Gov. Northam Vetoes LaRock’s Election Integrity Bill

Too many Virginians are still too solely focused on what the Democrats are doing to us here in the state and in Richmond. They complain they are contaminating our election primaries, they are pushing Medicaid expansion, they are vetoing legislation, etc. Folks that is the nature of the beast and has been for some time and you aren’t going to change that fact.

One might ask though how have they managed to gain such clear and close to total political superiority in the state in little over eight years! It took decades in California, New York and Massachusetts for example to grow such Democratic party dominance, here in Virginia we are talking about a little over eight years.

Many use what I consider the broken argument that it is all the fault of the expansion of the state’s federal workers, avoiding the reality that the federal worker has been in place in Virginia for decades and the Democratic party’s penetration has occurred across ALL of the state not just the northern Virginia suburbs. So what does that leave you with?

I look at the Republican Party itself that has devolved into endless partisan fraction squabbling and almost complete isolation and dissociation from its once strong Virginia voting base. It’s political messaging is no longer resonating and it’s reliance on recycled candidates or unknown no name candidates is a repetitive failure at the polls. Finally, and perhaps most serious is the strong impression among the many in the Republican voting base that the state party (and many of its candidates) themselves do not actually fully support the existing Republican national administration and its President elect. In other words too many state Republicans voters believe that they still hold strong Republican values but it is the state party and many associated opinion leaders that have left the party house.

I was in NYC in the early 1970s observing an early earth day street demonstration on a beautiful spring day lunch break when I noticed a march poster that sums up for me today’s situation most succinctly almost fifty years later. The poster read “We have met the enemy and it is us”.

Now that is a problem but filling ever election slot requires running a diversity of candidate types and candidate perspectives and the current party is not much interested (if at all) in doing either. They spend more attention taking internal secret votes on banning the party’s non clones than working to determine where they could be successful. I believe Darwin would identify as a highly inbred population that is not well suited for adaption and therefore long term survival.

I’m not willing to grant that urbanization=Democratic Party dominance. Otherwise we all might just as well fold up our tents and go home because mega urban centers are the future not the exception. Republican messaging can target mass urban centers just as well as Democratic its just that we rarely make the effort to do so and don’t have much to say when the opportunity does arise.

So is that why we apportion and weigh representation by GOP turnout and vote for our party Mass Meetings, Conventions, Canvass’ and Party Leadership??