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The Virginia G.O.P. Voted on Its Future. The Losers Reject the Results. (MAGAt-in-a-box bonus pic)
In a sign of the Trump era’s lingering alternate realities, Republicans in the struggling state party are refusing to move forward with a new system for choosing nominees.https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/19/us/politics/virginia-republicans-governor.html
State Senator Amanda Chase, a Trump loyalist who has recently been required to sit in a plexiglass box during Senate sessions after refusing to wear a mask, is one of the top Republican candidates for governor in Virginia
ARLINGTON, Va. — The Republican Party of Virginia has voted four times since December to nominate its candidates for this year’s statewide races at a convention instead of in a primary election. But in a sign of the Trumpian times of denial and dispute in the G.O.P., nearly half of the party’s top officials keep trying to reverse the results and get a primary. The refusal of these Republicans to admit they have lost, or to agree on a set of nominating rules, has fractured a state party already in upheaval: Republicans haven’t won a statewide election since 2009, and they now find themselves with legislative minorities for the first time in a generation. Even the broken windows at the state party’s Richmond headquarters haven’t been fixed for months. Just a month after former President Donald J. Trump left office, Virginia’s drama is the first state-level boomerang of his legacy. Some state Republicans have internalized the lesson that there is no benefit to accepting results they don’t like, and the result is a paralyzed party unable to set the date, location and rules for how and when it will pick its 2021 nominees for statewide office, including the race for governor.
The intraparty dispute has scrambled longstanding political alliances and left Virginia Republicans in the awkward position of defending stances that were once anathema to a party that has been redefined by the Trump era. “It’s very much about not accepting the results and trying to change the rules and game the election,” said former Representative Tom Davis, a moderate Republican who won seven terms in Congress from a Northern Virginia district. “The reality now is even when Republicans pull together, they have a hard time winning, and when they’re divided, they have no shot of winning.” The party’s decision on Dec. 5 to hold a May 1 convention rather than a June 8 primary was widely seen as an effort to stop Amanda Chase, a firebrand state senator who calls herself “Trump in heels,” from claiming the party’s nomination for governor. A primary might help Ms. Chase: She could win the nomination with as little as 30 percent of the vote in a field with three other major candidates and several lesser contenders, But a party convention would require a nominee to win support from at least 50 percent of delegates.
The Republican fight is unfolding on two fronts: whether to hold a convention or primary, and how a convention would work. On the first front, the state party has voted four times on the convention-versus-primary question because Ms. Chase, her allies and other Republicans are allowed to keep forcing the issue under party rules. They have so far been unable to reverse the convention result. On the second front, how a convention would work, Republicans are grappling with a state prohibition on most gatherings of more than 10 people. As a result, the party cannot conduct an in-person convention of several thousand people. Party leaders are trying to change their rules to allow for a convention held across dozens of sites in Virginia. Doing so requires approval of three-fourths of the State Central Committee’s members — a threshold so far impossible to meet because 31 of the committee’s 72 members are holding out for a primary. These Republicans are, in other words, trying to block the ability to have a convention in hopes that a primary will ultimately have to be held. “The fact that there’s a minority faction who lost that are standing in the way of a safe convention to try to get the primary that they couldn’t win fairly — that says a lot about them,” said Patti Lyman, the Republican national committeewoman for Virginia. “All their arguments can be boiled down to: We lost, and we don’t like it.”
Ms. Chase, who was still arguing with less than a week left in Mr. Trump’s presidency that he could yet be inaugurated for a second term, said Thursday that she “doesn’t trust conventions,” which she said unfairly limit voting access for members of the military and others who can’t make it to an in-person site. “If we’re going to win as Republicans, we need to include more of the electorate who vote Republican instead of less,” she said. “Stop creating so many obstacles for people who would normally vote.” Some proponents of a convention are arguing in favor of ranked-choice voting, a system that has been pushed elsewhere by progressives. The dispute threatens to undercut Republicans’ already-uphill fight in this year’s elections and prolong Democratic control of the state. The party’s squabble centers on a crowded group of Republican contenders for governor that includes one candidate each from the G.O.P.’s Trump and establishment wings, along with two wealthy wild cards. The major candidates include Ms. Chase; Kirk Cox, a former State House speaker, who is the favorite of the party’s elected state legislators; Pete Snyder, a millionaire technology executive who lost a bid for the lieutenant governor nomination at a party convention in 2013; and Glenn Youngkin, an even wealthier former chief executive in private equity who is a newcomer to politics.
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https://www.thedailybeast.com/virginia-state-senator-2021-gubernatorial-candidate-amanda-chase-is-next-level-maga
Virginia state Senator Amanda Chase and her staff wanted to be clear: She was experiencing a sinus infection, not COVID-19 symptoms. Just a little head cold. In fact, Chase told The Daily Beast on Friday shortly before stating that she would refuse a COVID-19 vaccine, she was already feeling much better. Such a diagnosis would be very good news for Chase, but also her colleagues in the Virginia General Assembly. Chase, a far-right Republican and 2021 gubernatorial candidate, refuses to wear a mask during government session, forcing her at times to sit alone in a plexiglass quarantine box that she calls “the square of freedom.” Framed by sheets of wobbly plastic in these moments, Chase is a portrait of her political reality: isolated from her fellow Republican lawmakers and walled off by conspiratorial belief. But Chase, who recently left the state Senate’s Republican caucus and was ousted from her local chapter of the GOP, is not alone. All year, she has stood shoulder to shoulder with members of far-right militant groups and conspiracy movements, some of whom would be arrested by year’s end.
Now, in the twilight of 2020 and the Trump presidency, she’s playing the hits for the extremist crowd, lying about the vaccine, knowingly taking donations and “security” help from neo-Confederate and QAnon-linked extremists, and calling on President Donald Trump to overturn his election loss by declaring martial law. Her gubernatorial campaign is an eerie preview of even stranger, more conspiratorial post-Trump Trumpism, even as her own state party grows increasingly uneasy with her antics. In a Facebook post shortly after the Electoral College certified President-elect Joe Biden’s win, Chase falsely claimed the election was a sham and asked Trump to suspend the Constitution. “Not my President and never will be,” she wrote of Biden, accusing him of cheating. “President Trump should declare martial law as recommended by General Flynn.”
Chase doubled down on those comments in a Thursday interview. “This is a war for the ideals and foundations of the very country we have come to know and love since our inception,” she told The Daily Beast. “I truly believe with all my heart that the presidential elections were stolen.” Some of Chase’s Republican peers condemned the remark, with Kirk Cox, her likely GOP primary opponent in the gubernatorial race, calling Chase’s statement “absurd and dangerous.” Dangerous, certainly. For some of Chase’s fans, however, the comments were not absurd but the logical culmination of a year of increasingly militant activity. On Jan. 20, Chase participated in a massive pro-gun rally in Richmond. The event served as a meeting ground for several extremist groups, among them the civil war-fantasist “Boogaloo” movement that became increasingly visible over the course of the year. She gave a speech standing next to the leader of the far-right paramilitary group the Proud Boys, as well as next to Joshua Macias, a member of a group called Vets for Trump.
Chase and Macias would cross paths repeatedly in 2020, as documented by citizen journalist Kristopher Goad. Macias and another man, Antonio Lamotta, were by Chase’s side as “security” when she announced her gubernatorial run this year. They appeared with her in multiple photo-ops and videos, including one in front of Lamotta’s Hummer, which was festooned with a huge flag promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory. To call Lamotta a conspiracy theorist and a Chase fan is an understatement. The Virginia man, a self-described martial arts expert, tweeted hand-drawn anti-Semitic comics showing Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam participating in a baby-eating plot, and Chase (dressed in a karate uniform) beating up Northam with a pair of brass balls. Those associations would come back to trouble Chase in November. Days after the election, when Trump’s loss was becoming clear and his fans accused Democrats of theft, Macias and Lamotta were arrested on gun charges in Philadelphia. Prosecutors accused them of driving there to interfere with the ongoing vote-count. Chase initially downplayed her connection to the men after their arrests, when they were identified as her occasional bodyguards. Now she describes them as dedicated volunteers who started providing her security at the January gun rally, and continued doing so throughout the year.
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