"McAuliffe told a modest crowd outside a Fairfax brewery Monday night at his final rally. 'He is doing an event with Donald Trump here in Virginia.' That was a lie."

"Trump wasn’t in Virginia and he never campaigned with Youngkin.... Thirty miles away, at the Loudoun County Fairgrounds, a crowd several times the size of McAuliffe’s was waiting for Youngkin to take the stage. You got a hint of why McAuliffe was desperate to manufacture the fake Trump event... [H]is Monday audiences in Richmond and Fairfax, where we caught up with him, were modest and listless. Youngkin’s were large and rollicking, with many of the trappings of a MAGA rally — a similar dad rock playlist, hats and flags and T-shirts paying homage to the former president — but, to the great disappointment of Democrats, not Trump himself."

From "POLITICO Playbook: Youngkin’s crowds dwarf McAuliffe’s on election eve."

The spirit of Trump is pervasive and evasive. It even made poor Terry McAuliffe lie about it. I certainly hope the vote count at the end of the day shows that McAuliffe has lost, because if it doesn't, people won't believe it, and I don't like that kind of chaos.

McAuliffe accuses Youngkin of racist dog whistling.

 Transcript. Excerpt:

TERRY McAULIFFE: [P]eople were very happy that I vetoed the bill that literally parents could take books out of the curriculum. You know, I love Millie and Jack McAuliffe, my parents, but they should not have been picking my math or science book. We have experts who actually do that. And look what happened. [Glenn Youngkin] is closing his campaign on banning books. It's created a controversy all over the country. He wants to ban Toni Morrison's book Beloved. So he's going after one of the most preeminent African American female writers in American history, won the Nobel Prize, has a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and he wants her books banned. Now, of all the hundreds of books you could look at, why did you pick the one Black female author? Why did you do it? He's ending his campaign on a racist dog whistle...

 It's racializing to call it a racializing, of course.

... just like he started the campaign when he talks about election integrity. But Chuck, we have a great school system in Virginia. Dorothy and I have raised our five children.

But McAuliffe sent 4 of those 5 children to private school (Catholic school). 

The Lincoln Project inserts itself into the Virginia gubernatorial race by sending 5 demonstrators with tiki torches to a Glenn Youngkin rally.

1. Here's how the Washington Post puts it: "A group of people carrying tiki torches outside Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin’s tour bus in Charlottesville on Friday, which caused a stir on social media and led both political parties to blame the other for the stunt, turned out to be organized by the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump Republican group."

2. Is the Lincoln Project really/still a Republican group?

3. Did the Lincoln Project hope to keep its role secret until after the election and, if so, did it assume that the finger-pointing would hurt Youngkin more than McAuliffe? 

4. The candidates and their supporters immediately started blaming each other, and that could be inconclusive — just chaos. I think chaos — with racists in the center of the controversy — would at least shake things up and benefit McAuliffe, who's been failing lately and seeming desperate as polls have shifted toward Youngkin. But that's also a reason to implicate McAuliffe in what would be understood as a false-flag dirty trick.

5. But the Lincoln Project stepped forward and rescued McAuliffe by announcing that it was their dirty trick. And now we have to talk about them. They'd come into disrepute lately, and who knows who they really are now? But how mind-bending for them to take the spotlight in the last weekend before this crucial election! Did they decide on their own that this would be appropriate — a really strained decision — to forefront virulent racism? Or did they consult with McAuliffe? Does campaign finance law forbid them from engaging in that level of coordination?

6. Now that the Lincoln Project has taken responsibility, does that let the candidate they intended to help off the hook? You can't control what your supporters do, and this question parallels whether Trump should be responsible for the openly expressed racism of the original tiki-torch marchers in Charlottesville. But I see that Philip Klein at The National Review is saying "McAuliffe Should Be Held Responsible for Tiki Torch Stunt, Because His Campaign Thinks Candidates Are Responsible for Supporters."

7. Klein raises a very basic question that had occurred to me: Is the Lincoln project telling the truth now? The stunt itself was deceptive, so how do we know this isn't a new form of deception — "taking the heat off of somebody else given the stunt epically backfired"? I would note that there are 5 human beings who are easily identifiable, the demonstrators. Why did they do it? How much were they paid? What were they told? Is anyone talking to them?

8. Klein contends that McAuliffe is responsible even if the Lincoln Project did the whole thing independently because "the McAuliffe campaign pounced":

One McAuliffe spokesperson, Christina Freundlich, referenced the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally, and said, "this is who Glenn Youngkin’s supporters are."Another McAuliffe spokesperson, Jen Goodman, claimed the image of the fake Youngkin supporters was “disgusting and disqualifying.”

9.  It becomes very easy to take that "disgusting and disqualifying" and aim it back at McAuliffe, and that is how Philip Klein ends his piece. It is "disgusting and disqualifying" to snap up whatever's available to make everything about race, and the McAuliffe campaign showed that instinct. Everybody uses everything that can be used these days, and they often have to work pretty hard to show that things are really about race — that's the Critical Race Theory method. But this thing was blatantly racial. 

10. I mean those 5 demonstrators were blatantly racial. The leap was to say "this is who Glenn Youngkin’s supporters are." Those 5 people are (posing as) racists and what it means — in the view of at least one McAuliffe spokesperson — is that all of Youngkin supporters are racists. That readiness to besmirch the entire group — that's the problem. Ironically, it's the methodology of racists.

These men approached @GlennYoungkin’s bus as it pulled up saying what sounded like, “We’re all in for Glenn.” Here they are standing in front of the bus as his campaign event at Guadalajara started.@NBC29 pic.twitter.com/l681ejyBjc

— Elizabeth Holmes (@holmes_reports) October 29, 2021

"Youngkin’s new ad features the heart-wrenching story of Laura Murphy, a mother who tried to shield her son from having to read Beloved, by Toni Morrison."

"The ad does not identify the book, nor does it mention that Murphy is a Republican activist. But the story was covered by the media at the time, back in 2013. Murphy’s son told the Washington Post that the book, assigned for his Advanced Placement English course, 'was disgusting and gross. It was hard for me to handle. I gave up on it.' He also complained that he suffered 'night terrors' as a result of reading it. Murphy sought to have Beloved banned until 'new policies are adopted for books assigned for class that might have objectionable material,' said the Post. One irony here is that Republicans are rallying around a privileged snowflake who claims a book millions of children have read caused unbearable trauma. If their principle is that parents should be able to prevent schools from assigning texts that upset their kids, what are they going to say when progressives start demanding the school excise texts by Mark Twain, Richard Wright, and other authors who have run afoul of the left for depicting racist dialogue?"

From "Glenn Youngkin’s Closing Message: Ban Toni Morrison From Schools/Virginia Republican wants the angriest parents to have a veto on school curriculum" (NY Magazine).

Here's the ad: 

What's it like to have Terry McAuliffe block you from having a say in your child's education?

This mom knows – she lived through it. Watch her powerful story. #VAgov pic.twitter.com/u8EjmMQX0n

— Glenn Youngkin (@GlennYoungkin) October 25, 2021

"You can believe him, because he's done it before" — Obama's pitch for McAuliffe.

I've cued this to start when Obama starts, but the first 5 minutes is introductions and instructions on how to vote. There's some byplay about how wives tell their husbands what to do: Michelle would say something obscene if Obama said he wanted to run for office again after being out of office, which is McAuliffe's predicament, and Obama doesn't know what Doris might have said to Terry. 

All the signs say "Terry," by the way. He's become one of those first-name guys, like Bernie.

The repeated line — "You can believe him, because he's done it before" — depends on the voters' perception that things went well when McAuliffe was governor and are going well under Northam — "Northram," as Obama calls him. 

It's an anti-change argument from a rhetorician who built his career on the abstraction "change." Obama portrays Virginia as in the middle of a process of "movin' forward" and needing to decide whether to keep going or whether "to go backwards": "We can plunge right back into the misguided policies and the divisiveness and the negligence."

Obama — stumping for McAuliffe — asserts that Republicans are not trying to win with ideas.

Obama claims Republicans are “trying to rig elections” pic.twitter.com/SVl5o4uAtl

— Jewish Deplorable (@TrumpJew2) October 24, 2021

ADDED: Are Democrats trying to win with ideas? Obama is saying Republicans should put their ideas up against the Democrat's ideas, and let the people compare the ideas and pick what they like. I'm irritated by the assertion that McAuliffe's opponent isn't talking about ideas and McAuliffe supposedly is. But I do like the idea of calmly and clearly showing people the ideas and letting us choose. This is something I talked about in my first year of blogging, in a post called "Mysterious personal reaction to Dick Cheney." 

Do it for Terry.

"McAuliffe Needs Passage of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill—Now/If House progressives drop their opposition, Biden will sign it quickly. That may save the Virginia governorship for the Democrats" (Washington Monthly).

To help salvage McAuliffe’s chances against the private equity executive Youngkin—whom [sic] polls show is running an uncomfortably close race—Virginia Senator Mark Warner has floated the idea of re-upping the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill (the “BIF”) passed by the Senate this summer but yet to clear the House. Right now, it’s being held hostage by progressives who insist that its passage be linked to the much bigger Build Back Better Act—a move the White House has blessed. Decoupling the BIF would be a Hail Mary move, but McAuliffe’s situation is dire enough that it might be worth trying again. If liberals drop their objections, the BIF has enough bipartisan support to pass the House easily.

I'm reading too much into the headline "Everyone Is Reading Too Much Into Virginia’s Race for Governor/Many fear that if Terry McAuliffe loses, doom for Democrats is imminent. Don’t be so sure."

That's at The New Republic.

What I'm reading into that is that Democrats originally loaded a lot of meaning into that election, because they wanted to use it for leverage to argue in favor of their interests, to predict future success, and to demand support for vigorous exercise of ambitious power, and that now, they see a need to dismantle that foundation, because they think they will (or might) lose, so they want to unload the extra meaning attached and isolate the election as something random and local.

From the article, which is by Alex Shepard:

If McAuliffe loses to [Glen] Youngkin, it could throw an already chaotic scene into further disarray, as the various factions mull a response. A McAuliffe loss in a state that Joe Biden won by 10 points, and that a Democrat won by eight only four years ago, would be treated as apocalyptic harbinger—a sign of an imminent bloodbath in just a year’s time. Joe Biden’s agenda, along with all of the Americans who stand to benefit from its passage, could be a casualty in that mass panic....

Clearly, I'm cherry-picking, but that's there in the article with the headline chiding us about reading "too much" into the election. 

"Did Kamala Harris Just Violate Federal Law To Boost Terry McAuliffe In Virginia?"

Asks Jonathan Turley, and I was inclined not to be too picky about this. I thought — what? — did she encourage black churchgoers to vote, and we just know that's done with the expectation that they'll vote Democratic? But then I watched the video:

NEW -- More than 300 Black churches across VA will hear from @KamalaHarris btwn Sun. and November 2 in video message that will air during morning services as part of outreach effort aimed to boost @TerryMcAuliffe.#VAGOV

Video first obtained by CNNhttps://t.co/vaefXtWqUe pic.twitter.com/l8re0KUkN1

— Eva McKend (@evamckend) October 16, 2021

She explicitly campaigns for McAuliffe.

Turley writes: "If this is indeed played in churches (as opposed to simply posted on Internet sites), it does appear a premeditated and unambiguous violation of the federal law governing churches as non-for-profit institutions."

Turley doesn't explain how this means Harris has "violated" federal law. Isn't the only issue whether the churches should lose their tax-exempt status? 

Terry McAuliffe is flummoxed by the question my father used to defeat me in arguments when I was a teenager.

Virginia Democrat Terry McAuliffe suggests parents concerned about Critical Race Theory are racist, then refuses to define CRT. pic.twitter.com/MKnnb5BC4S

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) October 8, 2021

The challenge is: Define your terms. 

Here's a local news article about the Virginia gubernatorial debate: 

"One of the biggest acts of political malpractice in the history of American politics."

According to Terry McAuliffe's new memoir, “What a Party! My Life Among Democrats: Presidents, Candidates, Donors, Activists, Alligators and Other Wild Animals,” that would be John Kerry's decision to forbid attacks on George W. Bush at the 2004 Democratic convention. Yes, that was Kerry's big problem all right. He was just too darned nice to his opponents.