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      Virginia G.O.P.’s Choices for Governor: ‘Trumpy, Trumpier, Trumpiest’

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      As the party prepares to pick its nominee this weekend, the race embodies the collapse of Republican power in a state that has tilted more sharply to Democrats than perhaps any other.MIDLOTHIAN, Va. — One candidate brands himself a “conservative outlaw.” Another boasts of her bipartisan censure by the State Senate for calling the Capitol rioters “patriots.” A third, asked about Dominion voting machines — the subject of egregious conspiracy theories on the right — called them “the most important issue” of the campaign.These are not fringe candidates for the Republican nomination for Virginia governor.They are three of the leading contenders in a race that in many ways embodies the decade-long meltdown of Republican power in Virginia, a once-purple state that has gyrated more decisively toward Democrats than perhaps any in the country. In part, that is because of the hard-right focus of recent Republican officeseekers, a trend that preceded former President Donald J. Trump and became a riptide during his time in the White House.The party’s race to the right shows no sign of tempering as a preselected group of Republicans gather on Saturday at 39 sites around Virginia to choose a nominee for governor. That candidate will advance to a November general election that has traditionally been a report card on the party in power in Washington, as well as a portent of the midterms nationally.After a monthslong G.O.P. schism, Virginia Republicans decided to hold a nominating convention rather than a primary, which would attract a broader field of voters. At the party’s “disassembled convention,” as it is called, delegates who have been vetted by local Republican officials will choose the nominee, which critics say perpetuates the party’s narrow appeal.Al and Julia Kent, moderate Republican voters in the Richmond suburbs, won’t be participating.“It’s so confusing,” said Mr. Kent, an Air Force veteran who found the paperwork to register for Saturday’s nominating process to be intrusive. He said it had asked questions that “the Republican Party doesn’t need to know.”His wife, a retired preschool teacher, said, “I don’t think the Republican Party is listening to anybody — the normal class of people, what they want.”Kirk Cox, a former speaker of the House in the state’s General Assembly, is the favorite of establishment Republicans.Carlos Bernate for The New York TimesThe Kents both voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 and 2020, but they are worried about his legacy of divisiveness, in America and the G.O.P. “I think he’s ruined the Republican Party,” Ms. Kent said.Once a Republican stronghold, Virginia did not vote for a Democratic presidential nominee in 10 elections before 2008. But ever since 2009, Republicans have lost 13 consecutive statewide elections.Changing demographics are part of the reason: A booming economy in Northern Virginia has drawn educated, racially diverse professionals from out of state, as well as immigrants. Both groups have shifted the populous region leftward.Suburban changes have also remade greater Richmond, including Chesterfield County, south and west of the capital city, where the Kents live. President Biden carried Chesterfield County in November, becoming the first Democratic presidential candidate to win here in 72 years.But demographics don’t tell the whole story. Republican candidates and their messages have also undermined the party’s appeal, G.O.P. elders said in interviews. In response to a changing state, Republicans have nominated ideologues who fanned polarizing social issues like abortion, illegal immigration and preserving Confederate statues. This year’s No. 1 priority for most candidates is “election integrity,” the base-rousing cause fueled by Mr. Trump’s false claims of a rigged 2020 vote.Former Gov. Bob McDonnell, the last Republican elected statewide, said his path to victory — a focus on “kitchen table issues” that appeal to “the working dad and soccer mom” — was rarely pursued by the party’s nominees anymore. “There’s been an inability for us to connect with the suburban voters,” he said.Instead, Republicans make their pitch to white voters in the state’s western mountains and other rural counties, which have turned redder as the majority of the state tilts Democratic.A poll this week by Christopher Newport University found that majorities of Virginia voters supported liberal policies, including “Medicare for all,” a path to citizenship for all undocumented immigrants and a Green New Deal to tackle climate change.Larry J. Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said the Republican candidates for governor this year fit into three categories: “Trumpy, Trumpier, Trumpiest.”By embracing the former president, who lost Virginia by 10 percentage points last year, Republicans are trading electability in the general election for viability in a primary. “They play the Republican nominating game very well, but they go so far to the right that most people find them offensive,” Mr. Sabato said. “It’s not respectable anymore for well-educated people to identify with the Trump G.O.P.”Glenn Youngkin, a first-time candidate with a large fortune from a career in private equity, has said election integrity is his top issue.Kendall Warner/The News & Advance, via Associated PressMany Virginia Republicans said the party’s decision to hold a nominating convention with preselected voters typified the party’s self-inflicted wounds. The move was made after a bitter public squabble among central committee members of the state party.The choice of a convention — to be held at disparate sites because the state has banned mass gatherings during the coronavirus pandemic — has historically favored candidates who appeal to party activists, rather than to the more ideologically diverse voters who show up for a primary.“We don’t just preach voter suppression, we practice it,” said former Representative Tom Davis, a moderate Republican who served seven terms in Northern Virginia. “Why don’t we try to build the party and be a welcoming party instead of being exclusionary? Frankly, it says a lot about where we are as a party.”The Republican Party of Virginia says that 53,524 people successfully signed up to participate in the convention, more than many predicted, but far fewer than the 366,000 who voted in the Republican primary for governor in 2017.There is no reliable public polling of the field because of the difficulty of surveying conventiongoers. Most insiders throw up their arms if asked which candidates have the edge.Kirk Cox, a former speaker of the House in the state’s General Assembly, is the favorite of establishment Republicans. Recognizing that he may not be the grass-roots favorite, he has appealed to be voters’ second choice. The ballot is formatted with ranked-choice voting, meaning that if no one wins more than 50 percent — as expected — the last-place finisher will be eliminated and his or her supporters’ second-choice votes will be allocated to the remaining candidates. That process will continue until a winner attains a majority. The outcome could take several days.Mr. Cox, a former high school teacher, represents a part of Chesterfield County that he calls “the bluest Republican-held district in the state,” which is his selling point to voters looking ahead to the general election.Still, party activists have not responded much to an electability message in recent years.Pete Snyder, a wealthy technology executive, is running as an “outlaw conservative.”Steve Helber/Associated PressCompetition for the Trump-centric base is split between State Senator Amanda Chase, a firebrand who was censured by fellow lawmakers in January, and Pete Snyder, a wealthy technology executive, who is the one running as the “outlaw conservative.”Ms. Chase recently visited Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s resort in Florida, hoping for his endorsement. She said she came away with a fist bump. The former president has not signaled a favorite in the race.The fourth top contender is Glenn Youngkin, a first-time candidate with a large fortune from a career in private equity. He has said election integrity is his top issue.At a forum hosted by the Virginia Federation of Republican Women last month, he and other candidates were asked if they would demand an audit of the coming November election if Dominion voting machines were used. Dominion is the company spuriously accused by Mr. Trump and his allies of changing votes in 2020; after the company filed and threatened lawsuits, it won retractions from Fox News, Newsmax and other conservative outlets.In response to the Dominion question, Mr. Youngkin said, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is the most important issue we’re going to talk about right now.” He laid out “five steps to restore our trust” in elections.A former co-chief executive of the Carlyle Group, Mr. Youngkin has spent at least $5.5 million of his own money on the race. Part of his appeal to Republicans is that in the general election, he could theoretically match the spending of the leading Democrat, former Gov. Terry McAuliffe.Polls show that Mr. McAuliffe, with the advantage of name recognition from an earlier term, has a hefty lead over three Democratic rivals going into their party primary on June 8.To many observers, it was the 2013 race won by Mr. McAuliffe that began the rout of Virginia Republicans. Ahead of that election, social conservatives gained control of the G.O.P. central committee, canceled a primary and chose one of their own, Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, at a Tea Party-flavored convention.Mr. Cuccinelli lost to Mr. McAuliffe, a Democratic fund-raiser and friend of Hillary and Bill Clinton’s — thus beginning Republicans’ years in the wilderness.“That’s a direct result of the Cuccinelli heist, if you will,” said Chris Peace, a Republican former state lawmaker. “Much of the old guard, the center-right of the party, was pushed out.”Four years later, the party’s nominee for governor in 2017, Ed Gillespie, lost decisively after making a Trumpian effort to stir fear of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. The next year, the party’s Senate nominee, Corey Stewart, ran on preserving Confederate statues — and lost in a landslide.And in 2019, the G.O.P. lost control over both houses of the state General Assembly for the first time in a generation.This year, with Mr. Trump gone from the White House, Republicans hope their prospects will improve in November, especially after unified Democratic control in Richmond has pushed through a broad progressive agenda.Gov. Ralph Northam, who cannot run for a second consecutive term, has signed laws that repealed the state’s voter identification requirement, imposed broad gun restrictions, made Virginia the first Southern state to abolish the death penalty and will raise the minimum wage to $15 by 2026.“Democrats have a lot to answer for that they didn’t four years ago,” Mr. Cox said. “I see it as the best issue mix for Republicans since 2009.”Bridget O’Connell, a mother of four young children in Chesterfield County, called herself “a gun activist” and said Democrats had gone too far in their restrictions, including a “red-flag” law that lets the authorities seize weapons from a person deemed a threat.Ms. O’Connell, 32, voted for Mr. Trump in 2016, but she did not vote last year. She was worried that Americans would become even angrier and more polarized if he remained in office, but she did not think Mr. Biden was the answer.She will not be participating in the Republican nominating convention. She did not know she had to preregister. As for November, she might or might not vote, depending on how divisive she perceives the candidates to be.“I think the majority of people don’t want that,” she said. “I think the majority of people really are normal kind of people.” More

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      In the Virginia Governor’s Race, Can Anyone Take On Terry McAuliffe?

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      Once again, the state is shaping up to be a case study in the complexities around the politics of race and power.Two years ago, when a racist blackface picture emerged from the 1980s that appeared to include Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia, the blowback was swift and severe. There were mounting calls for his resignation.But in the end, polls showed that most voters said he shouldn’t step down — and some of his most unwavering support came from Virginia’s Black voters. He weathered the scandal, and he’s still on the job.There are now exactly two months until the Democratic primary election that will most likely determine Northam’s successor, as the state has become decidedly blue (the Democratic candidate has won all 13 statewide elections there since 2012). And once again, Virginia is shaping up to be a case study in the complexities around the politics of race and power.Northam, who continues to enjoy widespread approval, particularly from Black voters, on Thursday endorsed Terry McAuliffe, a former Virginia governor and one of the two white candidates in a five-person Democratic field. McAuliffe directly preceded Northam in the governor’s mansion and now wants to succeed him, too.In a statement, Northam portrayed McAuliffe as a strong steward of the economy during his four years in charge. “It’s critical that our next governor has the plans and experience to continue the fight to rebuild Virginia into a stronger, more equitable future,” he said. “That’s why I am so proud to support Terry McAuliffe to be our next governor.”A former banking executive, prolific Democratic fund-raiser and onetime chair of the Democratic National Committee, McAuliffe was prevented from running for re-election in 2017 because Virginia does not allow its governor to serve consecutive terms.There’s been scant polling in this race, but McAuliffe is regarded as a clear front-runner, partly because of his formidable connections and résumé, and partly because his challengers have similarities — albeit some superficial — that could split their support. Aside from Lee Carter, a 33-year-old Marine veteran and member of the House of Delegates, the three other candidates — Jennifer McClellan, Jennifer Carroll Foy and Justin Fairfax — are Black, younger than McAuliffe and generally to his left.Like Northam four years ago on the crooked road of the Virginia campaign trail, and Joe Biden last year in the presidential race, McAuliffe has been deliberate about outflanking his less-established Black opponents. He has emphasized his ties to the Black elite in Virginia politics, and from the day he announced his candidacy he has ensconced himself in endorsements from Black officials.But on Tuesday, in a televised debate, McAuliffe faced attacks from a unified team of rivals, and things boiled over when Fairfax, the state’s lieutenant governor, criticized him for calling in 2019 for Fairfax’s resignation. As Northam was engulfed in his own scandal, two women publicly accused Fairfax of sexual assault. Fairfax denied the allegations and, like the governor, managed to remain in office, mostly by just moving on.At the debate Fairfax went all the way after McAuliffe, reminding voters of the long and disgraceful history in America of false accusations and violence by white people toward Black men. “He treated me like George Floyd, he treated me like Emmett Till — no due process, immediately assumed my guilt,” Fairfax said. “I have a son and I have a daughter, and I don’t want my daughter to be assaulted; I don’t want my son to be falsely accused. And this is the real world that we live in. And so we need to speak truth to power, and we need to be very clear about how that impacts people’s lives.”But even before that, Fairfax had partly undercut his own argument by pointing out that it wasn’t just McAuliffe: All of his Democratic rivals onstage had called for him to resign in 2019.Besides, as the Times reporter Astead Herndon observed on Twitter, “‘what happened to me is like what happened to George Floyd and Emmett Till’ is not a thing a living person can say.”McClellan, a state senator, picked up on the theme of racial justice but went after McAuliffe on substantive policy grounds. She said he had underfunded the state’s parole system as governor, and called him a latecomer to the movement for justice reform.McAuliffe pushed back by pointing to his order restoring voting rights to more than 200,000 felons in 2016, and said he supported equipping all police officers in the state with body cameras — two major goals of civil rights advocates.For now, Fairfax has been unable to define his candidacy aside from the allegations against him, leading some close observers to anticipate that the next few weeks will be a face-off between McClellan and Carroll Foy, a former state delegate. If one emerges as the clear alternative to McAuliffe, it would most likely be because she persuaded enough major funders to come out of the woodwork to back her campaign and provide much-needed advertising dollars.As one Democratic insider in Virginia put it to me in a phone chat on Thursday: “McClellan has a track record to sell. Carroll Foy has a track record and an approach to sell. But if they’re only selling it on Twitter, then Terry McAuliffe will be the nominee.”On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Justin Fairfax Accuses Terry McAuliffe of Treating Him Like Emmett Till

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      At a debate for Virginia governor, Mr. Fairfax, the state’s lieutenant governor, denounced Mr. McAuliffe for urging him to resign after women accused Mr. Fairfax of sexual assault in 2019.Terry McAuliffe, the leading candidate in this year’s Democratic primary for Virginia governor, faced a flurry of attacks from his rivals at a debate on Tuesday night as they aimed to diminish his broad support from Black voters. In the most extraordinary broadside, the state’s Black lieutenant governor, Justin Fairfax, accused Mr. McAuliffe of treating him like George Floyd or Emmett Till after Mr. Fairfax was accused of sexual assault by two women in 2019.Mr. McAuliffe, a white former governor of the state who has the backing of many of the state’s top Black elected officials, issued a public call that year for Mr. Fairfax to resign.Mr. Fairfax’s remarks on Tuesday — in which he compared himself to two Black people killed in episodes of white violence — were the most pointed attempt by one of the three Black candidates in the race to draw a racial distinction between them and Mr. McAuliffe, who is aiming to reclaim the office he held from 2014 to 2018.The accusation came at the end of the debate, the first for the five Virginia Democrats running for governor. Responding to a question asking the candidates to envision the future of law enforcement in Virginia, Mr. Fairfax said theoretical descriptions were unnecessary because he was a living embodiment of the harm that false accusations and a rush to judgment can produce.“Everyone here on this stage called for my immediate resignation, including Terry McAuliffe three minutes after a press release came out,” Mr. Fairfax said. “He treated me like George Floyd, he treated me like Emmett Till, no due process, immediately assumed my guilt. I have a son and I have a daughter, and I don’t want my daughter to be assaulted, I don’t want my son to be falsely accused. And this is the real world that we live in. And so we need to speak truth to power and we need to be very clear about how that impacts people’s lives.”Mr. McAuliffe did not respond to Mr. Fairfax on the debate stage. His spokesman declined to address the remarks.In February 2019, amid a concurrent scandal involving a medical school yearbook photograph of Gov. Ralph Northam in blackface, two women accused Mr. Fairfax of sexually assaulting them in separate episodes — allegations that Mr. Fairfax has always denied. Mr. Fairfax faced a torrent of calls for his resignation. Weeks later, in a speech on the floor of the Virginia Senate, he compared himself to lynching victims.Mr. Fairfax was not the only candidate on Tuesday night to try to cleave Black voters from Mr. McAuliffe. The scant public polling of the race has found Mr. McAuliffe holding sizable leads over his four opponents, and no survey has shown him with less than a two-to-one advantage over his closest rival.Jennifer McClellan, a state senator who is running for governor, accused Mr. McAuliffe of underfunding the state’s parole system, cutting deals with the National Rifle Association during his term as governor and being a late advocate for racial justice.“Racial justice is about more than criminal justice reform,” said Ms. McClellan, who is Black. “It is embedded in every system we have in government, and I did not need George Floyd’s murder or the Unite the Right rally to teach me that.”Mr. McAuliffe, during his turns to speak, emphasized his relationships with Mr. Northam and President Biden, two Democrats who both owe their offices to strong relationships with and support from Black voters. He highlighted his move to restore the voting rights of 206,000 felons in the state and said every police officer in the state should wear a body camera “so we can see what’s going on.”“Thank goodness we had all those individuals there who had those cellphones when George Floyd was murdered,” he said.Mr. McAuliffe barely mentioned his rivals during the debate, except to remind the audience that Ms. McClellan was a frequent partner of his when he was governor. But Mr. Fairfax, by the debate’s end, sought to define himself as the chief rival to the loquacious former governor.“There appears to be two sets of rules up here, one where the governor can talk as long as he wants to and do whatever he wants, and one for everybody else,” Mr. Fairfax said. “I think that’s part of the issue, that we do have so many disparities in our society.” More

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      One Republican’s Lonely Fight Against a Flood of Disinformation

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      After losing an ugly congressional race last year, Denver Riggleman is leading a charge against the conspiracy-mongering coursing through his party. He doesn’t have many allies.AFTON, Va. — Denver Riggleman stood virtually alone.It was Oct. 2, on the floor of the House of Representatives, and he rose as one of only two Republicans in the chamber to speak in favor of a resolution denouncing QAnon. Mr. Riggleman, a freshman congressman from Virginia, had his own personal experiences with fringe ideas, both as a target of them and as a curious observer of the power they hold over true believers. He saw a dangerous movement becoming more intertwined with his party, and worried that it was only growing thanks to words of encouragement from President Donald J. Trump.“Will we stand up and condemn a dangerous, dehumanizing and convoluted conspiracy theory that the F.B.I. has assessed with high confidence is very likely to motivate some domestic extremists?” asked Mr. Riggleman, a former Air Force intelligence officer. “We should not be playing with fire.”Six months later, conspiracy theories like QAnon remain a threat that most Republicans would rather ignore than confront, and Mr. Riggleman is out of office. But he is ever more determined to try to expose disinformation from the far right that is swaying legions in the Republican base to believe in a false reality.Mr. Riggleman is a living example of the political price of falling out of lock step with the hard right. He lost a G.O.P. primary race last June after he officiated at the wedding of a gay couple. And once he started calling out QAnon, whose followers believe that a satanic network of child molesters runs the Democratic Party, he received death threats and was attacked as a traitor, including by members of his own family.The undoing of Mr. Riggleman — and now his unlikely crusade — is revealing about a dimension of conservative politics today. The fight against radicalism within the G.O.P. is a deeply lonely one, waged mostly by Republicans like him who are no longer in office, and by the small handful of elected officials who have decided that they are willing to speak up even if it means that they, too, could be headed for an early retirement.“I’ve been telling people: ‘You don’t understand. This is getting worse, not better,’” Mr. Riggleman said, sitting on a stool at his family bar one recent afternoon. “People are angry. And they’re angry at the truth tellers.”Mr. Riggleman, 51, is now back home in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where he and his wife run the bar and a distillery. And for his next move in a career that has included jobs at the National Security Agency and founding a military contracting business, he is working with a group of other experts to shine a light on what he calls the “social disease” of disinformation.His experience with the issues and emotions at work is both professional and personal. He was so intrigued by false belief systems that he self-published a book about the myth of Bigfoot and the people who are unshakably devoted to it.Mr. Riggleman is working with a group of other experts to shine a light on what he calls the “social disease” of disinformation.Matt Eich for The New York TimesMr. Riggleman, who first ran and won in 2018 after the Republican incumbent in his district retired, joined the arch-conservative Freedom Caucus and was endorsed by Mr. Trump. Now he says it “gives me shivers” to be called a Republican. He hopes to show that there is still a way to beat back the lies and false beliefs that have spread from the fringe to the mainstream. It is a heavy lift, and one that depends on overcoming two strong impulses: politicians’ fear of losing elections and people’s reluctance to accept that they were taken in by a lie.Mr. Riggleman summarized his conversations with the 70 percent of House Republicans he said were privately appalled at the former president’s conduct but wouldn’t dare speak out.“‘We couldn’t do that in our district. We would lose,’” he said. “That’s it. It’s that simple.”Stocky, fast-talking and inexhaustibly curious, the former congressman is now working for a group of prominent experts and academics at the Network Contagion Research Institute, which studies the spread of disinformation in American politics and how to thwart it. The group has undertaken several extensive investigations into how extremists have used propaganda and faked information to sow division over some of the most contentious issues of the day, like the coronavirus pandemic and police violence.Their reports have also given lawmakers a better understanding of the QAnon belief system and other radical ideologies that helped fuel the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6.Mr. Riggleman said he had written one report about the involvement of far-right militants and white supremacist groups in the attack specifically at the request of a Republican member who needed help convincing colleagues that far-left groups were not the culprits.Getting lawmakers to see radical movements like QAnon as a threat has been difficult. Joel Finkelstein, the director of the Network Contagion Research Institute, said that in June, when the group tried to sound the alarm on QAnon to members of Congress, Mr. Riggleman was the only one who responded with a sense of urgency and agreed to help.“We were screaming it from the rooftops,” Mr. Finkelstein said. “We said: ‘This is going to be a problem. They’re growing increasingly militant in their conspiracies.’” When the institute’s members spoke to Mr. Riggleman, he said, “We showed him our data and he said, ‘Holy moly.’”Far from a theoretical or overblown concern, disinformation and its role in perpetuating false beliefs about Mr. Trump’s election loss and its aftermath are problems that some Republicans believe could cripple their party if left ignored.In a sign of how widespread these conspiracy theories are, a recent poll from Suffolk University and USA Today found that 58 percent of Trump voters wrongly believed the storming of the Capitol was mostly inspired by far-left radicals associated with antifa and involved only a few Trump supporters.“There was a troika of us who said, ‘This is going to a bad place,’” said Paul Mitchell, who represented Michigan in the House for two terms before retiring early this year in frustration. He said he had watched as members dismissed Mr. Riggleman, despite his experience in intelligence. “There weren’t many people who gave a damn what your expertise was,” Mr. Mitchell said. “It was inconsequential compared to the talking points.”Bob Good defeated Mr. Riggleman in a state Republican Party convention in June.Amy Friedenberger/The Roanoke Times, via Associated PressMr. Riggleman’s loss last summer in a closely held party convention allowed him to be more outspoken. The winner, Representative Bob Good, is a former associate athletic director at Liberty University who took issue with Mr. Riggleman’s officiation at the gay wedding and called him “out of step” with the party’s base.And as Mr. Riggleman kept it up and spoke out more aggressively against Mr. Trump after the election, his fight got lonelier.“I had a colleague of mine pat me on the shoulder and say: ‘Denver, you’re just too paranoid. You’re killing yourself for the rest of your life politically by going after the big man like this,’” Mr. Riggleman recalled.When he returned to Virginia for good in January, he said he sometimes felt just as isolated. Family members, former constituents and patrons at the distillery insisted that the election had been stolen from Mr. Trump. And they couldn’t be talked out of it, no matter how hard he tried.He recalled a recent conversation with one couple he is friends with that he said was especially exasperating.“I go over stats,” he said. “I go over figures. I go over the 50 states, how that actually works. How machines that aren’t connected are very hard to hack. How you’d have to pay off hundreds of thousands of people to do this.”“Did not convince them,” he added.Other friends of his, some of whom are also members of the growing group of former Republican lawmakers now publicly criticizing Mr. Trump, said that many conservative politicians saw no incentive in trying to dispel disinformation even when they know it’s false.“What some of these guys have told me privately is it’s still kind of self-preservation,” said Joe Walsh, a former congressman from Illinois who ran a short-lived primary campaign against Mr. Trump last year. “‘I want to hang onto the gig. And this is a fever, it will break.’”That is mistaken, Mr. Walsh said, because he sees no breaking the spell Mr. Trump has over Republican voters anytime soon. “It’s done, and it was done a few years ago,” he said.Mr. Riggleman, who is contemplating a run for governor in Virginia and is writing a book about his experience with the dark side of Republican politics, sees a way forward in his experience with Bigfoot. The sasquatch was how many people first learned about him as a politician, after an opponent accused him of harboring a fascination with “Bigfoot erotica,” in 2018.“I do not dabble in monster porn,” he retorts in his book, “Bigfoot … It’s Complicated,” which he based in part on a trip he took in 2004 on a Bigfoot expedition.Mr. Riggleman paid $2,000 to go on a Bigfoot expedition with his wife in 2004.Matt Eich for The New York TimesThe book is full of passages that, if pulled out and scrubbed of references to the mythical creature, could be describing politics in 2021.Mr. Riggleman quotes one true believer explaining why he is absolutely convinced Bigfoot is real, even though he has never seen it. In an answer that could have come straight from the lips of someone defending the myth that Mr. Trump actually won the 2020 election, the man says matter-of-factly: “Evidence is overwhelming. Check out the internet. All kinds of sightings and facts.”At another point, Mr. Riggleman describes a conversation he had with someone who asked if he really thought that all the people claiming to have seen Bigfoot over the years were liars. “I don’t think that,” Mr. Riggleman responds. “I do believe that people see what they want to see.”He did find one way to crack the Bigfoot false belief system: telling true believers that they were being ripped off to the tune of hundreds or thousands of dollars to go on expeditions where they would never actually see the creature.“They got very angry,” he said. But eventually, some started to come around. More

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      Virginia becomes the first southern state to end the death penalty

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      Sign up for the Guardian Today US newsletterVirginia has become the 23rd US state and the first in the south to abolish the death penalty, a dramatic shift for the commonwealth which previously had the nation’s second-highest number of executions.The move was the culmination of a yearslong battle by Democrats who argued the death penalty has been applied disproportionately to people of color, mentally ill people and poor people. Republicans argued that the death penalty should remain a sentencing option for especially heinous crimes and to bring justice to victims and their families.Virginia’s new Democratic majority, in full control of the general assembly for a second year, won the debate last month when the senate and house of delegates passed measures banning capital punishment.The state’s Democratic governor, Ralph Northam, signed the house and senate bills in a ceremony on Wednesday after touring the execution chamber at the Greensville correctional center, where 102 people have been put to death since executions were moved there from the Virginia state penitentiary in the early 1990s.“There is no place today for the death penalty in this commonwealth, in the south or in this nation,” Northam said shortly before signing the legislation.The change is also significant for making Virginia the first state of the former Confederate south to abandon capital punishment. Northam said the death penalty has been disproportionately applied to Black people and is the product of a flawed judicial system. Since 1973, more than 170 people around the country have been released from death row after evidence of their innocence was uncovered, he said.Northam recounted the story of Earl Washington Jr, a Black man who was sentenced to death after being wrongfully convicted of rape and murder in Virginia in 1984. Washington spent more than 17 years in prison before he was exonerated. He came within nine days of being executed.“We can’t give out the ultimate punishment without being 100% sure that we’re right, and we can’t sentence people to that ultimate punishment knowing that the system doesn’t work the same for everyone,” Northam said.Virginia has executed nearly 1,400 people since its days as a colony. In modern times, the state is second only to Texas in the number of executions it has carried out, with 113 since the supreme court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, according to the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center.Only two men remain on Virginia’s death row: Anthony Juniper, who was sentenced to death in the 2004 slayings of his ex-girlfriend, two of her children, and her brother; and Thomas Porter, who was sentenced to die for the 2005 killing of a Norfolk police officer. Their sentences will now be converted to life in prison without parole.In addition to the 23 states that have now abolished the death penalty, three others have moratoriums in place that were imposed by their governors.Robert Dunham, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, and a death penalty opponent, said abolishing executions in Virginia could mark the beginning of the end for capital punishment in the south, where the highest number of prisoners are put to death.“Virginia’s death penalty has deep roots in slavery, lynchings and Jim Crow segregation,” said Dunham. “The symbolic value of dismantling this tool that has been used historically as a mechanism for racial oppression by a legislature sitting in the former capital of the Confederacy can’t be overstated.”During Northam’s tour of the death chamber, he was shown the wooden chair where death row inmates were electrocuted and a metal gurney where they were given lethal injections. He also saw the holding cells where they spent the final days of their lives and had their last meals.“It is a powerful thing to stand in the room where people have been put to death,” Northam told the crowd of lawmakers and death penalty opponents who attended the bill-signing ceremony.“I know that experience will stay with me for the rest of my life, and it reinforced [to] me that signing this new law is the right thing to do.” More

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      'We're making our way': how Virginia became the most progressive of the US’s southern states

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      Having lived in Virginia most of his life, Larry Sabato can remember racially segregated schools and systematic efforts to stop Black people voting. Now 68, he observes a state that has diversified, embraced liberal values and shifted from symbol of the old south to symbol of the new.“I have to admit, as a young man I would never have believed it was possible for Virginia to move in such a strong progressive direction,” said Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “I worked for candidates back then who were progressive. I used to joke, ‘If I work for you, you’re going to lose, you have to understand that’. And they always did.“Virginia has taught the country and the world that America can change, and sometimes can change rapidly, and in a very progressive direction.”Two dramatic examples came last month when the state general assembly voted to abolish the death penalty – an extraordinary reversal for a state that has executed more people than any other – and to make Virginia the first southern state to legalise marijuana for adult recreational use.These followed a flurry of measures that put the commonwealth, as it is known, in the vanguard on racial, social and economic issues in the American south. Last year it passed some of the strictest gun laws, loosest abortion restrictions and strongest protections for LGBTQ+ people in the region, as well as its highest minimum wage.Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by 10 points in Virginia in 2020. Its two US senators are Democrats, its governor is a Democrat and last year Democrats took full control of the general assembly for the first time in a quarter of a century.Such a monopoly would once have been unthinkable. Sabato reflected: “It was almost a one-party Republican state.It was Barack Obama in 2008 that finally got hundreds of thousands of young people registered and voting“Virginia had been edging a little bit closer to the Democratic party because of population growth in northern Virginia and Hampton Roads and even the Richmond area. But it was Barack Obama in 2008 that finally got hundreds of thousands of, not just minorities, but also young people registered and voting and we haven’t gone back since.“The Republican party has drifted further to the right. Instead of responding to the changes and bouncing back to the middle, they’ve decided to double down. They’ve lost every single election in this state from 2010 onwards.”Sabato was speaking from his office in Charlottesville, looking out on a statue of Thomas Jefferson, the third president who, like the first, George Washington, was a Virginian. Both founding fathers owned enslaved people on sprawling estates – Monticello and Mount Vernon – that have gone far in recent years to confront that legacy for tourists, historians and children.Virginia’s long and painful history would later include Confederate generals Robert E Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson fighting to preserve slavery and destroy the union. The state capital, Richmond, was the capital of the Confederacy. The south lost the civil war but Virginia remained a bastion of Jim Crow laws that maintained racial apartheid.By the 1990s, however, Virginia had elected the first African American governor in the US and political realignment was being fuelled by growing suburbs. The expansion of Washington spilled into northern Virginia, where voters are more likely to be immigrants, college educated and liberal. Other cities have expanded and diversified. The mayors of Richmond and Charlottesville are African American.Few changes are as totemic as the demise of capital punishment. Virginia had executed nearly 1,400 people since colonial days, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Since 1976, when the US supreme court reinstated the death penalty, it had carried out 113 executions, second only to Texas. But in voting to abolish it last month, Virginia’s general assembly noted that it is applied disproportionately to people of colour, the poor and the mentally ill.The march of progressive values is neither uniform nor irreversible. Virginia’s reforms have provoked resentment in rural areas. Tens of thousands of gun rights activists descended on Richmond last year to protest.A white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in 2017 was a stark reminder of the potential for backlash. Four years later, the statue of Lee at the centre of the protest still stands. Despite last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, a giant Lee monument in Richmond also remains intact.Juli Briskman, a district supervisor in Loudon county, northern Virginia, said: “You don’t have to drive very far to start seeing Trump flags and Confederate flags, and often you see them together. We still have the ‘Don’t tread on me’ licence plate. I’m trying to figure out how we can take that out of the system. So Virginia still has a little ways to go but I think as a ‘southern state’ it is really leading the way right now.I’m thankful that Virginians stuck with me“We’re the first state to pass the Voting Rights Act in the south and that is sitting on the governor’s desk right now. We’ve made a lot of strides in abortion access: last year the general assembly repealed a law that would have required women to get an ultrasound and have certain types of counselling before getting abortion care. We’ve passed a number of gun sense laws in ’20 and ’21, so we’re making our way.”‘He faced the storm’Perhaps no one personifies the often uncomfortable, but seemingly inexorable, transformation of Virginia more than Ralph Northam, the 61-year-old governor. Two years ago the Democrat was engulfed in scandal over a blackface image in his 1984 medical school yearbook. In one disastrous press conference, he seemed ready to accept a reporter’s challenge to perform Michael Jackson’s “moonwalk” dance until his wife interjected that these were “inappropriate circumstances”.Northam faced demands to resign but with his potential successor facing sexual assault allegations, managed to survive. He vowed to focus on racial equality and confronting his own white privilege. He has enthusiastically signed many of the progressive bills passed by the general assembly.Briskman, a Democrat who shot to fame by giving Trump’s motorcade the middle finger while cycling near his golf course, was among those who called for Northam to quit but now believes he has redeemed himself.“If he had resigned, we might not have gotten as much done,” she said. “It goes a long way toward reconciliation when somebody like Governor Northam can say he faced the storm and decided that he was going to turn it around and do something about it.”In an interview with the Guardian on Friday, Northam acknowledged the blackface incident had been a watershed moment.“That was a difficult time for Virginia and I’m thankful that Virginians stuck with me,” he said. “We had worked on a lot of equity issues prior to February 2019 but it really allowed me to travel around: I had listening tours and meetings and I learned so much from various people across Virginia.“The more I know, the more I can do, so we’ve really been able to put a stronger focus on equity and I made it clear to our administration, to our cabinet secretaries, that whether it be agriculture or education or health or whatever, we would address the inequities that continue to exist in our society today.”Then, in 2020, came the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and a nationwide uprising against racial injustice.“That was an awakening for a lot of people that look like me that hadn’t really ever thought through it in such detail,” Northam said. “So I kind of had a head start before that tragedy but I think it was an awakening. People said this just this is not right and we need to make changes.”Northam grew up in a conservative rural area and was in sixth grade when his school became racially integrated. When he got involved in politics, around 2006-07, he recalls, Virginia was still a red state but turning purple. The “blue wave” truly began with resistance to Trump’s election in November 2016, which prompted Northam to run for governor.“It’s diversity that really makes this country and, in our case, makes Virginia who we are,” he said. “We’re becoming more diverse every day and so we need to have our lights on and our doors open and make people feel welcome.In the smaller cities and in the country, it is quite conservative“We’ve really used that theme to support our base and also to draw more people to our party and supporting common sense policies. If you compare where we are today versus back in 2016, 2017, we’re essentially a blue state now.”‘Representation matters’Northam will soon return to work as a doctor, since state rules prevent him seeking a second consecutive term. Among the Democrats vying to succeed him in November are Terry McAuliffe, governor from 2014 to 2018, and two African American women: Jennifer Carroll Foy and Jennifer McClellan. Victory for either would be another historic breakthrough.Carroll Foy, 39, who became a member of the Virginia house of delegates in 2017, said: “I can’t speak about what happened in the past but what I can say is I know the man today, and the Ralph Northam today will go down as one of the most progressive governors that Virginia has ever had, delivering on the promises of getting us to expand Medicaid to 500,000 Virginians and helping to reform our criminal justice system.“I passed a bill to prohibit the use of chokeholds by law enforcement officers. We have just done such incredible things. I carried legalisation of marijuana for several years and now it’s passed in Virginia and that is under Governor Northam leading the charge and taking seriously his commitment to racial reconciliation.”Carroll Foy was one of the first African American women to graduate from Virginia Military Institute and is aware what message electing a woman of colour as Northam’s successor would send. “It is absolutely imperative for us to make good on what we’ve been saying,” she said. “Representation matters and for millions of little girls it’s hard to be what you can’t see. We are yet to have a Black woman lead this nation and we’re yet to have a Black woman lead in a state in this country and, while people have applauded Black women for delivering the White House and helping us win Congress, it’s not enough to thank us.“You also have to support us when we’re ready to lead, and we are ready. Now is our time. You don’t just need bills and pledges for Black women; we need them written by Black women. And I’m excited that as the next governor, I will be able to continue on the legacy that Governor Northam has started in addressing the inequities throughout all of our systems so we can ensure that Virginia’s future is better than its past.”John Edwin Mason, who moved to the state in the mid-1990s and teaches history at the University of Virginia, said: “It is a remarkable change. If you had told me that Virginia was going to legalise marijuana and outlaw the death penalty, I would have been very surprised in 1995 and probably would have told you that you had been drinking a little too much to think that that would be possible.“It was not simply a largely Republican state when it came to electoral politics, but it felt very conservative and it doesn’t quite feel that way on the whole now, although of course in the smaller cities and in the country, it is quite conservative.”Mason noted that Virginia Republicans seem to be embracing Trumpism, even after the state comprehensively rejected the president in 2020. Democrats hope other southern states will do likewise.Mason added: “I think that if you are an optimistic Democratic political operative, you’re probably saying that Virginia is the harbinger of things to come.“You would point to Georgia which just elected two Democratic senators in a very similar dynamic to the way that our two Democratic senators and Democratic governor have been elected in a state that is very split along regional lines. It is a big change and, of the states of the old confederacy, Virginia is by far the bluest.” More

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      The Virginia G.O.P. Voted on Its Future. The Losers Reject the Results.

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Virginia G.O.P. Voted on Its Future. The Losers Reject the Results.In a sign of the Trump era’s lingering alternate realities, Republicans in the struggling state party are refusing to move forward with a new system for choosing nominees.State Senator Amanda Chase, a Trump loyalist who has recently been required to sit in a plexiglass box during Senate sessions after refusing to wear a mask, is one of the top Republican candidates for governor in Virginia.Credit…Ryan M. Kelly/Associated PressFeb. 19, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETARLINGTON, Va. — The Republican Party of Virginia has voted four times since December to nominate its candidates for this year’s statewide races at a convention instead of in a primary election. But in a sign of the Trumpian times of denial and dispute in the G.O.P., nearly half of the party’s top officials are still trying to reverse the results.The refusal of these Republicans to admit that they have lost, or to agree on a set of nominating rules, has fractured a state party already in upheaval: Republicans haven’t won a statewide election since 2009, and they now find themselves with legislative minorities for the first time in a generation. Even the broken windows at the state party’s Richmond headquarters haven’t been fixed for months.Just a month after former President Donald J. Trump left office, Virginia’s drama is the first state-level boomerang of his legacy. State Republicans have internalized the lesson that there is no benefit to accepting results they don’t like, and the result is a paralyzed party unable to set the date, location and rules for how and when it will pick its 2021 nominees for statewide office, including the race for governor.The intraparty dispute has scrambled longstanding political alliances and left Virginia Republicans in the awkward position of defending stances that were once anathema to a party that has been redefined by the Trump era.“It’s very much about not accepting the results and trying to change the rules and game the election,” said former Representative Tom Davis, a moderate Republican who won seven terms in Congress from a Northern Virginia district. “The reality now is even when Republicans pull together, they have a hard time winning, and when they’re divided, they have no shot of winning.”The party’s decision on Dec. 5 to hold a May 1 convention rather than a June 8 primary was widely seen as an effort to stop Amanda Chase, a firebrand state senator who calls herself “Trump in heels,” from claiming the party’s nomination for governor.While Ms. Chase or other candidates could win the nomination with as little as 30 percent of the vote in a field with three other major candidates and several lesser contenders, a party convention would require a nominee to win support from at least 50 percent of delegates.Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat who cannot serve consecutive terms, has prohibited most large gatherings in Virginia.Credit…Steve Helber/Associated PressBut with the coronavirus pandemic raging and Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat who under Virginia law cannot serve consecutive terms, having for now prohibited most gatherings of more than 10 people, there was little chance Republicans could conduct an in-person convention of several thousand people. Changing the party’s rules to conduct a so-called unassembled convention at dozens of sites across Virginia requires approval of three-fourths of the State Central Committee’s members — a threshold so far impossible to meet because those holding out for a primary have refused to compromise.“The fact that there’s a minority faction who lost that are standing in the way of a safe convention to try to get the primary that they couldn’t win fairly — that says a lot about them,” said Patti Lyman, the Republican national committeewoman for Virginia. “All their arguments can be boiled down to: We lost, and we don’t like it.”Some proponents of a convention are arguing in favor of ranked-choice voting, a system that has been pushed elsewhere by progressives. Those making the case for a primary argue that it makes it easier for voters to participate. The dispute threatens to undercut Republicans’ already-uphill fight in this year’s elections and prolong Democratic control of the state.The party’s squabble centers on a crowded group of Republican contenders for governor that includes one candidate each from the G.O.P.’s Trump and establishment wings, along with two wealthy wild cards. The major candidates include Ms. Chase; Kirk Cox, a former State House speaker, who is the favorite of the party’s elected state legislators; Pete Snyder, a millionaire technology executive who lost a bid for the lieutenant governor nomination at a party convention in 2013; and Glenn Youngkin, an even wealthier former chief executive in private equity who is a newcomer to politics.In past intramural skirmishes, conservative Virginia Republicans have pushed for conventions to give a larger voice to the most hard-line party activists. In 2013, Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II won the nomination for governor at a convention after his social conservative allies boxed out more moderate candidates who preferred a primary.But the current disagreement has more to do with derailing Ms. Chase and Mr. Youngkin, who threatened to blanket the state with tens of millions of dollars of television advertising ahead of any primary.Allies of Mr. Snyder have pushed for a convention by arguing that Mr. Youngkin would buy the election if it went to a primary.“I’m going to run hard and win the Republican nomination regardless of the method of nomination,” Mr. Snyder said. “It’s time for the Virginia G.O.P. to decide the rules.”There is little establishment support for Ms. Chase, who last month was censured by her State Senate colleagues and stripped of committee assignments after she called the rioters at the Capitol “patriots.” She has recently been required to sit in a plexiglass box after refusing to wear a mask during Senate sessions. Ms. Chase has called it her “square of freedom.”Mr. Cox, for his part, prefers a primary but has written two letters to State Central Committee members emphasizing his official neutrality in the primary-versus-convention debate.“They need to resolve it as quickly as possible,” Mr. Cox said. “We need to know the process. But I’ve been very adamant about not weighing in.”Kirk Cox, a former State House speaker, and Delegate Todd Gilbert at the State Capitol in Richmond, Va.Credit…Bob Brown/Richmond Times-Dispatch, via Associated PressVirginia Republicans face a Feb. 23 deadline to inform state elections officials whether they intend to hold a primary. The state G.O.P. chairman, Rich Anderson, warned in a Jan. 25 letter to committee members that an in-person convention would be impossible and that an unassembled convention could not proceed if supporters of a primary refused to budge from their no-convention stance.If neither side shifts, wrote Mr. Anderson, who through an aide declined an interview request, the party’s nominees for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general will be chosen by the 72-member State Central Committee, “which will take on the perception of party bosses huddled in a smoke-filled back room.”The inability to organize a nominating contest has brought ridicule to a disorganized party aiming to win a statewide election for the first time in 12 years. John Fredericks, a radio talk show host who was the Virginia state chairman for Mr. Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns, has organized bingo games to mock the party’s marathon Zoom meetings, which have each lasted four to eight hours.“To be four months away from the nomination and not have a process is terribly embarrassing and shows an unwillingness to compromise for the good of the party,” said former Gov. Bob McDonnell, the last Virginia Republican to win a statewide election. “Every passing day hurts whoever our eventual nominee is for myriad reasons.”Sixteen minutes after The New York Times emailed State Central Committee members asking questions about the Republicans’ internal nomination battle, the party’s general counsel, Chris Marston, who is also Mr. Snyder’s campaign compliance lawyer, emailed committee members asking them not to speak to reporters.Mr. Marston’s stated reason for avoiding media scrutiny is a lawsuit Ms. Chase filed in federal court challenging the party’s decision to hold a convention. But courts have long given political parties wide latitude to set and enforce their own rules for choosing nominees. Few outside Ms. Chase’s immediate circle of supporters believe her lawsuit, which has a hearing scheduled on Friday, will succeed.Ms. Chase, who was still arguing with less than a week left in Mr. Trump’s presidency that he could yet be inaugurated for a second term, said Thursday that she “doesn’t trust conventions,” which she said unfairly limit voting access for members of the military and others who can’t make it to an in-person site.“If we’re going to win as Republicans, we need to include more of the electorate who vote Republican instead of less,” she said. “Stop creating so many obstacles for people who would normally vote.”Ms. Chase this week won support for her primary push from Mr. Youngkin. During an interview with a Charlottesville radio station on Tuesday, Mr. Youngkin, whose supporters want a primary, said it was “not fair” that the party had created uncertainty for the candidates in its nominating process.“Boy, can I sympathize with Senator Chase on her frustration,” he said. “Here we are on February the 16th, we have an election in November, and we don’t even have a plan to select our candidate. I mean, this is absolutely amazing to me.”As Republicans across the country struggle with how much Mr. Trump should influence the direction of the party and whom it nominates for key races in 2022 and eventually for president in 2024, Virginia’s Republicans remain mired in their procedural fight.Those pushing for a primary say they won’t give up.Thomas Turner, a State Central Committee member who is chairman of the Young Republicans of Virginia, said he was hearing regularly from grass-roots Republicans who were dismayed with the decision to hold a convention and looking for him to keep trying to overturn it.“I am still wanting a primary because I do believe that is the best way to pick a candidate,” Mr. Turner said. “I will fight for that until the end.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More