Once upon a time — not too long ago, in fact — Virginia was touted as a breeding ground for the kind of Republican who could go far: commonsense conservatives who masked their right-wing beliefs behind veneers of pleasant blandness, and thus were able to appeal to folks across party lines in the suburbs. Dudes like George Allen, Jim Gilmore, and of course, the one whom the national GOP seemed most eager to vault to national prominence, "Transvaginal Bob" McDonnell.
Ah, those were the days. Republicans haven't won a statewide race in the Old Dominion in a decade, and last night's primary results just added insult to injury. A white supremacist Trumpster, Corey Stewart, grabbed the GOP nomination for Senate, eking out a win just a point or so over Nick Freitas, who as a state legislator was the more "establishment" candidate.
Virginia Republicans are privately whining to Larry Sabato today, and the media have pretty much summed it up like this: Racist hater Stewart will repulse all the moderate and cross-over voters that the GOP so desperately needs in the fall — not to beat Senator Tim Kaine, which now seems impossible, but to save endangered members of their Congressional delegation, like Barbara Comstock. On top of that, Democrats just nominated a passel of strong candidates. So it sounds like the Virginia GOP is toast.
We cats are tickled about that, but it's not escaped our notice that the punditheads and pontificators, in selling the narrative of the state party versus Stewart, are missing an important part of the story.
Coming in third behind Freitas in the primary was total nutcase E.W. Jackson. (He's not only crazy, he's the Harold Stassen of Virginia's extreme right. He just keeps running, and losing, and running, and losing.)
Anyway, Jackson got 12 percent of the vote. You know what? Add that to Stewart's near-45 percent, and you have a Republican electorate that's 57 percent haters and whackjobs. That's in a primary, kids — not a party convention, which can get way more fringe-y.
With numbers like that, mainline Republicans have to do more than wring their hands. They need to take stock of themselves and figure out exactly how long they're going to allow racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism and xenophobia to rule their party. It's going to take courage to snatch the GOP back from the Trumpsters. It may take running the teabaggers out of the party altogether. But they need to do it: Banish the haters back to the shadows where they belong, or face oblivion. We cats HISS.
(IMAGE: Just in case you're wondering, Stewart is from Minnesota.)
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