IN THE VIRGINIA RACE, NYT EDITION
IN MEDIA, VIRGINIA GOVERNOR'S RACE
The New York Times previews the Virginia gubernatorial election in a good story by Jeremy Peters and Matthew Cullen. On the one hand, they report:
“We are substantially leading on the early vote, but we cannot take our foot off the gas,” Mr. McAuliffe told a crowd on Saturday in Norfolk, where he met with labor leaders who were planning to spend the day knocking on doors.
He and his allies took it as an encouraging sign that more than 1.1 million of Virginia’s 5.9 million registered voters had cast ballots as of Sunday morning, according to the Virginia Department of Elections.
On the other hand, they pick up on differences that can be observed on the campaign trail:
[T]he energy this weekend was more palpable among Mr. Youngkin and his supporters, who have heeded the Republican’s calls for a new direction in the state’s political leadership after more than a decade of Democratic governors. Mr. Youngkin has framed the election as an opportunity for Virginians to send a message to the nation that Democrats are out of step with the majority of Americans on a number of issues, from how racial inequality is taught in schools to coronavirus-related mandates.
“The nation’s eyes are on Virginia,” Mr. Youngkin told an energetic crowd of several hundred people who came to see him on Saturday afternoon in Manassas Park, a city near the suburban Democratic stronghold of Fairfax County outside Washington. In his speeches, he often ascribes a larger significance to his campaign, saying, “This is no longer a campaign. It’s a movement.”
Although it has banked a lot of votes with a little help from its friends and may well march forward to victory, the McAuliffe campaign is a study in the political equivalent in mortuary science:
For Mr. McAuliffe, the visit to Norfolk was one of several stops he made in southeastern Virginia, where he drew small to modest crowds of 30 to 100 people. The largest crowd on Saturday was at a Black church in Portsmouth, where Mr. McAuliffe was joined by Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, the civil rights leader.
President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Barack Obama have all visited Virginia as part of the McAuliffe campaign’s push to boost turnout, especially among core Democratic constituencies such as Black voters. But generating enthusiasm has been difficult at times, which was evident on Saturday at a McAuliffe event in Chesapeake. When Mr. McAuliffe went to speak, the crowd yelled “Terry, Terry, Terry” only after a campaign staffer started the chant to ramp up the energy in the room.
Peters and Cullen omit any mention of Friday’s disgusting Democratic hoax allegedly perpetrated under the auspices of the Lincoln Project and a Democratic operative, who have taken the fall. I don’t think the Times has gotten around to it. If you get your news from the Times, the whole thing is a deep secret. By contrast, the Wall Street Journal runs the editorial “A dirty campaign trick in Virginia.”
It is the kind of story the Times would dig into and hammer if Republicans (real Republicans) were involved and a Democrat was the target. The Democrats seek to portray Youngkin as some kind of a racist, but the story includes the Times photo of black Youngkin supporters at Saturday’s rally in Springfield. At least they aren’t buying it.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/11/in-the-virginia-race-nyt-edition.php
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