George Fitch, the Don Quixotian seeker of the Republican Party nomination for governor, has delivered petitions with 14,000 signatures to the State Board of Elections — enough to ensure that he gets on the June ballot for the state primary.
Eighty-two volunteers around the state collected names to get Fitch on the ballot. These volunteers came to him through the George Fitch for Governor website. Fitch, the fiscally conservative mayor of Warrenton best known as the promoter behind the Jamaican bobsled team, gathered more than 2,000 of those signatures himself.
Ignoring Fitch as always, the Kilgore campaign issued a press chortling at the relatively low number of signatures submitted by Democrat Tim Kaine. Noting that the Kaine campaign had set a goal of submitting 30,000 signatures, Kilgore’s press secretary, Tim Murtaugh, noted that Kaine had garnered only 18,776 signatures.
There was no indication in the Kilgore press release, nor on the Kilgore website, how many signatures the former Attorney General submitted. But if Fitch, despite a near black-out in press coverage for his campaign, managed to bring in 76 percent as many signatures as the undisputed Democratic nominee, it may indicate that his anti-tax, anti-spending message has more traction than commonly recognized.
Then again, those 14,000 signatures may mean that if you go to a shopping mall, you can get people to sign almost anything just to get you to leave them alone.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.