.
Terry can stop him, but he’ll need our help to match Youngkin’s bucket loads of cash.
So I am asking. The average small-dollar donation to Terry’s campaign is just under $30. Can you chip in that amount or any amount meaningful to you right now?
Thanks for being a part of this,
Elizabeth
Click here to donate to McAuliffe’s campaign.
The Washington Post has a great piece out about McAuliffe’s record as Governor and it’s a great reminder why Virginia needs him back:
McAuliffe returned to Virginia politics in 2013 to run for governor against hyper-conservative Ken Cuccinelli. His narrow victory gave him four years with a Republican legislature. McAuliffe likes to boast about the record number of vetoes he issued in his term — 120 — to make the point that he thwarted Republican efforts on issues such as tightening abortion restrictions or loosening gun laws.
Despite the partisan conflict, even Republican lawmakers used to praise McAuliffe for his tireless economic development efforts, which involved more travel to woo companies than any other Virginia governor.
And despite his earlier image as a rowdy politico, McAuliffe won plaudits for being a conscientious and talented manager.
“He ran the government well,” said Aubrey Layne, a Republican who served as secretary of transportation under McAuliffe and went on to serve as finance secretary under Gov. Ralph Northam (D).
Layne credited McAuliffe with stocking state agencies with good managers, delegating where appropriate and holding people accountable.
“It was more of a business approach in the way he interacted with me versus a more political approach,” Layne said. He noted that McAuliffe undertook a bipartisan effort with the General Assembly to create a new funding system for transportation projects called Smart Scale, which awards points based on need.
As the system was being put in place, McAuliffe held off on allocating transportation funds for an entire year — forgoing a chance to win political points around the state. “I can’t think of many other people who would’ve [done that],” Layne said. “This label that he’s just all politics — I didn’t see it.”
He did see McAuliffe’s wrath, though, which is the flip side of his boisterous personality. One year, Layne released information about an unpopular new tolling program for I-66 just a few weeks before Election Day. He got a call from the governor. “I could hear him screaming through the phone at me,” Layne recalled with a laugh.
“He was right, I could have delayed it a few weeks,” he said. But after that one dressing down, McAuliffe never mentioned it again.
By the end of his term, McAuliffe claimed credit for creating some 200,000 jobs and boosting education funding to record amounts. But two major goals had eluded him: He failed to get Republicans to go along with expanding Medicaid, and though he says he wrote the proposal for Amazon’s HQ2 headquarters in Arlington, his term ended before the company made its decision.
His successor — Northam, who had been McAuliffe’s lieutenant governor — landed both.
The Washington Post also has a piece out reminding voters about Youngkin’s obsession election audits:
“I think we need to make sure that people trust these voting machines,” he said the other day, thereby lending his winking support to Republican conspiracy theorists enamored of the lie that voting machines are rigged, and allying himself with party fantasists elsewhere who continue to press for dodgy state “audits” of the 2020 elections.
Mr. Youngkin plays his game with feigned naivete. Gosh, he says, businesses are audited routinely, so why not voting machines? In fact, the state’s Department of Elections already coordinates an annual post-election audit of voting machines; in last year’s elections it found the results were accurate, which was not exactly a surprise.
At the same time, Mr. Youngkin, a wealthy former private equity executive, has been happy to have the campaign trail surrogate services of one of the state’s most extreme and polarizing figures, Republican state Sen. Amanda F. Chase (Chesterfield). Ms. Chase, who has embraced the “big lie” that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, says out loud what Mr. Youngkin hints at with his double-talk — that election fraud is rife, that Virginia’s audit was phony, and that the buffoonery of Arizona’s election audit, which she visited while it was underway, is a model for the nation. She says electing Mr. Youngkin is “the single most important thing” Virginia can do to advance election integrity.
Mr. Youngkin’s rhetoric is more deft than Ms. Chase’s, and more subtle than Mr. Trump’s, but the intent is the same — to affirm and legitimize doubts about whether U.S. elections can be trusted, and therefore about American democracy itself. It is pernicious, and serves only to accelerate the Republican Party’s flight from the constitutional order.