Bacon's Rebellion

  • A Red Wave in Roanoke County

    Posted on

    by

    Bob Rayner

    by Scott Dreyer

    In contrast to some big Democrat wins in the eastern part of the state giving them control of both houses of the General Assembly, the Roanoke and NRV experienced a regional red wave in the November 7 elections.

    Of particular significance, the GOP won both of the most competitive, high-stakes races in our area for General Assembly seats.

    Sen. David Suetterlein (R)
    (photo/Tennesseestar.com)

    In the highest-profile race, Sen. David Suetterlein defeated Roanoke City Councilwoman Trish White-Boyd for the newly-created Senate District 4. Some have erroneously claimed this race was for “retiring Sen. John Edwards’ seat.” Actually, however, the grossly-gerrymandered district Edwards long represented–nicknamed “The Johnnymander”— was dissolved in recent redistricting. That old district lumped Democrat-heavy Roanoke City with the Virginia Tech area, so that both it and the surrounding GOP-heavy rural areas surrounding it were not competitive seats.

    The new District 4, however, has the advantage of including most of the Roanoke Valley as a “community of interest.” It covers all of Roanoke City, Salem, and parts of Roanoke and Montgomery Counties. As can be seen in this district map, White-Boyd racked up wide margins in the City and narrow margins in two Montgomery County precincts just east of Blacksburg. However, she lost everywhere else in Montgomery County, Roanoke County, and Salem. Suetterlein carried seven precincts in Roanoke City: Preston Park, East Gate, Hollins Road, Southeast, Garden City, South Roanoke, and Deyerle. (more…)

  • It Wasn’t About Youngkin

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    by

    Bob Rayner

    by Joe Fitzgerald

    Deep in the hills of Southwest Virginia is a state Senate district where nobody works because the coal industry is increasingly mechanized. The district has all or part of eight counties. In Northern Virginia is a county where nobody works because they’re all employed by the federal government. The county includes all or part of eight state Senate districts.

    Every four years, national political  writers combine this into a cohesive entity called Virginia and use it as a bellwether for the presidential election that follows the state Senate election by one year, every single time. The state’s economics and politics are shaped by, among other things, the coal industry and the federal government (see above). The state’s boundaries are shaped by rivers, a bay, a mountain range, and a southern line that’s straight except for a zig-zag south of Abingdon caused by a drunken surveyor.

    Most of the national political writers don’t know that our districts were drawn by the courts, our counties and cities are separate entities, and our precincts are drawn by processes that vary by district, county, and city. And every four years, regular as clockwork, they write about how the General Assembly races will impact the ambitions of George Allen, Jim Gilmore, Mark Warner, Tim Kaine, Bob McDonnell, Terry McAuliffe, or Glenn Youngkin for president, vice president, or U.S. senator. (more…)

  • In Loudoun, Some Good News for Republicans

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    by

    Bob Rayner

    The exquisite Loudoun County countryside

    by Jeanine Martin 

    I feel sorry for Governor Yougkin. This has to be one of the worst nights of his life. After doing 100 campaign events, he lost the state Senate and House of Delegates.

    Youngkin may need to rethink his future in politics. Although this election wasn’t about him. It was about abortion, always the Democrats’ most important issue. They lied saying Republicans would ban ALL abortions, and probably birth control too. Scaring Democrats always works to get them into the voting booth.

    The newly-elected Senate is now 19 Republicans and 21 Democrats. The new House of Delegates is currently 51 Democrats and 48 Republicans. The one outstanding race is expected to go Republican, giving the party a total 49 Republicans. It doesn’t get much closer than that, in both Houses. Results can be found here.

    There was some good news for my Loudoun County friends. Our awful commonwealth’s attorney, who won with George Soros’ funding, Buta Biberaj, has been defeated by Republican Bob Anderson, who is currently ahead of her by 1,000 votes. (more…)

  • Virginia Election Reflections

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    by

    Bob Rayner

    by Kerry Dougherty

    So, boys and girls, what did we learn Tuesday night?

    I’ll go first.

    First, we learned never to underestimate the Democrats’ devotion to abortion. To them, it’s a sacrament. Something not to be touched. Every woman, they believe, has the right (I’d say God-given, but it seems blasphemous) to abort her baby right up until birth.

    They want unfettered access to abortions more than they want good schools, a booming economy, or world peace.

    Shoot, they nearly elected a woman who engaged in slutty online sex acts with her lawyer husband while they begged for tips from an audience of masturbating voyeurs over abortion. This mother of two convinced more than 16,000 Virginia Democrats that spreading her legs and who knows what else for an online camera was simply bodily autonomy. An extension of a woman’s right to choose.

    Did those voters think this sex worker had the judgment and character to serve in the same chamber than once housed Patrick Henry? Yeah, baby. She supports abortion!

    Moving on, we also learned that there is a downside to holding off-year statehouse elections when almost no other states have contests.

    It means there are tractor-trailer loads of loot that can be dumped from out-of-state special interests into Virginia campaigns undiluted by needs in other places.

    It also means that Virginia’s elections take on an exaggerated national importance.

    Virginia is not a swing state. It’s a blueish purple state that elected a likeable businessman as governor, along with his running mates, during a time when parents were harboring raw resentment toward public schools that closed during covid and then hid sexual assaults once they opened. It was a type of harmonic convergence, unlikely to be repeated any time soon. (more…)

  • Rising Costs Pushing UVa Tuition Higher

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    by

    James A. Bacon

    Click here to read the report.

    The Jefferson Council released the following press release this morning (Nov. 9, 2023):

    CHARLOTTESVILLE—Rising costs, not cutbacks in state aid, are primarily responsible for pushing tuition higher at the University of Virginia. State appropriations for UVa have declined sharply between 2002 and 2022 when adjusted for inflation and enrollment. But tuition has exploded over the same time. Only one-third of the increased tuition revenue was needed to offset state cuts. The other two-thirds represented spending increases, primarily in payroll.

    Those are the major conclusions of a report, “Rising Costs: The Driving Force Behind Tuition Increases at UVa,” released today by The Jefferson Council, an organization dedicated to upholding free speech, viewpoint diversity, and Thomas Jefferson’s legacy at UVa.

    The UVa Board of Visitors is working this fall on how much to increase tuition in the next two academic years. The Finance Committee has scheduled a public hearing November 17 in which students and other members of the public can address undergraduate tuition & fees. The Board is expected to approve a new tuition structure in December. (more…)

  • A Resolution Concerning the Safety and Rights of Jews at UVa

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon


    Jefferson Council President Tom Neale yesterday delivered the following resolution of the Council to University of Virginia president Jim Ryan and the Board of Visitors. — JAB

    The Jefferson Council, by unanimous agreement of the Officers, Committee Chairs and Board of Advisors, hereby issues the following RESOLUTION supporting the rights of the Jewish students, faculty and staff at the University of Virginia to study, teach and work in safety and in an environment conducive to the free and civil exchange of ideas.

    WHEREAS, the Jefferson Council was founded to promote an academic environment based on open dialogue throughout the University;

    WHEREAS, on October 7, 2023, military units of Hamas, the de facto governing body of Gaza, invaded the sovereign state of Israel and intentionally targeted, murdered, tortured and/or captured approximately 1400 innocent civilians including but not limited to women, children and the elderly, all in violation of international law and the moral norms of every civilized country in the world; (more…)

  • More Bad News for the Governor

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    by

    Dick Hall-Sizemore

    Yesterday was a bad day for Gov. Glenn Youngkin.  In addition to having to absorb the news about losing both houses of the General Assembly to the Democrats, he learned that the federal General Services Administration has decided to locate the long-coveted new FBI headquarters in Maryland rather than Virginia.  That was bad news for the Commonwealth as a whole, as well.

  • Additional Electoral Jolts

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    Dick Hall-Sizemore

    by Dick Hall-Sizemore

    It has long been evident that Henrico County has been changing, both demographically and politically. The results of this week’s elections were the culmination of that long-term trend.

    The county has a history of continuity in its Board of Supervisors membership with members serving for many years. This year, two long-serving board members, Patricia O’Bannon and Frank Thornton, both of whom will complete 28 years on the board this year, announced their retirements.  (Thornton was the first Black elected to the board.)

    The partisan breakdown of the board has been three Republicans and two Democrats for many years, except for a brief interlude in 2018 when a Democrat was elected in a special election following the death of a long-serving Republican. She resigned from the board seven months later after getting into a nasty squabble with other board members, including her fellow Democrats, who said she was not playing by their internal rules. A Republican won in the ensuing special election. (more…)

  • A Few Thousand Votes Would Have Made a Big Difference

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    by Shaun Kenney

    Yeah — I’m a bit bitter over this one.

    Virginia Republicans did everything we were asked, despite our intuition. We narrowed the talking points, stayed in our lanes, muffled internal criticisms, and allowed the effort to be centralized. Consultants made their money as they do every election and the Democrats outspent us as we thought.

    Yet at the end of the day, redistricting did us in — and voters were given a choice between Virginia Democrats or Glenn Youngkin.

    They chose the Democrats — barely.

    By The Numbers? Spirit of Virginia PAC Got Republicans Awfully Close…

    Cooler heads now prevailing, there is one culprit — maybe two — for Republican fortunes in November 2023: redistricting and $8 million in Democratic cash spent on a handful of House of Delegates races.

    Consider that Democrats did not win a single seat where Youngkin earned 52% of the vote or higher. Not a single one. Likewise, Republicans did not win a single seat where Youngkin did not perform 50% or better.

    Biden’s favorable numbers were also just about where they were in 2021, hovering in the low-40s (RCP has Biden at 41.4%). 2023 was no repeat of 2017, where Democrats enjoyed a massive victory over Republicans one year after Donald Trump was elected president.

    A 51-49 House and a 21-19 Senate is no mandate — it is stasis.

    Bolling: Three Reasons Why Republicans Fell Short

    Former Lt. Governor Bill Bolling has offered his thoughts on why Republicans lost in triplicate. I think he is wrong on two, but most certainly right on the third.

    There will be a temptation to blame the outcome of the 2023 elections on abortion, but this is not the case at all. (more…)

  • Song Sung Blue

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    by James A. Bacon

    Not every General Assembly race has been decided, according to the data displayed by the Virginia Public Access Project, but enough votes are in to conclude that the Democrats won the election. They retained their control of the state Senate and won a narrow majority in the House. Some preliminary observations:

    Bye, Bye White House. Governor Glenn Youngkin can stop entertaining fantasies about running for president. Give him credit for fighting hard to win GOP control of the state legislature. But he failed. He has not cracked the code on how to turn blue states red, and, therefore, he does not create a viable alternative to Donald Trump in the GOP presidential nomination contest.

    Abortion, abortion, abortion. Youngkin staked his effort to retake the General Assembly largely on a platform of banning abortion after 15 weeks (with exceptions for rape and incest). It was a more moderate plank than what we’ve seen in other red states, but it was not what most Virginians wanted. The Virginia GOP needs to decide which is more important: abortion or… taxes, government spending, jobs, crime, parental rights, public-sector unions, salvaging K-12, reforming higher- ed, and every other issue they could make progress on if Democrats didn’t have the abortion issue to beat them with. (more…)

  • A Day in the Election Trenches

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    by

    Dick Hall-Sizemore

    by Dick Hall-Sizemore

    I just finished my first stint as an election official.  I was surprised by some aspects but, upon retrospect, I should not have been surprised.

    Voters came in steadily throughout the day, with some backups occurring.  The biggest push was between 5:15 and 6:15, when the line was much longer. But it cleared fairly quickly and voters did not have to wait more than about 15 minutes at the most.

    About 1,350 folks voted, which constituted a turnout of 35 percent of the active registered voters in the precinct.

    Some of that turnout undoubtedly was the result of the failure of voters to know about, and understand, the changes wrought by redistricting. The precinct’s candidates for the House and Senate in the General Assembly were unopposed Democrats. However, Sen. Siobhan Dunnavant (R) had represented the area for many years in the General Assembly. Redistricting put her in a new district which did not include this precinct. She was being challenged by Del. Schuyler VanValkenburg (D), who has represented the precinct in the House of Delegates for several years. That contest is one of the key ones in the state and there has been heavy advertising on TV by both candidates. Many voters were puzzled and frustrated when they found that neither Dunnavant nor VanValkenburg was on their ballots. I overheard one man lamenting that he had come to the polls specifically to vote against one of those candidates. (more…)

  • Election Day: VOTE

    Posted on

    by

    Bob Rayner

    by Kerry Dougherty

    No matter how busy you are, no matter what’s going on, don’t sit this one out.

    VOTE.

    Especially if you love Virginia and don’t want our commonwealth to go backwards, turning into an East-coast version of tax-mad, crime-ridden, pronoun-obsessed California.

    Remember how good it felt the day after the 2021 election, when Glenn Youngkin beat Terry McAuliffe and you knew that it was Independence Day in Virginia?

    VOTE.

    Remember how you woke up the morning after that historic election and knew the vaccine mandates that cost state workers their jobs were a thing of the past? You knew that statewide mask mandates were not coming back. You knew that parents were going to be heard at their kids’ schools and school officials would no longer be allowed to hide a child’s gender confusion from their parents. You knew that schools would focus on excellence instead of kowtowing to teachers’ unions. You knew that the parole board would not be turning murderers loose.

    I could go on, but if you were in Virginia in November 2021, you remember the overweening tyranny of the Northam administration and his Democrat monopoly on the state house and how good it felt to shake it all off.

    VOTE.

    If all goes well, we’ll feel that sense of exhilaration again tomorrow. Youngkin’s common-sense policies will have a chance to become law if voters manage to dismantle the Democrat’s sick brick wall of stupidity.

    At last, the General Assembly will have the votes to repeal the measure that tie Virginia’s future to California’s nutty climate regulations. Parents will continue to have a say in their kids’ education. Oh, and there won’t be any drag queen story hours. (more…)

  • Tomorrow’s Ballot Question: Will Virginia Become Illinois?

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    by

    Bob Rayner

    by Derrick Max

    It was reported last week that billionaire Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker had made substantial campaign contributions totaling $250,000 to four liberal Democrats running for Virginia State Senate and the Democratic Party of Virginia. These donations, made through Governor Pritzker’s “Think Big America” organization, are the clearest sign yet that the left wants to turn the Commonwealth of Virginia into an Illinois of the East.

    Truthfully, the governing philosophies in Illinois and Virginia could not be more different. State and local government spending per capita in Illinois is higher than in Virginia. Illinois has a higher overall tax burden than Virginia, and Illinois has a substantially higher unionization rate than Virginia. In fact, about one in seven workers in Illinois is unionized, while only one in 22 workers in Virginia is unionized. Illinois also has a higher minimum wage than Virginia. So, what does Illinois get with its higher taxes, higher spending, higher minimum wage, and higher unionization? A worse state. (more…)

  • That’s One Way to Cut Down on Health Care Costs

    Posted on

    by

    Dick Hall-Sizemore

    Tim Griffin, Republican candidate for 53rd House District

    by Dick Hall-Sizemore

    Just as the Democrats and Republicans get rid of their embarrassments in the Virginia Senate (Joe Morrissey and Amanda Chase, respectively), it appears the Republicans will be electing another one for the House.

    Following up on a report by The Daily Progress in Charlottesville, Dwayne Yancey reports today in Cardinal News that Tim Griffin, the Republican candidate for the district that covers parts of Bedford, Nelson, and Amherst counties, has defied multiple court orders to pay for the support of his children. In 2021, a court ordered Griffin to pay his ex-wife for health care coverage for their two young children, spousal support, and legal fees. It appears that, soon after that order was entered, he cancelled the health coverage for his children and has not paid the other required amounts. He now owes more than $33,000.

    Furthermore, some Republicans have raised questions about whether he even lives in the district, going so far as to hire a private investigator to figure out where he lives.

    There was a time when such revelations would have been devastating to a candidacy. But, this is a heavily Republican district and the Democratic candidate seems to be running an uninspired campaign. Therefore, it looks as if there will be a scofflaw in the legislature voting on laws that apply to the rest of us.

    It could be asked why the Republicans did not do a better job of vetting their candidate, who was chosen in a convention. It just so happens that the chairman of the Republican Party in Bedford County, “home to most of the voters in this district, is none other than Griffin himself.”

  • Never Again

    Posted on

    by

    sherlockj

    Chinese-funded Code Pink’s co-founder Medea Benjamin at antisemitic rally in D.C. Nov. 4th. Courtesy Asra Nomani

    by James C. Sherlock

    At 78, I have been all over the world often and for long periods of time. I felt myself reasonably immune to cultural surprises.

    But I had never seen anything like this.

    It was the Maghrib prayer time about 5 p.m. on Saturday. On the southeast corner of 12th and Pennsylvania Ave. in D.C., a devout Muslim man was in the sujood prayer position on the sidewalk, forehead touching the ground.

    That was not the surprise.

    But a girl we took to be the praying man’s daughter was waiting a few feet away next to her mother and three young siblings. She looked to be, at the most, four years old.

    There had been thousands like her at the festival on that beautiful afternoon. Families with toddlers and baby carriages were everywhere at the edges of the demonstrations. Watching. Learning.

    Full of adrenaline from the hate that had been spewed out on a huge screen broadcasting anti-Israel rally speakers in the middle of shut-down Pennsylvania Avenue, that beautiful little girl was jumping up and down, tiny fists clenched, shouting in her small voice “Gaza,” “Gaza,” “Gaza.”

    Three thousand years of hatred of Jews was being passed down to another generation.

    It is never going to stop. (more…)

Now Available

Book cover of 'Dust Mites: A Second American Revolution' by James A. Bacon, featuring astronauts planting a flag with a blue and white emblem on a lunar landscape, with Earth visible in the background.
For sale on Amazon.com

The year: 2075. The American colonies on the Moon are getting restless under Washington’s tyrannical rule….

This second edition of “Dust Mites” has a snazzy new cover, includes helpful lunar maps, and is 5,000 words tighter than the original. The sequel, “Trogs,” is scheduled for publication this summer.

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Bacon’s Rebellion is Virginia’s leading politically non-aligned portal for news, opinions and analysis about state, regional and local public policy. Read more about us here.

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