When the Republican Liberty Caucus of Virginia endorsed Tina Frietas in her race against Senator Emmett Hanger in the upcoming June 11th Primary, RLCVA Chairman Christian Heiens described Hanger as “the worst Republican in the General Assembly”.
It isn’t hard to see why.
From tax hikes to second amendment rights. From abortion to school choice, Emmett Hanger has betrayed conservatives in the 24th District time and time again.
He has a voting record that ranks at the absolute bottom of the entire Republican Senate Caucus according to key conservative groups such as the ACU, VDCL, and the Family Foundation.
Hanger is notorious for being the “20th vote” for Democrats on every major political issue that comes before the Virginia Senate on a yearly basis. And with a record of voting with the left on key issues going back to 2004, Hanger’s liberal record stands in stark contrast to the conservative lean of the 24th District.
Despite the fact that Republicans outnumber Democrats in the 24th District by a magnitude of roughly two to one, Hanger has routinely and consistently voted with Democrats in Richmond, while at the same time lying through his teeth about his record to his Republican constituents back at home.
But the mask is finally being torn off, and it’s clear that Hanger has completely lost the support of the conservative base in the 24th District when Republican committees in Culpeper, Madison, and Greene county voted to censure him and withhold all future support for his vote to expand Obamacare in 2018.
And it isn’t just the eastern counties that are in revolt against Hanger.
Republicans in the Shenandoah Valley are up in arms over Hanger’s vote to ratify the leftist “Equal Rights Amendment”, which would remove all legal distinctions between the genders and potentially even codify abortion into the US Constitution.
So the question is, why is Hanger doing this? While it’s clear he’s either betrayed his principles or he’s never had any to begin with, the answer to his leftist voting record lies in the voter rolls of the 2015 primary, the last time Hanger was challenged for the Republican nomination to the 24th District.
And the results are astounding.
After looking at votes cast in the 2015 Republican Primary, as well as those who voted in the Democratic Presidential Primary in 2016 or the Democratic Gubernatorial Primary in 2017, it becomes obvious that Hanger keeps relying on Democrats to get him re-elected in a Republican nomination contest.
You heard that right.
Let’s break down the numbers to see just how many Democrats keep voting to make Emmett Hanger the Republican nominee.
An examination of the voter file in the 24th Senate District reveals that a total of 1,726 Democrat primary voters showed up to vote in the 2015 Republican primary.
While party registration in Virginia doesn’t exist, these 1,726 Democrats were identified by cross-referencing those who voted in the 24th District GOP primary in 2015, with those who also voted in the Democrat primary for President in 2016 or in the Democrat primary for Governor in 2017, as previously stated.
There were hotly contested Republican primaries in 2016 and 2017 as well, so any voters who chose to select the Democrat ballot that year are incredibly unlikely to be Republican general election voters.
So here we have a Republican Senator, in an overwhelmingly Republican district (one of the most conservative in the entire Commonwealth of Virginia), routinely voting with the Democrats to expand taxpayer funding for abortion, kill gun rights legislation, hike taxes, and expand Obamacare…and he does it all in order to keep getting Democrats to vote for him when it’s time to run for re-election.
Hanger knows that the Republican Primary will determine the winner of the seat in such a staunchly conservative district.
But rather than make the case to Republican voters why they should keep electing him, he’s instead more interested in courting Democrats to hijack the GOP primary and get one of their own in office.
Make no mistake, this is a hostile takeover of the Republican Party in the Valley and across Central Virginia, and it’s been happening quietly and behind the scenes for years.
Every Republican in Virginia should be outraged by this.
Every conservative in Virginia should be outraged by this.
And every voter in the 24th District should remember this on June 11th, when Hanger is betting on his Democratic buddies bailing him out in a Republican nomination contest.
The Hanger-Democrat collusion that is playing out in the 24th District is unbelievable in size and scope.
- In Augusta County, over 12% of voters who came out in the 24th District’s GOP primary were Democrats.
- In the City of Waynesboro, over 15% of voters in the Republican primary were Democrats.
- In Madison County, 16% of Republican primary voters were in fact Democrats.
- And in the City of Staunton, that number was over 26%.
A quarter of the people who helped to choose the Republican nominee for the 24th Senate District in the City of Staunton weren’t even Republicans. They weren’t even Independents for that matter.
They were Democrats.
We’ve spent the past two years hearing nothing from the left other than the endless moaning and complaining about alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government in 2016.
The only real collusion we have going on here in the Commonwealth of Virginia though has been with Democrats infiltrating the Republican nomination contest in the 24th Senate District and choosing to re-elect a liberal like Emmett Hanger in the face of conservative opposition time and time again.
This is something that even the Democrats themselves are bragging about.
Shortly after Hanger’s victory in the 24th District Republican primary in 2015, the Chairman of the Culpeper County Democratic Committee, Harold Boyd, revealed the collusion between Hanger and the Democrats to be an open fact. It’s worth noting that Culpeper is one of the countries Hanger represents.
“In the 24th State Senate Race, Republican, Emmett Hanger is running unopposed because Democrats came out in the Republican primary to make sure he won the nomination. He votes 90% of the time as a Democrat would in that seat,” writes Boyd.
And what do the Democrats get in return for turning out to vote for Hanger?
Well, actually a lot. That “90%” figure doesn’t seem too far off when you consider that since being re-elected in 2015, Hanger has:
- Joined with Democrats to kill School Choice TWICE
- Voted with the Democrats to place a liberal justice on the Virginia Supreme Court
- Killed Constitutional Carry THREE years in a row
- Single-handedly rammed through Obamacare expansion just last year
- Ripped the Hyde Amendment out of the Virginia Budget in order to funnel millions of taxpayer dollars to the abortion lobby, including Planned Parenthood.
- Voted with the Democrats to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, which would codify abortion into the US Constitution
Just one of these things would disqualify someone from winning the Republican nomination under normal circumstances.
Emmett Hanger did all of this in just four years.
It’s up to Republican voters in the 24th District to stand up, speak out, and declare with one voice that decades of betrayal at the hands of Emmett Hanger – the Democrats’ favorite Republican – is at an end.
They have it in their power to unseat this man on June 11th as Hanger faces a challenge from Tina Freitas, who has pointed to each of these votes, as well as Hanger’s record of voting with the left for decades before 2015, as reasons for her decision to primary him.
The question that will be decided on June 11th is whether or not Republicans will let Democrats steal their own primary election, or whether they’ve had enough of years of Hanger betraying them on the second amendment, taxes, life, cronyism, Obamacare, education, and more.
The time has come for Hanger to hang it up.
