1. Republicans will have a hard time portraying Democrats as dangerous socialists.
That seems to be the favorite Republican line these days, but it wonât work here.
Former Gov. Terry McAuliffe is a corporate-friendly Democrat who, as governor, stood alongside Dominion Energy executives to endorse the now-abandoned Atlantic Coast Pipeline. (He also endorsed, and presumably still endorses, the Mountain Valley Pipeline.)
The actual socialist in the field, Lee Carter, couldnât even muster 3% of the vote (and was a double loser because he lost his renomination campaign for the House of Delegates, as well).
In all previous gubernatorial elections (with the exception of Mills Godwin in 1973), voters have had to guess what kind of governor the candidate will be.
Editorial: Roanoke needs a statue to Linwood Holton roanoke.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from roanoke.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
A little more than a half-century ago, conservative Democrats â back then there were such things â wrote a loophole into the state constitution that had the effect of legalizing the disparities between the stateâs poorest schools and its most affluent ones.
That breed of Democrat is no more but strangely thereâs been a bipartisan agreement in the General Assembly to preserve their constitutionally approved inequities.
The past few years, a conservative Republican â state Sen. Bill Stanley, R-Franklin County â has taken it upon himself to challenge that disparity, which falls most heavily on schools in Republican-voting rural areas and Democratic-voting central cities. His efforts, which logically ought to form the basis for a bipartisan coalition, instead forged a different sort of coalition, as members of both parties voted to deep-six both his calls for a constitutional rewrite and a $3 billion bond issue for school construction.
The deadly storming of the U.S. Capitol by a mob that we should properly call domestic terrorists irrevocably changes the politics of the day in the same way that the