Democrat Terry McAuliffe (47%) narrowly beats Republican Ken Cuccinelli (46%).
Libertarian candidate Robert Sarvis got 7% of the vote.
The reasons for Cuccinelli’s loss are quite interesting, and a possible foreboding of future, patriotric immigration reform, Third Party possibilities.
On the one hand, he was (as would be a white-racialist candidate) construed as racist by the Democrat Party machine. From a WaPo article titled “Latino voters say health care, controversial remark spur them to turn out for McAuliffe” (talk about saying-it-all in just the headline):
Some Latinos who turned out to vote in the Northern Virginia suburbs on Tuesday said they were supporting Democrat Terry McAuliffe for governor because they believed his opponent is anti-immigrant.
Republican Ken Cuccinelli II, Virginia’s attorney general, was pilloried in a Democratic campaign commercial for a remark he made criticizing a D.C. law on pest control, which he claimed prevented the killing of rats.
“It is worse than our immigration policy,” Cuccinelli said in a 2012 radio interview. “You can’t break up rat families . . . and you can’t even kill ’em.”
In a Spanish-language television ad that aired last month, Virginia’s Democratic Party denounced the comment — which Cuccinelli’s campaign said was taken out of context.
On the other hand, were it not for libertarian candidate Robert Sarvis chipping off 7 pts, Cuccinelli would have won.
Regarding the latter, as far as I’m concerned the Republican Party, having driven various conservatives out of the party with their ever more apparent abandonment of principle, can squarely blame this gubernatorial defeat on… The Republican Party.