Ken Cuccinelli won the vast majority of Virginia but lost Black urban centres, the DC suburbs and areas with large numbers of immigrants
A recent article in The Washington Post by Luz Lazo and Debbi Wilgorn makes the point that Third World immigrants in Virginia sided with Federal Government employees and Black voters to elect New York Leftist Terry McAuliffe governor of the Commonwealth despite winning only small, densely populated areas. Conservative Ken Cuccinelli won the vast majority of Virginia geographically, losing only largely Black urban areas, the Washington, DC suburbs and areas heavily populated by foreigners. Furthermore, the article points out that it was a sense of group solidarity and support for more immigration that drove the vote of immigrants. They were specifically appealed to in Spanish-language television ads by the McAuliffe campaign that demonised Cuccinelli. The Hispanic nationalist group La Raza was extremely active in Virginia on behalf of McAuliffe. Lazo and Wilgorn write:
Republican Ken Cuccinelli II, Virginia’s attorney general, was pilloried in a Democratic campaign commercial for a remark he made criticizing a D.C. law on pest control, which he claimed prevented the killing of rats.
“It is worse than our immigration policy,” Cuccinelli said in a 2012 radio interview. “You can’t break up rat families . . . and you can’t even kill ’em.”
In a Spanish-language television ad that aired last month, Virginia’s Democratic Party denounced the comment — which Cuccinelli’s campaign said was taken out of context.
The controversy of Cuccinelli’s position on immigration generally misses the point that the Republican candidate has moderated his once strong stand. Back in the Spring he took down the part of his website which stressed his previous positions on immigration-related policies. As Talking Points Memo noted at the time, ‘GOP leaders have been moving left in recent months on immigration.’
OUT-OF-STATE MONEY
Any analysis of the election would be incomplete without a look at the money. Two-thirds of the donations to the candidates came from out-of-State sources. And Democrat McAuliffe outspent his opponent by at least 2 to 1. Political leaders and institutions on the Left, such as former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and California’s billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer, poured money into McAuliffe’s campaign. This allowed him to blanket the State with negative commercials blasting Cuccinelli. As the Los Angeles Times noted, ‘Republican activists have not responded in kind.’ This has provoked some Tea Party supporters such as talk radio personality Rush Limbaugh to assert that Cuccinelli was ‘betrayed by his own party.’ He went on to say that ‘now the Republican establishment can run around and claim the Tea Party is an albatross around their neck.’
WHAT DOES THIS ELECTION MEAN?
It is interesting that Cuccinelli, at least perceived to be solid on immigration and well to the Right of the GOP establishment, nearly won an election in which he was heavily outspent. He took 45.3% of the votes while McAuliffe won 47.7%. Both candidates received over a million votes and in the end only 56,000 separated them. One has to also consider the fact that the Libertarian Party candidate, attorney Robert Sarvis, won 6.5% – over 145,000 votes. Sarvis is half-Chinese and is married to a Black woman. He also supports homosexual marriage. The most well-known libertarian in the United States, former congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul, endorsed Cuccinelli over Sarvis. Paul also also blamed Federal employees and the US military-industrial complex in Virginia for Cuccinelli’s narrow defeat.
The root of the trouble for Virginians is demographic. From 1990 to 2012 Whites in Virginia fell from 76% to 64% of the population, due in large part to the US policy of demographic displacement. That is a huge drop in a very short period of time. It seems clear that Cuccinelli would have won the recent election given the demographics that prevailed back in 1990. He might have won easily. An ethnic/racial map which shows the breakdown of demographic groups in Virginia matches almost perfectly the election results map. White Southerners voted for Cuccinelli while Northern transplants, Blacks and other immigrants voted for McAuliffe. The regions that are heavily Ulster-Scots went overwhelmingly for the Republican candidate. The media may describe the election in terms of policy differences and ideological labels, but in the end this election (like nearly all US elections) came down to ethnicity and culture. Simply put, White Southerners voted one way and Blacks, Northerners and foreigners voted against them.
