Monday Roundup and What We’re Hearing

We’re in the middle of convention and campaign season here in Virginia, and there’s been a lot of movement in a variety of places, including at the state and the local levels. Here’s a brief recap of what Bearing Drift has been hearing on a variety of issues.

Trump IS NOT Coming to Virginia

GOP front-runner Donald Trump will apparently be making a surprise appearance at the RPV Convention in Harrisonburg this weekend.  Get your protest signs or your trucker hats ready, depending on which side you’re on.

According to RPV, press reports that Trump was coming to the convention this weekend were bogus.

RPV Chairman’s Race

Vince Haley’s on-again-off-again-on-again race for Chairman has plodded along.  While their campaign is being stonewalled by RPV on official requests for things like delegate lists, walkthroughs of the convention location and sign placement as Jim Hoeft noted last week, Haley is continuing to go through the motions of running an actual campaign.  Last Saturday night, Haley held a conference call with GOP unit chairs.  The call was sparsely attended according to one unit chair who participated, with only 16 unit chairs out of the nearly two hundred in Virginia participating.  The call was poorly received, according to that Chair, who questioned why he even did it, and noted that Haley was heavily reliant on responses from supporters like Aaron Gulbransen.

Throughout the weekend, the astro-turf group “Your Conservative Future,” which is run by former Gulbransen employee and non-Virginia resident Zach Gelpey, has been sending out multiple emails and funding robocalls that have landed in the inboxes and voice-mails of many delegates, which has prompted a variety of responses from the grassroots, most of which appear to be negative.  In the last email Gelpey appeared to claim that his efforts working as a local field coordinator for Americans for Prosperity single-handedly defeated Rich Boucher in the 9th Congressional District in 2010.  This raised a few eyebrows in the Fighting 9th, which tends to give credit to Morgan Griffith for defeating Boucher.  He also played the religion card, dredging up the Whitbeck anti-semitism allegations from three years ago.  As noted, the attacks don’t seem to be doing anything more than annoying most delegates, and have pushed a number of people, including our own Matt Colt Hall, into endorsing Whitbeck.

The multiple emails and robocalls from this group, which is clearly connected to Haley, also seem to undermine the Haley “campaign” contention that they don’t have access to the delegate list.

GOP Response to Governor McAuliffe’s Action on Felon Voting Rights

The GOP response to Governor McAuliffe’s unilateral action to restore the voting rights of over 200,000 violent felons by executive order has been all over the place.  McAuliffe once again picked up another tool from the Washington playbook and pushed through an executive action that then-Governor Tim Kaine did not take in 2010 after his legal team determined it was an improper example of executive overreach.  The resulting hue and cry raised by Republicans demonstrated the difficulty GOP elected officials face in trying to come up with coherent messaging.

GOP leaders were all over the map on the issue.  Some, like Speaker Howell, focused on the executive overreach, noting that Kaine declined to take the same step that McAuliffe did.  Others chose to attack the idea of violent felons being allowed to vote at all, citing concern for their victims.

Unfortunately, almost all of them stepped right into the trap McAuliffe set.  Almost all of them accused McAuliffe of a cynical move designed to boost Hillary Clinton’s chances in November.  This was exactly what McAuliffe wanted them to say, as he quickly responded with the obvious rejoinder that Republicans should “quit complaining” and go try to win the votes of these new voters.

What few, if any, noted was that McAuliffe’s efforts here were essentially rolling back a Jim Crow era law, which meant this was a law that was originally put in place by racist Democrats in the post-Reconstruction era in Virginia specifically designed as part of the mesh of laws passed to keep poor whites and blacks from voting.  Essentially, our Democratic Governor finally reversed a policy that his Democratic predecessors had used to maintain their control over Virginia politics, through disenfranchisement of blacks and poor whites.  Essentially, Governor McAuliffe is seeking credit for fixing a problem his own party created.

The Governor’s point is valid, however – it’s up to Republican candidates to go out and make the case to these newly enfranchised voters to gain their support. The best first step is probably not demonizing all of them as rapists and murderers, given that rapists and murderers make up a tiny percentage of the felons who will receive their voting rights back.

Debate Rages Over Where to Poop

Now that we have solved every other major problem facing America, we can turn to the most important issue of the day – where to poop.

Of everything that happened over the weekend, one issue stood out that had social media buzzing over the weekend was the on-going debate over which bathrooms transgendered people should be using.  Thanks to Target Corporation’s announcement that they had instructed their employees to allow transgendered people to “use the restroom or fitting room facility that corresponds with their gender identity.”

Given the response on social media, you’d think Target had announced that they would be randomly killing customers in their restrooms.  One Virginia GOPer wrote on Facebook “[m]y wife will not be allowed to shop at Target anymore. You better believe if my wife gets raped, someone in management will loose some teeth!!!!”

This is why we can’t have nice things.

Kasich and Cruz Team Up to Stop Trump

Finally, we saw continued action in the Presidential campaign over the weekend.  Despite being essentially mathematically eliminated, Ted Cruz’s team trumpeted their continuing efforts to pick up delegates in places where primaries have been held and they’ve lost, or in states with old-school style convention systems.

Despite claiming earlier the same day that Cruz had more momentum heading into tomorrow’s races in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, news broke late last night that Kasich and Cruz had entered into a Gentleman’s Agreement to work together to stop Trump from getting to 1237 before the convention, with Kasich pulling his forces out from Indiana (although he just said in a press conference that voters who want to vote for him should still vote for him in Indiana), and Cruz backing off in Oregon and New Mexico in an effort to get enough support for a single candidate in each state to deny Trump their full delegations.  The Trump campaign reacted in typical fashion, howling about collusion and complaining that both Cruz and Kasich couldn’t win the nomination.  Given that the agreement feeds directly into Trump’s primary messaging about a crooked system that is trying to deny him in the nomination, it’s unclear whether this new effort is going to do much more than generate a few hours worth of headlines today before being blown off the air by Trump’s likely crushing victories tomorrow.