"Two recent polls show President Biden and former president Donald Trump tied in Virginia, a surprising finding for a blue-trending state that Biden won by 10 points in 2020..."

"... and that independent analysts still see as a stretch for the presumptive GOP nominee.... 'Whether the numbers are fully accurate or not, you do get a general indication of what’s happening. … Things are not going well for Joe Biden. They’re just not,' [said Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist and self-described polling skeptic].... Karoline Leavitt, national press secretary for Trump’s campaign [said] 'Joe Biden is so weak, and Democrats are in such disarray, that not only is President Trump dominating in every traditional battleground state, but longtime blue states such as Minnesota, Virginia, and New Jersey are now in play.... President Trump is on offense with a winning message and growing his movement every single day. Joe Biden’s campaign should be terrified.'"

WaPo's reporter on Virginia, Laura Vozzella, strains to cheer readers up in "Virginia still seen as stretch for Trump despite two tied polls with Biden/While some analysts say they have trouble squaring those polls with other surveys showing a tight race nationwide, they still see potential warning signs for Biden."

"There is concern for potential violent protests regardless of who wins the presidency in November."

"Although more are concerned about potentially violent protests by Trump supporters if Biden wins (36% very concerned; 31% somewhat concerned), there is also concern about violent protests by Biden supporters if Trump wins (19% very concerned; 29% somewhat concerned). Democrats were much more concerned about Trump supporters’ reactions (54% very concerned; 30% somewhat concerned), while Republicans were about equally concerned regardless of who wins."

From "Roanoke College Poll: Biden and Trump tied in Virginia."

And, yes, it's a big deal that Trump is now tied with Biden in Virginia. A year ago, in the Roanoke poll, Biden was up by 16 points:

"A Virginia school board voted to restore the names of two schools previously named after Confederate leaders...."

"The Shenandoah County School Board voted 5-1 to call the schools Stonewall Jackson High School and Ashby Lee Elementary School, four years after the board — under different members — changed the names of the institutions due to their ties to Confederate leaders Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee and Turner Ashby."

WaPo reports.

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. 

"Just watched as a massive crane took down the magnificent and very famous statue of 'Robert E. Lee On His Horse' in Richmond, Virginia."

"It has long been recognized as a beautiful piece of bronze sculpture. To add insult to injury, those who support this 'taking' now plan to cut it into three pieces, and throw this work of art into storage prior to its complete desecration. Robert E. Lee is considered by many Generals to be the greatest strategist of them all. President Lincoln wanted him to command the North, in which case the war would have been over in one day. Robert E. Lee instead chose the other side because of his great love of Virginia, and except for Gettysburg, would have won the war. He should be remembered as perhaps the greatest unifying force after the war was over, ardent in his resolve to bring the North and South together through many means of reconciliation and imploring his soldiers to do their duty in becoming good citizens of this Country. Our culture is being destroyed and our history and heritage, both good and bad, are being extinguished by the Radical Left, and we can’t let that happen! If only we had Robert E. Lee to command our troops in Afghanistan, that disaster would have ended in a complete and total victory many years ago. What an embarrassment we are suffering because we don’t have the genius of a Robert E. Lee!

Said Donald Trump, in a written statement at his website, here. 

1. I had some trouble finding the original statement. News sites quote without linking, and Trump's website is rather hard to find by casual Googling. They don't want you to see it. So, when I finally found it, I made a bookmark, and now I intend to make a point of checking it every day. These efforts to hide things can backfire.

2. I notice that Trump is far more grounded in aesthetics than your run-of-the-mill politician. The first thing he talks about is the magnificence and beauty of the statue. That's my first reaction to this issue: Richmond, you have had a beautiful statue in your midst! Regardless of the extent to which you want to honor or dishonor the man it depicts, it is a work of art. To tear it down because of the ideas you think it represents is like the Taliban blowing up the Bamiyan Buddhas.

3. Trump has a visual mind: The "magnificent statue" is attacked by the "massive crane." He's especially drawn to the huge. That's his word — yooge. And here you have 2 huge things in confrontation. It's epic, the crane vs. the statue, like Godzilla v. Rodan. For that link, I Googled "Godzilla vs." and Google wanted to autocomplete that as... let's just say another large movie monster that it would be distracting to name.

4. But I will sidetrack you into this crucial piece of the Trump-and-art puzzle: To prepare the site for Trump Tower, his yooge monument to himself, Trump famously destroyed prominent Art Deco bas-relief sculpture that had been a focal point of 5th Avenue in New York City. In his new statement, Trump observes that the statue of Lee will be cut in 3 pieces, but Trump completely destroyed that stone artwork. 

5. More visuals: The cut-up sculpture is "thrown" into storage. It will be stored, not completely destroyed. On first glance, you might think you read "complete destruction," but Trump writes "complete desecration."

6. To say "desecration" is to say that the statue of Robert E. Lee contained sacredness. 

7. But the rest of the statement is not about holiness but military aptitude. Trump vaunts Lee as a great military strategist. Like a moviemaker pitching an alternative history script, he visualizes Lee in command of the Union Army: "the war would have been over in one day." And Lee in command in Afghanistan: There would have been "a complete and total victory many years ago."

8. It's not enough to end wars. You need to end them well, something we didn't do with Afghanistan, but which Lee — in Trump's telling — did: "He should be remembered as perhaps the greatest unifying force after the war was over, ardent in his resolve to bring the North and South together through many means of reconciliation and imploring his soldiers to do their duty in becoming good citizens of this Country." 

9. That makes me think of Trump's January 6th speech. After losing (or ostensibly losing) the 2020 election, Trump could have been more of a "unifying force," "ardent in his resolve" to bridge the partisan divide. He could have pursued "many means of reconciliation and implor[ed his supporters] to do their duty in becoming good citizens."

10. Trump enlarges the picture — I think of the crane shot in "Gone With The Wind" — and we see the entire culture. The Radical Left is destroying not just this one sculpture, but everything. This is Trump's cinematic visual mind operating again. The filmmaker has us concentrating on Scarlett looking for one man then pulls back and exposes hundreds of wounded men. 

11. Trump had us looking at one sculpture, then pulls back and urges us to gaze upon the entire culture. The Left is besetting all of "our history and heritage, both good and bad." He's so protective of our culture that he's alarmed about extinguishing "both good and bad." What's wrong with extinguishing the bad?! And isn't the demand for more teaching about slavery and racism the opposite of extinguishing the bad? Let's see it! Let's make kids look right at it.

12. I'm just noticing the very close similarity in the words "sculpture" and "culture." Just pull the "s" and the "p" out of "sculpture" and you have "culture." Sorry, that's just me being visual about letters and words. Is there any meaning to that? Of course there is! Go farther down that road and you might be a poet.

"When Virginians voted nearly 2-to-1 last fall to establish a bipartisan redistricting commission, the idea was to embrace a fairer method of drafting the state’s political maps...."

"But... the 16-member panel — split evenly between Republicans and Democrats, citizens and state legislators — was unable to agree on hiring a single, nonpartisan lawyer to guide its work, settling instead for one affiliated with each party. Then, at a similar impasse over hiring a firm to draft boundaries for congressional and state legislative districts, it opted for two firms, each partisan.... The commission’s rules allow any two of its legislator members of either party to block a proposed map, a structure intended to promote compromise. If instead the outcome is an impasse, the enterprise will be turned over to Virginia’s Supreme Court, which will hire its own experts to do the job. That could lend Republicans a partisan advantage; a majority of the court’s judges were appointed by past GOP-led legislatures...."

From "Virginia’s new redistricting panel was supposed to make democracy work better — but partisanship stands in the way" by the editors of The Washington Post. 

So the people voted in a referendum for reform to solve a problem that has reemerged in the reform. They voted against partisanship for something that also manifested partisanship. The editorial ends by saying that because the people voted to "improve democracy," the commissioners ought to take improving democracy "more seriously." Yet it looks like what's really going on is that the Democrats on the commission just have to figure out if they are worse off making concessions to the Republicans or letting the Republican-dominated state Supreme Court pick the "experts" and let them draw the lines. It's a grisly business.

ADDED: I don't like my own phrase "They voted against partisanship." Who knows exactly why people vote for what they vote for? It's at least as likely that they voted with hope that the new method of redistricting would benefit their party more than the method it replaced. In that case, the WaPo's editors threat to the commissioners is silly: The people believed they were voting for democracy, so you'd better not give them partisanship. 

"No, with a beautiful head of white hair. Go ahead. I’ll tell you if I like his hair in about a minute, after he asks the question."

Said Donald Trump — calling on the last questioner at yesterday's press briefing — addressing a man identified as "Speaker 11" in the transcript.

The man with the white hair that was beautiful or not beautiful depending on how much Trump liked his question want to know about Trump's "LIBERATE VIRGINIA" tweet that connected the protest of the lockdown to the Second Amendment. ("LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!")

Doesn't that "potentially pose a concern" about "civil unrest"?

Notice that the man did not say Doesn't that foment armed rebellion? — and that makes the head of white hair look beautiful. Indeed, Trump called the question "an easy one" — so we may infer that Trump "like[d] his hair."

Trump's answer to the question:

We’re entitled to a Second Amendment and [the Governor of Virginia is] trying to take... that Second Amendment right away. To me that’s liberty. When I say "Liberate Virginia," I would say "Liberate Virginia" when that kind of thing happens and where does it all stop? So I think it’s a very good analogy.... [Y]ou have them working and signing documents trying to take your Second Amendment away essentially. So I do think it’s an appropriate time to bring it up.

What's the analogy? I think it's in using the idea of a state "under siege" and in need of "liberation" to describe a state that is limiting Second Amendment rights. The right to keep and bear arms is a "liberty" — he's saying — so if the state is cutting back on that liberty and you want to fight against that, you can say — in colorful language — that it's a fight to "liberate" the state.

ADDED: This morning, I heard a snippet of MSNBC on the car radio. A Michigan Congressman, Dan Kildee, was asked about the protests against the stringent restrictions. What would he would say to the people who feel that they are deprived of liberty?

I don't have the verbatim quote, but Kildee had an earnest way of presenting safety as liberty. He was not talking about gun rights, specifically, but he was using the same rhetoric that I've heard in the defense of gun control regulations. Restrictions on liberty are justified by characterizing one person's liberty as an impingement on the liberty of others. Just as gun control is presented as a protection of the people's right to be free of gun violence, Kildee presented the stay-at-home orders as a protection of the people's right to be free from the virus.

The rhetoric of liberty is available to everyone and is presumed to be what Americans want to hear. Wanting to be safe is repackaged as a love of the freedom to be found in safety.

"Before being arrested by the FBI last week, three alleged members of a white supremacist group were plotting deadly attacks at Monday’s gun rights rally in Richmond..."

"... including shooting 'unsuspecting civilians and police officers' in hopes of igniting what one called a 'full-blown civil war,' authorities said in court filings. In legal motions filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Maryland, prosecutors said the three suspects, who were under investigation for weeks before the rally, were recorded discussing the planned mayhem by a microphone and video camera secretly planted in a Delaware apartment by FBI agents in December. 'We can’t let Virginia go to waste, we just can’t,' one of the men, Patrik J. Mathews, said, according to the court filings. Like his co-defendants, Mathews is accused of belonging to a militant hate group whose name, 'the Base,' is a rough English translation of 'al-Qaeda.' Mathews, according to prosecutors, said: 'Here’s the thing. . . . You want to create . . . instability while the Virginia situation is happening . . . derail some rail lines . . . shut down the highways' as a way to 'kick off the economic collapse.' 'Virginia will be our day,' another of the three, Brian M. Lemley Jr., said, according to the court documents."

From "Alleged white supremacists planned deadly violence at Richmond gun rally, federal prosecutors say" (WaPo).

Meanwhile, the rally that did take place was entirely peaceful: "Gun-rights advocates pick-up trash after protesting peacefully in Richmond."

"It’s clear that Northam is praying for violence."

Wrote Glenn Reynolds, expressing the cynical view that I had but felt I should refrain from saying.

My post, from 5 days ago, quotes NBC12 — "Fearing a repeat of the deadly violence that engulfed Charlottesville more than two years ago, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam declared a temporary emergency Wednesday banning all weapons, including guns, from Capitol Square ahead of a massive rally planned next week over gun rights" — and says:

That phrase — "Fearing a repeat of the deadly violence that engulfed Charlottesville more than two years ago" — caused me to have a thought so cynical that I will refrain from writing it down.

With Glenn's companionship, I will disclose that when I read the headline out loud 5 days ago, I stopped after "Fearing a repeat of the deadly violence that engulfed Charlottesville" and said "Hoping for a repeat of the deadly violence that engulfed Charlottesville."

Today's the day. The rally is under way. The New York Times is doing live, minute-by-minute updates under the heading "Virginia Gun Rally Live Updates: Crowds and Lines, but Calm So Far." Sample text:

White supremacists, members of antigovernment militias and other extremists have said they planned to be in Richmond for the rally as well, stoking fears of the sort of violence that left one person dead and some two dozen others injured during a far-right rally in Charlottesville in 2017.

Hoping to head off trouble, the state has set up a security perimeter around the Capitol grounds and has banned weapons — including firearms — from the area inside. Police officers guarded the area with the help of bomb-sniffing dogs, and people entering the perimeter through the single entrance were being screened with metal detectors....

"Leslie Cockburn, a Democratic congressional nominee in Virginia, accused her Republican opponent, Denver Riggleman, on Sunday of... being the author of Bigfoot-themed erotica."

The NYT reports.

In an interview on Monday, Mr. Riggleman said he was writing a book about people who believe in Bigfoot but denied that it contained any erotic content. He said any eyebrow-raising images of Bigfoot on his social media accounts were a result of “a 14-year practical joke between me and my military buddies.”...

Mr. Riggleman says the whole thing is a joke that has been misconstrued by Ms. Cockburn. The naked drawing of Bigfoot that she tweeted was a gag that was sent to him by friends — although it was a reference to the title of a real second Bigfoot book that he says he is currently writing: “The Mating Habits of Bigfoot and Why Women Want Him.”

He describes the book as “a sort of joke anthropological study on Bigfoot believers.”

Here's the ludicrous tweet by Cockburn:

My opponent Denver Riggleman, running mate of Corey Stewart, was caught on camera campaigning with a white supremacist. Now he has been exposed as a devotee of Bigfoot erotica. This is not what we need on Capitol Hill. pic.twitter.com/0eBvxFd6sG

— Leslie Cockburn (@LeslieCockburn) July 29, 2018

It's just by chance that Riggleman and Cockburn have smutty looking names.

"Moderate Democrat defeats Bush family surrogate in Virginia."

David Blaska puts yesterday in perspective.

"There is a natural order of things... a woman's arm is constructed at a certain angle so that she can adequately cradle a baby."

"This is the way we're created. There are just certain things that nature intended.... I know that might not be a popular view around here, but there is a created order that we must all follow."

Said the Virginia state legislator Robert G. Marshall, back in 2006. He called himself Virginia's "chief homophobe."

And — perhaps because the natural order of things is that pride goeth before a fall and the first shall be last — he lost his bid for reelection to Danica Roem, a transgender woman.

“Discrimination is a disqualifier,” a jubilant Roem said Tuesday night as her margin of victory became clear. “This is about the people of the 13th District disregarding fear tactics, disregarding phobias . . . where we celebrate you because of who you are, not despite it.”

"Ed Gillespie worked hard but did not embrace me or what I stand for."

"Don’t forget, Republicans won 4 out of 4 House seats, and with the economy doing record numbers, we will continue to win, even bigger than before!”

Tweeted Trump, quoted in a WaPo piece with a headline that seems premature, "Republicans seek new path after failure of Gillespie’s ‘Trumpism without Trump.’" That's by Michael Scherer and David Weigel. How do they know what Republicans are seeking based on one Republican losing a race in a blue state? Or is this just another headline that doesn't represent the text of the article?

Scherer and Weigel begin:

The Republican Party thought it had a plan to win the governor’s mansion in Virginia: Run a mainstream candidate who could nonetheless employ the racially charged culture-war rhetoric of President Trump to turn out a white working-class base.

Yikes. Did that happen? Republicans had that as a plan? Sounds more like the Democratic Party's plan to defeat the Republican — get people to believe that's what Ed was doing. I saw the pickup truck ad: Scare people into thinking Republicans are heartless haters.

A onetime establishment stalwart, Ed Gillespie, declined to campaign with Trump — but he executed the plan as well as he could. He defended Confederate memorials, vilified Central American gangs in ads that looked like horror movies and even denounced the kneeling protests of professional football players.

So an old-time GOP guy got dressed up for Election Day as an old-time GOP guy's idea of what Trump is. I didn't follow the race closely enough to know what Gillespie actually did, but I do think that GOP candidates can't be like Trump by adopting a bunch of seemingly Trumpish policy positions.

Compare what Scott Adams wrote in his phenomenal book "Win Bigly/Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter":

[P]ersuasion was more important to the outcome than policies; we just perceive it to be the other way around.... If you think Trump’s policies got him elected, you have to explain why his positions substantially changed during the campaign and he still won. My filter explains it perfectly: Trump is so persuasive that policies didn’t matter. People voted for him even as his policies were murky and changing....

You might have seen a viral video on Jimmy Kimmel Live of street interviews in which a prankster presented Trump’s policy positions as Hillary Clinton’s policies and asked her supporters if they agreed with those positions. Lots of people said they did. I’ll take it one step further by saying Trump would have won the election even if he and Clinton had switched positions and erased our memories of their old opinions. It literally didn’t matter what policies either person brought to the table. People made up their minds based on biases alone. That is typical when you get to the final two candidates, as both of them are capable of doing the job. So we use our biases to break the tie. Later we will imagine that our reasons were totally rational.

Here's the Jimmy Kimmel thing:



ADDED: I didn't follow the Virginia race enough to know what exactly Gillespie did to try to appropriate some idea of what Trump is.

But the idea of copying Trump by acting hardcore towards immigrants is very stupid. I don't think anyone really understands what Trump did, which was at a deeper level of the human psyche than can really be figured out. (Thank God! Or we would be screwed.)

Scott Adams is somewhere in the general area of trying to understand what happened, and I respect what he wrote, but he's not being completely serious and he's into winning bigly for himself (as he admits from time to time when it's entertaining to do so).

We're very lucky that the thing Trump did cannot be discerned and repeated, certainly not just by some political hack who tries to imitate Trump. It won't even work to — as Trump himself put it — "embrace me" and "what I stand for."

Trump followed his own instincts, and what he said and did came from inside himself, and that's why it felt frighteningly impulsive to many of us. It was quite bizarre. No one else can do what he did, but can they do something like what he did? You have to be somebody. The person who's come closest so far is Bernie Sanders.

Have you seen this awful anti-Gillespie ad?

I'm only seeing that now because I'm reading that it was talked about on last Sunday's "Meet the Press," where Chuck Todd interviewed the DNC chair Tom Perez. The ad (above) is played and Todd asks:

Aren't you stereotyping? Are all pickup trucks--I drive a pickup truck. I mean, are all pickup truck drivers racist? That’s what the ad--do you understand why some people think the ad implies that?

Perez plunges into distraction and evasion:

Well, Chuck, let's be clear...

(That is, let's not be clear.)

... about what's happening in the race in Virginia and in all too many races, dog-whistle politics. Steve Bannon just endorsed Ed Gillespie in Virginia this morning. And throughout this campaign, Ed Gillespie has been fear mongering. He's been doing the same thing Donald Trump did. That's not fair. That's not right. Virginia, under Ralph Northam's leadership, under Justin Fairfax leadership, they're looking for a way to unite people.

The ad is the opposite of attempting to unite people.

And Ed Gillespie, throughout the campaign, has been dividing people. And when you, when you hit the bully back, and the bully starts crying, those are crocodile tears to me.

The ad isn't hitting Gillespie. It's generating amorphous fear that some ill-defined evil is out to do something symbolized by mowing down children with a truck.

Perez registered no shame or regret about that ad.

ADDED: That ad made me think about something Scott Adams wrote in "Win Bigly":

Fear can be deeply persuasive. But not all fear-related persuasion is equal. To maximize your fear persuasion, follow these guidelines.

A big fear is more persuasive than a small one.

A personal fear is more persuasive than a generic national problem.

A fear that you think about most often is stronger than one you rarely think about.

A fear with a visual component is scarier than one without.

A fear you have experienced firsthand (such as a crime) is scarier than a statistic.

I'd say that pickup truck ad followed all the guidelines for maximizing fear persuasion. It went too far and got criticism, and yet the criticism made it viral. I'm passing it on, and you can probably tell that I hope that looking at it together and being critical lifts us above our animal instincts and helps us resist irrational fear. But I don't know. Maybe that visual image, the truck coming after the children is still lodged in my head, affecting my decisions.

"Gillespie is establishment. He hasn’t said one word about Trump. It’s a hold-your-nose vote, but I have to vote for him. We don’t want that goddamn Northam."

Said Bobbe Scruggs, "an 88-year-old retired administrative assistant who was excited about Stewart in the primary and now dutifully attended a picnic for Gillespie in Beaverdam."

Quoted in "What Va. voters can agree on: These guys and Trump are from different planets" (WaPo). The headline on the front page is different: "In Virginia governor’s race, two low-octane candidates vie for votes beyond their bases."

"Virginia Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Ralph Northam omitted any mention of Justin Fairfax, the party’s African American candidate for lieutenant governor..."

"... from about a thousand pieces of campaign literature, a move Fairfax called a 'mistake' and that has stoked tensions within the Democratic ticket and threatens to alienate African American voters three weeks before Election Day. The palm cards with photos of Northam and Attorney General Mark Herring (D) were produced for canvassers with the Laborers’ International Union of North America, which asked that Fairfax be excluded because it did not endorse him. Fairfax has spoken critically of two proposed natural gas pipelines that the union supports."

WaPo reports.

It's a "mistake" only in the sense that what they did completely intentionally has received attention and made them look bad. And do you even believe the explanation for why they did it? These were palm cards with photos. I would guess that the party is afraid that black people who see a photo of a black face will decide that's the one to vote for.

ADDED: I'm misreading this, so my guess there is wrong. Northam is the only Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor. So the Democrats can't be accused of trying to redirect black voters to a white candidate. They may be trying to hide the black candidate from voters who don't like or are skeptical of black candidates, but I'm willing to believe the union's argument: they don't like his position on pipelines and didn't mind risking alienating black people (until it got too much attention).

IN THE COMMENTS: cubanbob said:

So the Democrats are hiding the candidate the union rank and file would be against since he is against their interests. That's the problem for the Democrats; too many interest groups to placate and many of them at cross purposes.

"Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe gutted a bill to let Virginia use the electric chair when it cannot find scarce lethal-injection drugs..."

"... making an 11th-hour amendment Sunday that would instead allow the state to hire a pharmacy to make a special batch in secret," WaPo reports.

The chair is already an option in the state, where condemned inmates are allowed to choose between it and lethal injection. The measure was intended to remove the choice if the state cannot obtain the drugs, which have grown scarce amid political pressure against the death penalty.

McAuliffe’s amendment comes at the scarcity issue in a different way, by allowing the state to special-order the drugs from compounding pharmacies, whose identities would be kept secret to shield them from pressure....

All I could think was what Justice Harry Blackmun wrote (more than 20 years ago): "From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death."

"The Republican Party would not mind at all if the takeaway in Virginia was it was a Terry McAuliffe landslide against the Tea Party."

"I'm not exaggerating," says Rush Limbaugh.

Polls close in Virginia in 20 minutes.

And here are the 5 counties to watch.

While you're waiting, check out the Althouse blog polling.

McAuliffe or Cuccinelli — do you care?

They're voting in Virginia today. But do you care?

What's it to you?
	It's a referendum on Obamacare, so I want Cuccinelli to win.
	It's a referendum on Obamacare, so I want McAuliffe to win.
	It's a referendum on the Tea Party, and I want the Tea Party to gain strength.
	It's a referendum on the Tea Party, which I want to fail because I'm a liberal.
	It's a referendum on the Tea Party and I hope it loses so the GOP can get back on a mainstream track
	This is a race for governor of Virginia, nothing more, and McAuliffe is the better man.
	This is a race for governor of Virginia, nothing more, and Cuccinelli is the better man.
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