On Friday, Virginia Democratic Governor Terry McAuliffe said Republican gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie is running “the most racist campaign in Virginia history.” That’s right, McAuliffe technically called Gillespie more racist than … bans on interracial marriage, segregation, and even slavery.
“Ed’s whole campaign, he’s taken the campaign into the gutter. It’s the most racist campaign we’ve ever seen in Virginia history,” McAuliffe told Chuck Todd, host of MSNBC’s “Meet the Press.”
McAuliffe later added, “It’s a very divisive campaign. Hateful, hurtful, bigoted, racist campaign.”
"Ed, he's run the most hateful, bigoted campaign in Virginia history," @TerryMcAuliffe says on Republican candidate for gov @EdWGillespie
— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) November 3, 2017
The Democrat’s claim — that a 2017 Republican is running the “most racist” campaign in Virginia history — is not just desperate, it’s laughable. Virginia joined the Confederacy in fighting to preserve race-based slavery. Virginia wholeheartedly embraced segregation. Virginia even became notorious for banning interracial marriage — which the Supreme Court struck down in Loving v. Virginia in 1967.
Democrats attack Gillespie as racist because he supports preserving Confederate monuments, and because he launched ads against sanctuary cities. The ads went a bit far, branding the Democrat candidate Ralph Northam an enabler for the notorious gang MS-13. (Northam did cast the tie-breaking vote to kill a ban on sanctuary cities, after all.) Gillespie’s campaign isn’t racist, in fact his stances are popular.
A recent Washington Post-Schar School poll found that 57 percent of Virginia voters support keeping the monuments, while only 31 percent want them removed. A recent Hampton University poll found that 53 percent of Virginians oppose sanctuary cities, with only 36 percent supporting them.
Northam is not running on a pro-sanctuary cities platform, and a liberal organization officially unendorsed him when he came out in opposition to sanctuary cities.
The Gillespie MS-13 ads may have pushed the envelope, but they could never make his campaign the “most racist” in Virginia history. That didn’t stop Northam, Democrats, and leftist groups from pushing the “Gillespie is a racist” angle way too far.
First, Northam’s campaign and the Virginia Democratic Party launched a mailer connecting Gillespie to the white nationalist rioters in Charlottesville.
Naturally, the Democrats did this to the man who unequivocally condemned the Charlottesville rioters, from the beginning. Gillespie attacked them before the riots were over, and never wavered in his condemnation.
But the Left’s attack didn’t end there. Last weekend, the Latino Victory Fund (LVF) launched an ad portraying Gillespie supporters as genocidal racists, intending to drive over Latino, Muslim, and black children with a truck. LVF pulled the ad after the terrorist truck attack in New York City, but Northam refused to condemn it.
Worse, Northam’s campaign reported the LVF ad as an “in-kind” contribution, suggesting the campaign actively worked with LVF to brand Gillespie as a genocidal white supremacist.
In his interview with Chuck Todd, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe attacked that ad, but nevertheless suggested that the LVF was defending itself from an utterly racist campaign.
Until this point, however, no Democrat has actually suggested that Gillespie’s campaign is more racist than any other campaign in Virginia’s history. Such a historically ignorant, racially charged, and disgusting declaration is utterly indefensible.
The Northam mailer and the LVF ad have pushed some people who would not normally vote Republican to support Gillespie. One Virginia libertarian who did not vote for Donald Trump last year told PJ Media, “Usually I would just vote Libertarian in the governor’s race, but with that ad I’m absolutely voting Gillespie.”
After Democrats (who have connections to the LVF ad branding his supporters genocidal racists) continued to tie Gillespie to Charlottesville and have now actually said Gillespie was more racist than Confederates, segregationists, and opponents of interracial marriage, many more Virginians might find themselves supporting the Republican. Democrats only have their own ridiculous rhetoric to thank for that.
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