From the irascible Joe Romm at Climate Progress:
But how did this happen? Follow the money. The Daily Caller has this story:
Big ‘green’ dollars propel McAuliffe to victory
Environmental activists poured millions of dollars into the Virginia gubernatorial campaign to help propel Democrat Terry McAuliffe to victory over Republican opponent Ken Cuccinelli.
Environmental groups put up $3.8 million to help McAuliffe defeat Cuccinelli, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. That’s about four times as much as fossil fuel interests gave Cuccinelli.
Energy and environmental concerns became a major focus during the campaign, as McAuliffe planned to jump-start Virginia’s renewable energy production and bring green jobs into the state.
Of course, we all know about ‘green’ jobs. They tend to be subsidized, transient, and only available to a select group of people.
Green groups also spent millions on TV ad buys during the campaign. NextGen Climate Action, which was founded by San Francisco billionaire Tom Steyer, spent more than $2.4 million — the most spent on TV buys by any group.
…
The League of Conservation Voters was able to mobilize volunteers to knock on 100,000 doors in the Richmond area and 300,000 across the state, reports the Hill.
Environmentalists were successful at making global warming a central issue in the campaign, having former University of Virginia climate scientist and global warming activist Michael Mann stump for McAuliffe.
The stigma of political stink will always be over Michael Mann now, as he has transformed himself from scientist to political activist, much like Dr. James Hansen (formerly of NASA GISS) has.
If big environmental outfits can so easily spend millions buying an out-of-state candidate like Terry McAuliffe, then how hard is it to buy a climate scientist or two?
Is team climate science now the best science money can buy?
Those “secret” UVa emails Mann has been viciously defending might give some clues. More later.
Merrick: “Sarvis is no Libertarian. … Sarvis got 145,000 votes. Cuccinelli lost by 55,000 votes. You do the math.”
What math? I’m not sure if your thesis is that Republican voters can’t tell the difference between an establishment Republican and a Statist, or that they can. Because one way says the GOP should have helped Sarvis peel votes off the Democrats. And the other says the GOP are the other Democrat party.
Merrick says:
November 7, 2013 at 11:14 am
Arlington County (~34K edge for McAu) alone would not have done it, nor even with throwing in (or out!) Alexandria (~20K edge for McAu) as well. It would have taken Falls Church, too.
http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/2013/results?pw
But I agree that DC should have those bits of the Commonwealth.
Jquip, polling showed that for those voters who supported Obamacare Terry McAuliffe garnered >95% of the vote, but for those voters who were gainst Obamacare Cuccinelli got about 80%, and Sarvis about 16%, with the rest going to McAuliffe,
More than half the voters in Virginia are against Obamacare. Again, if Sarvis weren’t in the race, where would his “against Obamacare” votes have gone? You do the math.
milodonharlani, while your raw numbers are true in this case, you discount the fact that it’s a completely different race. Also, do just a little bit of googling to find out about all the voting “irregularities” that happened in Arlington County and Alexandria in the 2012 election and perhaps even just those numbers you quote look a little different. And, were you aware of the reported voting “problems” in Loudoun County Tuesday morning, which was a County that Cuccinelli had to do well in in order to win?
NextGen “green” money and rollout in Northern VA. Bloomberg with a big ad campaign for McAuliff who suddenly turned anti-gun, the Lt. Governor had a fit when he didn’t get the nomination he thought he deserved without campaigning, a “Libertarian” shill bought by Democrat bucks and his funding was not discovered until election day, “Repubulican” mainliners cutting McAuliff ads, limited national republican funding for Cuccinelli and Christie refusing to campaign in Virginia all contributed to a relatively narrow defeat.
Just for fun, I got lots of emails celebrating Christie’s big (setup) victory and requests for contributions starting 11/5. My guess is that the mainline republican party will have a devil of a time getting conservative votes in VA. The state may well go blue because they probably got responses like mine: When hell freezes over.
PS. It was obvious Sarvis was a shill, but no one went after him. I believe enough of his vote, had they known his funding, would have turned toward Cuccinelli. Remember 53% of the voters, voted against McAuliff.
Merrick says:
November 7, 2013 at 11:31 am
Yes, I read about them while they were happening. I mentioned fraud in a previous post. In 2012 & 2013, fraud was more widespread than just in suburban northern VA. In 2008 & 2012, you would also have needed to shed more counties than Arlington for Obama to lose.
If you want to make sure about VA, then add Loudon & Fairfax Counties to the exclusionary list. If DC gets that big, then it would be hard to deny it a US representative & two senators.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Virginia,_2008
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Virginia,_2012
Another problem for the GOP in VA is all the liberal Yankees who have moved to Virginia Beach & elsewhere in eastern VA.
The 2012 election was close enough in OH, VA, FL, NV & some other battlegrounds to lie within the margin of fraud.
It took a corrupt libertarian funded by democrats to put the clinton sock puppet in office.
Virginians are fising to be take to the cleaner between McAuliffe’s insider scams and the Clinton’s ever increasing need to be fed for the coming 2016 election.
Mann, and his phony hockestick will crumble with or without political cover. With political cover may take a bit longer.
Also being conveniently overlooked is the Republican party establishment worked against Cuccinelli. They would rather elect a big-government crony capitalist elitist than support their party’s nominee.
After all, if somebody is for limited government that means they won’t throw as much of the public mullah into the corporate trough.
never take on a fight that you might lose… Cuccineli took on too many fights and lost…more is the pity
more soylent green,
I don’t claim you’re wrong, but I haven’t heard evidence to that effect. I have heard arguments that the GOP didn’t do much to help Cuccinelli, but I always assumed that was simple triage (I.E., he was assumed to have already lost and therefore resources weren’t allocated to the battle).
@ur momisugly Peter Miller.
Peter, if your reference to “the Tea Party’s attempt to nearly bring down the world economy a few weeks ago,” is due to your belief that the US hitting its debt ceiling would have triggered an automatic default by the US Treasury on its sovereign debts, then you are uninformed (as are the overwhelming majority of the Congress and the US public). No such default would have occurred as there is ~ 9x the amount of revenues coming in each month than there is interest due on the debt. It’s a situation equivalent to my reaching the credit limit on my Visa; I would simply be obliged to reduce my new spending until I had paid off some of the principle until I had headroom for new debt (i.e., live within my means).
The point I was trying to make is this: most of the world and much of the American electorate perceive the Tea Party part of the Republican Party as being intransigent nay sayers, who are ruthlessly prepared to play chicken with the US and world economy.
As such, there was an inevitable voter reaction to this nihilist strategy. Whether or not the Republicans are correct to oppose the highly flawed Obamacare program is not the point.
The point is this, the use of extreme confrontationist tactics have created a voter backlash. The problem is: this backlash has allowed those who support climate alarmism to achieve political power – and that is in no sensible individual’s interest.
If the US – the world’s most powerful and richest nation – had defaulted on servicing its debt, no one can possibly predict the outcome, other than it would have been economically catastrophic. If you do not understand this, then you might as well be a Mann acolyte, with no understanding of economic or scientific reality.
Peter,
I’m not trying to insult you, yet it’s difficult to find a gentle way of phrasing this. When you say,
I believe that you demonstrate that you don’t know what you are talking about. This is media sensationalism that would not happen, regardless of what the House did or did not do in response to Tea Party pressure.
So is this the law of diminishing returns?
Even with a fake Libertarian candidate to split the vote, massive spending and probably voting booth fraud, the Democrat just squeaks in.
Maybe Americans are wising up to the game.
The panic spending by green activist groups was just enough to buy a little more time.
As soon as any government actually investigates the evidence for the CAGW policies, the scam is over.
This is why the “Greens” poured money in to oppose Cuccinelli,
CAGW created by, promoted by and now protected from investigation by, our Kleptocracy.
The unholy blend of bureaucrats,career do-gooders, spongers,parasites and bought politicians
Peter Miller says:
November 7, 2013 at 12:06 pm
There was never any risk of the US actually defaulting. The intransigence wasn’t from the GOP, but from Reid & Obama, who refused to do their constitutional duty. It takes two to tango.
Voters in northern VA might have blamed the Tea Party more than Obama, but that is not the national opinion, which is about evenly split between faulting the administration & the House GOP, whether Tea Party or not (mostly not). The more the debt rises & the worse Obamacare is shown to be, the more will voters thank the GOP for trying to fix both problems, by whatever means.
Reality doesn’t comport with your view, not surprising given media bias.
Let me clarify,
When I say ‘would not happen’, I mean it much the same was as I mean, let’s speculate that the President is in a bad mood one morning and orders a massive nuclear first strike on Iran. Is this utterly impossible? No, I guess not. The man might go insane I suppose, or perhaps suffer some sort of head trauma or brain chemistry imbalance or something. For all reasonable intents and purposes though, this would not happen. This is more or less what I meant.
It’s funny how “anti-science” is the favorite insult that green zealots and their highly censuring outfits throw to anyone who is not yielding to their diktat. The semantic slide from science to politics is now complete and the more shaky the climate science is, the more political the issue is becoming: no more masks, no more pretending.
I am a Libertarian in Chesapeake Va, and I find this speculation unfounded.
I doubt the money spent on Climate Change adds changed 100 votes. It is a non-issue here in that the adds did nothing to change anyone’s mind. Warmists were going to vote for McAuliffe anyway.
The issues that tipped the election were demographic change and social issues.
Most of VA’s population growth lately has been around DC, and that is a region dependent on the growth of government. They will vote Democrat if Satan was their nominee.
Cuccinelli’s efforts at stealth abortion bans angered a lot of women. Cuccinelli compared our immigration problems to a rat infestation, insuring that every single Latino who could vote would and would vote Democrat.
Its amazing the election was as close as it was.
Exit polling of Sarvis voters showed there were more Democrats disgusted by McAuliffe’s cronyism than Republicans joining the real Libertarians. The actual Libertarians would have written in Donald Duck before voting for either major party. Had Sarvis not been in the race, McAuliffe would have won by more than he did.
Republicans are looking for someone to blame, but it s their own fault. Had they nominated Bolling, the current Lt Governor, he would have easily defeated McAuliffe. But the religious right(not the Tea Party) insisted on Cuccinelli who was unelectable from the start.
Don’t forget the tea party was directly targeted by the IRS after the 2010 midterm elections. They were effectively prohibited formal tax exempt status to formally organize. You can bet the POTUS and his cronies were directing things from behind the curtain. That initiative directly impacted the 2012 elections.
The Libertarian candidate was funded by an Obama campaign bundler, so the democrats stole this election by footing the bill for a 3rd party candidate, who apparently was for policies that were not consistent with Libertarianism.
The solution is simple. Conservatives need to make sure they always pay for a Green Party candidate on every ballot.
Money in politics is a real problem. It means parties that represent the poor and downtrodden like … er … the Republicans … find it difficult to beat the candidates from parties that represent the interests of the rich and powerful, like … um … the Democrats. Hang on a minute. Is that right?
So, as I think all can see in Peter Miller’s arguments, a perfect example of someone whom, if he lived in Virginia, would be otherwise predisposed to vote for someone like Cuccinelli but is naively willing to buy into the media disinformation campaign (and how could it be classified in any other way if the media is actually supposed to be reporting facts) and change his vote accordingly. Much like Michael Cohen whom we’ve not heard back from on the “other issues.” You don’t have to look hard to find them.
Don Tabor says:
November 7, 2013 at 12:20 pm
Actual polling data both before the election & in exit polls show that the fake “Libertarian” Sarvis definitely damaged Cuch. Look at the AG race, for instance. Sarvis most likely cost Cuch the election, as Perot did Bush in 1992. Except for the Greens, third parties hurt the GOP. Democrats know this, which is why they bankroll & recruit “Libertarian” candidates, as in VA this year & MT last.
You bought into the Democrat lie about the rat infestation. Cuch didn’t compare immigrants to rats. He said, rightly, that DC cared more about rat families than they did about immigrant families. Naturally, the Democrats used their huge cash advantage to spread the lie about rats, which Cuch couldn’t afford to answer.
You are right however that Cuch is more of an old-fashioned social conservative than a Tea Party adherent. Too often now, as in NV, CO & DE in 2010 & MO & IN in 2012, the fiscal conservative, constitutionalist Tea Party has been hijacked by candidates who more properly belong to Focus on Family. Democrats naturally benefit from this conflation in their attempts to demonize the Tea Party, also by calling them racist when prominent among their leaders are ethnic minority figures & women.
Don Tabor,
Your comments about Northern Virginia are true, but make sure you address the issue at home as well. The vote deltas for McAulliffe:
Chesapeake +2000
Suffolk +3300
Portsmouth +11,000
Norfolk +20,000
And while you pick interesting issues, then reflect back the media take on them, you avoid other issues like the white Democratic candidate for Lt. Governor refusing, on camera at their debate, to chake the hand of the black Republican candidate for Lt. Governor. Imagine how the press had played that if it was a Libertarian or Republican who’d refused to shake the hand of a black man. But keep focused on those issues the media tells you you should be focused on.
For anyone interested, google “virginia lt. governor hand shake”. Top ten hits:
Breitbart
theblacksphere
Washington Examiner
Life News
Reclaim Our Republic
Republican Assemblies
Weasel Zippers
American University
Patriot Update
Lonely Conservative
I guess that a white man refusing to touch a black man, two public figures live on TV, isn’t news if you’re a liberal reporter.