RICHMOND, Va., November 1, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – With just over three days to go before Virginia picks its next governor, Democrat Terry McAuliffe – long considered the front-runner for the job – is worried. As his pro-life Republican opponent, Attorney General Ken Cucinnelli, has enjoyed a late surge in the polls, McAuliffe is warning supporters that his election is far from a sure thing.
“No matter what pollsters are reporting, newspapers are writing, and your friends might be telling you,” the former Clinton fundraiser and onetime DNC chairman warned in an e-mail to his financial contributors, “we're facing two hard truths.”
One of those “hard truths,” according to McAuliffe, is that “Tea Party” conservatives turn out in higher numbers during off-year elections than liberal voters do.
The other is a long-established Virginia voting trend: “For 45 years,” wrote McAuliffe, “the political party that controls the White House has lost our governor's race the next year. In 2009, fewer than 40 percent of Virginia voters cast a ballot for governor, despite the fact that nearly 70 percent voted in the presidential election the year before.”
“If we allow ourselves to be complacent for any part of the next five days, Election Day will not be pretty,” McAuliffe said.
Two recent polls have put Cuccinelli within easy striking distance of an upset win. A Quinnipiac poll released Wednesday showed him just four points behind McAuliffe, who had previously enjoyed a double-digit advantage, and a Wenzel Strategies survey gave McAuliffe just a single point lead over Cuccinelli.
“State Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is nipping at Terry McAuliffe’s heels as the race to be Virginia’s next governor enters the final week of the campaign,” said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. “It goes without saying that turnout is the key to this race, and the harshly negative tone of the campaign is the kind that often turns off voters.”
In recent weeks, McAuliffe has outspent Cuccinelli 10-to-one on advertising designed to paint the attorney general as an “extremist” mounting a “war on women” because of his opposition to abortion-on-demand and the controversial HHS mandate. Cuccinelli was the first state attorney general to mount a constitutional challenge to the mandate.
Planned Parenthood’s political action arm recently dumped more than a million dollars into the race on McAuliffe’s behalf, with their president, Cecile Richards, calling Cuccinelli’s defeat the abortion giant’s “top priority.”
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On Friday, McAuliffe struck a slightly less negative tone, claiming that if he is elected governor, he will appoint Republicans to his cabinet and work amicably with GOP legislators. But he maintained his position that Cuccinelli’s pro-life views make him too “extreme” to lead Virginia.
This weekend, President Barack Obama will join McAuliffe on the campaign trail, a testament to how important the outcome of Virginia’s election has become to the Democratic Party, particularly as Cuccinelli attempts to frame the race as a referendum on ObamaCare.
Cuccinelli has credited his recent poll jump at least partly to the health care law’s disastrous rollout, and has made every effort to highlight McAuliffe’s strong support for ObamaCare. “
McAuliffe was an ardent supporter of the law, so much so that he thought it didn’t go far enough,” Cuccinelli said Wednesday, and pointed out that McAuliffe’s economic plan is completely dependent on ObamaCare’s success, which – given the program’s rocky start – is far from assured.
He says he is thrilled that Obama is coming to Virginia to stump for his opponent.
“We always welcome the president to Virginia,” Cuccinelli told Fox News on Friday, “and we’re happy to bring the focus to his policies and what Terry McAuliffe plans to do with them in Virginia, and how bad they are for Virginians, losing jobs and hurting our economy.”
For more information on the race, see the websites of Ken Cuccinelli and Terry McAuliffe.