When I watched the last Virginia Gubernatorial election, I thought “The Clintons were behind this.” Governor Terry McAuliffe, a huge “Friend of Bill,” defeated Republican Ken Cuccinelli and Libertarian Robert Sarvis with just 48 percent of the vote. I’ve often warned that popular Libertarian Party candidates aren’t “taking” votes which would go to Republicans but, in this case, it may have been true. McAuliffe earned 95 percent of the registered Democrats’ votes while Cuccinelli earned only 92 percent of the registered Republicans’ votes.
It’s not often that a Libertarian Party candidate does as well as Sarvis did, but he was funded by an unconventional source, a Friend of Barack, Democratic fundraising bundler Joe Liemandt. Sarvis ended up winning close to seven percent of the vote, about twice what the usual Libertarian candidate earns.
Do the math. In an election where 2.2 million votes were cast, the victor wins by just 53,000 votes, and an extra 75,000 votes went to the Libertarian candidate, it makes you think if the Democratic money wasn’t donated purposefully.
I thought the Clintons were behind this because of the 1992 election. The anti-establishment crowd sent their vote to Ross Perot, giving Bill Clinton an electoral landslide with just 43 percent of the popular vote. The Clintons learned that in a close election, a right-sounding candidate can peel off votes which may have gone to the Republican candidate. That anti-establishment candidate is also going to split votes from the Democratic nominee but it’s more likely that 2/3 of Perot’s votes would have gone to Bush.
This isn’t illegal and this isn’t necessarily immoral. I think it’s happening again.
A year after the Virginia election, there were whispers about the Clinton camp recruiting a third-party candidate:
Clinton campaign strategists have concluded Hillary will easily be nominated in 2016, but cannot win the general election in a head-to-head matchup, Richard Turley reports on orbmagazine.com.
“They are reaching out to Wall Street allies to do ‘black-ops’ funding for a run by Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum or Herman Cain,” a source told Orb.
Okayfine. I have my conspiracy hat on, but walk through this with me. Bachmann and Santorum are both too sophisticated to fall for this trick and Herman Cain was ruined with the affair story. Which “independent-minded” candidate, can talk to the right of the GOP field, has contacts on Wall Street, and has been a tremendous friend to the Clintons ?
If you said Donald Trump, you connected the dots. It doesn’t matter if he blasts Hillary as long as he blasts the GOP power brokers the anti-establishment voters have come to despise. It doesn’t even matter if he runs in the general if he can position the GOP as xenophobic, but he will run. Trump will run and earn enough votes from the Republican nominee to cover up how much Hillary Clinton is disliked in the battleground states.
Today, the Electoral College math gives a generic Democrat and incredible advantage over a Republican candidate but Hillary Clinton is no “generic Democrat.” She is all but despised in the 4-5 “bubble” states which are her path to victory…unless…
…she can win just 45 percent of the vote in those states. Republican candidates need to focus their efforts there.