The last major election of 2017 happens next Tuesday, and the biggest catch is the governorship of Virginia.



McAuliffe's approval rating is above water and the state has a low unemployment rate of just 3.8 percent. But Democrats expect the race to tighten in battleground Virginia, and they can't afford to lose one of just 15 governorships they hold — especially in the only Southern state Hillary Clinton carried last year and where Donald Trump remains unpopular.

So if the race is a must-win you might think that the Dems would learn from 2016 and not make the same mistakes again, right? Nope.



Clinton was guilty of “malpractice” in how she conducted her 2016 Presidential campaign, Greenberg told me. Even worse, he said, Democrats were repeating the same political mistakes a year later. “Look at Virginia right now,” Greenberg said, as soon as we sat down in his second-floor office. “We have a candidate”—Ralph Northam, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee—“running as Hillary Clinton. He is running on the same kind of issues, and has the same kind of view of the world. It’s the Republicans who talk about the economy, not the Democrats.” This was the approach that doomed Clinton against Trump. The electorate was angry in 2016 and remains angry now, Greenberg said, and Northam, a Norfolk doctor, didn’t get it. Neither did Clinton and the team of Obama veterans who staffed her Brooklyn headquarters. “If you live in the metro areas with the élites, you don’t wake up angry about what’s happening in people’s lives,” Greenberg said.

Oh, sure. The Democrats could run on issues like the economy, wars, eliminating corruption, but why would they want to do that when you can run on Identity Politics?



Recently, a few high-profile events have illustrated the Democratic Party’s overdependence on the race card and Democrats’ need to wallow in identity politics.

...Most recently, in the Virginia governor’s race, Democrats are painting Republican Ed Gillespie, who I’ve known and contributed to for years, as a bigot. The Ralph Northam campaign is standing by a mailer they sent out depicting Gillespie and Trump as white nationalists akin to those who marched in Charlottesville with tiki torches yelling hate speech. And only after the tragedy in New York City yesterday did the Latino Victory Fund pull its vile ad that portrays a white Gillespie supporter as being on the prowl in a pickup truck to hunt down and attack Latino and Muslim children. Think about that. Can you imagine the outcry if Republicans had run an ad featuring someone with dark skin threatening white children? It would rightfully be universally condemned. But with Democrats today – crickets.

Stay classy Democrats.

To be fair, Democrats are also running against Trump, because that worked so well in 2016.

And in Georgia earlier this year.

And now, since the Democratic establishment has insisted in not giving an inch to progressives (who wanted someone else), the race is looking much as you would expect.



The Virginia Democratic Party is blowing their shot in spectacular fashion — culminating in printing literature which excluded their black lieutenant governor nominee, sending mail comparing Republican gubernatorial nominee Ed Gillespie to white supremacists in Charlottesville, and even comparing a Latina Republican House of Delegates candidate to a ravenous dog and the Halloween character Jason. Now, a Hampton University poll has Republican nominee Ed Gillespie winning by 8 percent going into the last two weeks.

Tom Perez is so confident of victory that he has downplayed the impact of Northam losing.

I just took a look at the GOS. Not one single word about Virginia. Almost every single post is about Trump. And then they wonder why they keep losing.