Republican Campaign in Virginia All About Preserving "Our" Confederate Statues
TIM MURPHY
OCT. 26, 2017 11:02 AM
Virginia will choose its next governor in less than two weeks. On the surface, the dynamics of the race seem pretty favorable for Democrats. The state is doing very well economically under Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe, who is term-limited, and President Donald Trump is extremely unpopular. The Democratic nominee is McAuliffes second-in-command, Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam. And the presidents party tends to do poorly in the first midterm and off-year elections.
So Republican gubernatorial nominee Ed Gillespie has tried something different. Instead of awkwardly triangulating between his president and the opposition in any substantive way, he has simply adopted Trumps campaign wholesaleby connecting Northam to a Latino gang, MS-13, and appealing desperately to white nationalists in the campaigns final stretch.
... Gillespies most recent campaign ad is the second spot this month that attacks Northam for proposing to take down Richmond's memorials to Confederate generals ...
"Ralph Northam will take our statues down," the narrator says in the latest ad. "Ed Gillespie will preserve them" ...
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/10/the-republican-campaign-in-virginia-is-all-about-preserving-our-confederate-statues/