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Reminder: McAuliffe Is the Only Election Truther Running for Governor in Virginia

Guy Benson
Guy Benson  |  October 22, 2021 10:05 AM

As we've noted before, Virginia Democrat and longtime Clintonite Terry McAuliffe has sought to cast his Republican opponent in this year's gubernatorial race as an election truther who's bought into Donald Trump's 2020 "big lie." In reality, Youngkin has stated on multiple occasions that last year's election was not fraudulent, has affirmed that he supported certifying its results, and has disclaimed an unofficial rally at which participants pledged allegiance to a flag from the January 6th Capitol riot. Some hardcore Trump supporters may actually hold those things against Youngkin to some extent, but each one clearly cuts against the false narrative McAuliffe and his allies have spun. And as we've also noted before, this pitiful claim is actually a case of Freudian projection. There is exactly one election truther in this race: Terry McAuliffe. For years, he has repeatedly and wrongly asserted that the 2000 election was "stolen," and he's even having trouble letting go of the lie to this day: 


Here's how I described the clip above earlier this month: 

When the reporter pushes him again, McAuliffe throws up his hands and says that once Bush was sworn in, they had to "move on," but based on his destructive lies in the ensuing years, he didn't move on. He kept telling Democrats that the election was "stolen," which was not true. Bush won, every way you slice it. Tellingly, McAuliffe concludes his answer with this hilarious point: “At the time, let’s be clear, I wasn’t running for governor.” Yes, he was merely the DNC Chairman, a position from which he had a wider ability to sow the "Big Lie" on a national scale. Things are different now, you see, because he's running for governor. And he's chosen to make election lies an issue. So he'd prefer that he simply be allowed to lie about his opponent on the subject of election lies, rather than be asked about his own actual lying about elections. It's all just so unfair for Terry.

Amazingly – or perhaps not so amazingly, given his shamelessness – the man who decided to make election lies a major issue in this campaign, having himself peddled toxic election lies, also chose to invite another infamous election truther to join him on the trail this week. Enter Stacey Abrams, famed election liar: 


Well, yes. She was not "entitled to become the governor" because she...lost that election. A Georgia GOP elections official (who has been quite critical of Trump – who, in turn, has half-endorsed Abrams) blasted her brazenness: "Not 'entitled'? Really? You lost. You simply lost. You had less votes," Gabriel Sterling tweeted, adding, "and your loss was 4x bigger than Trump’s in Georgia." Of course, Terry McAuliffe brought her to Virginia to continue her nonsense grievance act. Of course, he did. Peas in a conspiratorial, norms-crushing pod, as this Youngkin video makes plain: 

Meanwhile, here's law professor Jonathan Turley making the case that McAuliffe, Inc. pretty flagrantly violated federal law by running a video in black churches, featuring Vice President Kamala Harris explicitly politicking on behalf of McAuliffe. 

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For its part, the Youngkin campaign is showcasing longtime Democratic voters who've decided to break or suspend their partisan allegiances and pull the lever for the Republican in this race: 


In order for Youngkin to pull the upset, he'll need strong GOP turnout across the state, he'll need to win independents, and he'll need to win over a modest chunk of these types of voters:

Coming full circle to election truthers, I'll leave you with this – via the woman who paid for bogus opposition research against her opponent, which was laundered through US law enforcement and intelligence officials (and the media, of course), and who then pronounced that opponent an "illegitimate president" when she lost her election: