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Tag: virginia
Glenn Youngkin

Youngkin And Virginia GOP Now Promote Early Voting They Tried To Repeal (VIDEO)

The blog Blue Virginia reports that Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and other Republican leaders have launched a campaign to urge Republican voters to take advantage of easy-voting laws they pushed to repeal.

The Republican Party of Virginia shared a video on Tuesday in which Youngkin encourages his supporters to vote early in the November 2023 legislative elections. With every seat in the Legislature up for election, voters will decide whether to give the GOP majorities in the Virginia Senate and House of Delegates and enable them to roll back reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ equality, climate protections, gun safety, and voting rights.

“We’re making Virginia the best place to live, work, and raise a family, and to take us to the next level, I need your early vote this year,” he says. “We can’t go into our elections down thousands of votes, and you can secure your vote before Election Day. Join the permanent absentee list or make a plan to vote early by mail or in person.”

Youngkin directs voters to a website paid for by the Republican Party of Virginia with links for early voting options.

Between 2020 and 2021, when Democrats held majorities in both houses of the Virginia General Assembly and the governorship, they enacted more than a dozen laws aimed at expanding voting rights and making it easier for all citizens to vote. These included changes to allow voting by mail without an excuse and without a postage stamp on the envelope, increasing the number of sites for early voting, and permitting voters to sign up for an annual automatic vote-by-mail list, all passed over strong GOP opposition.

After Youngkin and a narrow GOP majority in the House of Delegates were elected in 2021, they quickly moved to repeal the laws and make it harder to vote. In the 2023 legislative session, they passed bills along party lines to prohibit drop boxes for ballots, reduce the period for in-person early voting to just two weeks, and do away with the automatic vote-by-mail list. Those bills each died in the Democratic-led Senate.

Former President Donald Trump, who endorsed Youngkin in 2021, has made opposition to easy voting a key part of the GOP agenda. In 2020, Trump falsely claimed that voting by mail causes fraud and chaos in American elections. Like Trump, Youngkin has also cast doubt on the integrity of elections.

“It’s blatant hypocrisy,” House Democratic Leader Don Scott said in a statement shared with the American Independent Foundation. “This is a party that is on the record against early voting. They are doing this whole push to pull the wool over our constituents’ eyes and hide from the fact that they’ve worked to make it harder for Virginians to vote at every turn. They’ve undermined our democratic systems for years and if allowed the majority, they will vote to restrict voting access.”

Democratic Delegate Cia Price told the American Independent Foundation on Tuesday that Republicans should apologize for their hypocrisy:

I would be more thrilled if the MAGA Republican Extremists decided to stop proliferating dangerous and wildly false claims about our free and fair elections systems. Their actions have put lives at risk and undermined the confidence in our entire democracy. I demand alongside their calls for GOP members to utilize the early voting and vote-by-mail options, that Democrats have instituted, apologies for the previous falsehoods. We also need apologies for and cooperation in undoing the damage of racially and politically gerrymandered districts across the nation. We need their votes for the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. We need them to halt their court cases to invalidate valid voters from voting roles. We need their votes to help end prison gerrymandering and for automatic voter rights restoration. And so much more. Until then, this is nothing more than political games from people only focused on using any means available to grab power from people with whom they disagree or devalue.

The Democratic Party of Virginia also called out Republicans for their “change of heart (or cynical political stunt).”

“We welcome the Virginia Republicans’ newly discovered interest in promoting democracy,” press secretary Liam Watson said in a statement. “Of course, we wish they had shown up in support of early voting and vote-by-mail years ago, instead of consistently voting against reforms designed to strengthen democracy in the commonwealth.”

Reprinted with permission from American Independent.

Virginia GOP Nominates Christian Nationalist Preacher For Vacant House Seat

Virginia GOP Nominates Christian Nationalist Preacher For Vacant House Seat

Two-time losing candidate Leon Benjamin will again try to win the seat left open by the death of Democratic Rep. Donald McEachin.

Voters in Virginia's 4th Congressional District will choose a U.S. representative to succeed the late Democratic Rep. Donald McEachin in a special election ending Feb. 21.

On Saturday, Republicans in the district nominated Leon Benjamin, a right-wing theocrat who has twice lost decisively in previous races for the seat.

Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears, and Attorney General Jason Miyares all endorsed Benjamin in his most recent campaign, leading up to his loss to McEachin on Nov. 8. McEachin died on Nov. 28.

The district includes the city of Richmond, some of its suburbs, and areas to its south. Its population is about 16 points more Democratic-leaning than the median U.S. House district, according to the Cook Political Report.

Benjamin, who holds the positions of chief apostle and presiding prelate of New Life Harvest Churches in Richmond, was an informal religious adviser to former President Donald Trump. Benjamin's campaign website calls him the "right choice for a strong Virginia" and emphasizes his "commitment to protect and restore your God-given and Constitutional rights."

That "commitment" has included opposing equal rights for LGBTQ Americans. In 2010, Benjamin participated in a webcast with anti-LGBTQ hate groups to oppose lifting the military's ban on gay and lesbian people serving openly, RightWingWatch reported.

A Christian nationalist, Benjamin has urged the United States to move toward becoming a theocracy. Benjamin subscribes to the "Seven Mountains Mandate," which holds that the Christian Church is meant, as he put it in a speech, to "rule and reign in the Earth."

In the speech, delivered at a right-wing "ReAwaken America" conspiracy rally in July 2021, Benjamin said:

What happens when the Church is not apostolically uniformed? We don't have the true mission of what Jesus said in Matthew 28:19, which was, 'Go ye out into all the world' — go ye into government, go into education, go into economy, go into sports and entertainment, go into media, go into a religion — 'and teach all nations and baptize them.' That means we should be baptizing presidents!

Benjamin has embraced false claims that Trump was the legitimate winner of the 2020 presidential election and attended Trump's Jan. 6, 2021, "Stop the Steal" rally in Washington.

He has also baselessly claimed to have been a victim of election fraud.

"I ran for Congress in 2020, and they did steal my election," Benjamin claimed in the July 2021 speech.

He lost that race to McEachin in a 61.6%-38.2% landslide.

In January, he told another ReAwaken America rally that a Christian leader would not encourage people to wear face masks or get vaccinated to curb the spread of COVID-19:

"You have no more chances unless you repent for telling people to take the virus, to take the shots, to shut your churches down, come on, to wear a mask. You are a false prophet. ... The Devil is a liar! God would never cover the mouth of a true prophet!"

Benjamin has dismissed the threat of climate change and has objected to using taxpayer revenue to address the issue, according to the progressive site Blue Virginia.

"Taxing people and corporations into oblivion does NOTHING to mitigate climate change!" Benjamin tweeted in February. "You cannot tax Mother Nature."

On his campaign site, Benjamin calls for increased oil and gas drilling while claiming the nation can achieve "energy independence" by restarting the Keystone XL pipeline project to import tar sands oil from Canada.

On the issue of education, the site calls for the removal of "all CRT teachings" from public schools, while also saying, "We must also teach our history — the good, bad, and the ugly."

Critical race theory is an approach used principally at the college level to examine the history of race and racism in America. Republicans and other conservatives have applied the term to any racism-related teaching they don't like. CRT is generally not used in elementary and high school curriculums.

The campaign website says that taxpayers should pay to send kids to private schools, fund parochial education, and pay for home-schooling: "Whether a parent chooses homeschooling, private school, charter school, or public school, aid and support should not be diminished. If money follows the child, parents have flexibility to select schools based on what is best for their children, and the quality of education everywhere improves."

According to a report published by the website Chalkbeat in 2020, studies have shown that school privatization efforts like voucher programs are linked with lower state test scores.

A campaign spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Benjamin's positions.

Benjamin helped lead a group of right-wing clergy in supporting unsuccessful Georgia Republican Senate nominee Herschel Walker in his runoff election this month, even after Walker said he was "accountable" for alleged domestic abuse and found to have routinely lied about his credentials.

Democrats will select their nominee to face Benjamin on Tuesday.

"The path to a stronger fourth district does not pass through Leon Benjamin's mire of election denialism and xenophobia," Democratic Party of Virginia spokesperson Liam Watson said in a press statement on Saturday.

Reprinted with permission from American Independent.

Mark Meadows Was Registered To Vote In Three States At Once, Officials Say

Mark Meadows Was Registered To Vote In Three States At Once, Officials Say

Mark Meadows, former White House Chief of Staff for the Trump administration and purveyor of election fraud conspiracies, is facing increased scrutiny and fresh allegations of voter fraud after the Washington Post reported Friday that he was registered to vote in three states at the same time.

Meadows was registered to vote in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia at the same time for three weeks, election records obtained by the Post show. However, Meadows was purged from North Carolina’s voter roles last week by the State Board of Elections in an investigation by North Carolina’s attorney general and the State Bureau of Investigations into whether he had committed voter fraud.

The investigation kicked into gear after a New Yorker report that Meadows had registered to vote with the address of a mobile home he didn’t own and never lived in. The previous owner of the Scaly Mountain mobile home was shocked to learn that Meadows had listed that address because his wife had spent only two nights there, despite renting the place for a few months, the New Yorker added.

According to the Post, Meadows is still a registered voter in both South Carolina and Virginia. A representative for South Carolina Elections, Chris Whitmire, told the AP that Meadows and his wife, Debbie Meadows, registered to vote in March 2022, two weeks after the New Yorker published its report.

“[March 2022] is when [Meadows] became active,” Whitmire added in his response to the AP, implying that Meadows had yet to vote in South Carolina.

Meadows was a congressman from January 2013 until March 2020, after which he took up the post of then-President’s Trump fourth and final chief of staff. After Trump lost the 2020 presidential elections, Meadows joined a far-right institute that purported to promote “election integrity” and pushed lies of election fraud.

In an August 2020 interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Meadows whined about the inaccuracy in states’ voter rolls, saying, “I don’t want my vote or anyone else’s to be disenfranchised. … Do you realize how inaccurate the voter rolls are, with people just moving around? … Anytime you move, you’ll change your driver’s license, but you don’t call up and say, ‘Hey, by the way, I’m re-registering.’”

Apparently, Meadows didn’t tell Virginia he was re-registering when he signed up to vote in the Virginia gubernatorial elections the following year, a race Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin ended up winning.

Voter role inaccuracies evidently didn’t matter to Meadows anymore when he registered to vote in South Carolina last month, despite already being a registered voter in Virginia and North Carolina at the time.

In July 2021, Meadows splashed nearly $1.6 million on a three-story waterfront home in South Carolina, per the Post. While using the abandoned motor home in North Carolina as an address for his voter records, Meadows sold for $370,000 a Sapphire home where his mother lived and from which she voted for many years.

A representative for Mark Meadows refused to comment, and requests for comment left at the retirement community where his mother now resides went unanswered.

New Virginia Poll Shows Youngkin Attack On Schools Is Backfiring

New Virginia Poll Shows Youngkin Attack On Schools Is Backfiring

Republicans are on the offensive over education, seeking to use a schools-focused culture war to take Democrats down in the 2022 midterms, and Democrats are predictably fumbling the response. But while some polls suggest that Republicans succeeding at dragging Democrats down on the issue, they’re also making themselves downright toxic.

Take Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, supposedly swept into office by parents angry about mask mandates and teaching about race in schools. A new poll from Christopher Newport University finds Youngkin’s approval rating underwater, with 41% of Virginia voters approving and 43% disapproving just over a month after his inauguration. “We have some history being made today. Glenn Youngkin is the first Virginia Governor to ever poll with a majority disapproval rating anytime in his first year in office,” Democratic state Sen. Louise Lucas gleefully noted. “He did it in just over a month!”

The same poll finds that majorities of voters support teaching about how racism impacts society, oppose a ban on critical race theory, and think school mask mandates should be determined by health data and information from health experts.

That’s one poll, but the mask portion of it, at least, echoes a September 2021 poll of Virginia and other, more recent national polling on that issue. Similarly, multiple national polls find majority support for teaching about the history of racism in the United States—though Republicans are something of an exception to that.

All that said, while Republicans are not winning majorities of voters over to their positions on the specific educational culture wars they’re waging, they are doing what Republicans do best: making the whole issue so ugly and conflictual that voters are disgusted with everyone. Sowing doubt and fear. A November 2021 poll found significant erosion in Democrats’ traditional advantage on education.

And while Republicans wage a cynical, dishonest, but very well-funded campaign against public education—with the ultimate goal of defunding public schools—Democrats are fumbling. There is so much material to use to go on the offensive against Republicans on these issues, starting with the fact that Republicans want to defund public schools while most people express confidence in their local schools. Republicans want to ban books. They want to put kids at risk through anything-goes public health policies.

Republican politicians support the people making death threats against school board members and barraging schools with baseless legal claims. They want to drive teachers out of the profession by intimidating them and making their jobs harder. These creepers want to put cameras in classrooms and watch what your kids are doing as part of that effort to intimidate teachers.

But despite the impression you might get from the media, which is so heavily driven by white people making noise, there already is grassroots pushback. Black parents have long had concerns about how race is taught and handled in schools. Students across the country are seeing racism in their schools and fighting back. Republicans may have the biggest partisan platform in Fox News, but the rest of the media should refuse to just follow along. And Democrats? Democrats must show another way, or prepare to lose.

It’s time for Democrats to be vocal and loud in defense of public education. Republicans are not going to let this drop. The only way to win is to fight, not to cover our heads and hope it goes away.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos