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As Mitt Romney was ending his Virginia rally on Thursday, he made an unusually direct appeal to voters in the crucial swing state: “I’m counting on you, Virginia,” he told voters in Fairfax. “We have to win this. Find someone who voted for Barack Obama, get him to join our team.”
But Barack Obama isn’t the only candidate Romney needs to worry about in the state that Republicans acknowledge is a must-win on Romney’s path to the White House. When the state’s voters go to the polls, they’ll also find former Virginia congressman Virgil Goode on the ticket, a homegrown, ultra-conservative presidential contender on the Constitution Party line, whose far-right positions on immigration and the federal budget could siphon off just enough disgruntled voters from Romney to give Obama a victory in the state, and possibly the country.
If that sounds like a long shot, it probably is. But as Al Gore knows too well, slim margins and surprise outcomes are hardly unknown in presidential politics, and improbable is a long way from impossible when any state comes down to a few thousand votes.
"If it is a very close election, then Virgil Goode could take enough votes away from Romney to give Virginia’s 13 electoral votes to Obama,” says Larry Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, which sits in the district that Goode represented in Congress for 12 years and in the state Senate for 24 yeas. “But notice the ‘if’—it has to be very close.”
Virginia Ex-Congressman Could Cost Romney the Election - The Daily Beast
But Barack Obama isn’t the only candidate Romney needs to worry about in the state that Republicans acknowledge is a must-win on Romney’s path to the White House. When the state’s voters go to the polls, they’ll also find former Virginia congressman Virgil Goode on the ticket, a homegrown, ultra-conservative presidential contender on the Constitution Party line, whose far-right positions on immigration and the federal budget could siphon off just enough disgruntled voters from Romney to give Obama a victory in the state, and possibly the country.
If that sounds like a long shot, it probably is. But as Al Gore knows too well, slim margins and surprise outcomes are hardly unknown in presidential politics, and improbable is a long way from impossible when any state comes down to a few thousand votes.
"If it is a very close election, then Virgil Goode could take enough votes away from Romney to give Virginia’s 13 electoral votes to Obama,” says Larry Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, which sits in the district that Goode represented in Congress for 12 years and in the state Senate for 24 yeas. “But notice the ‘if’—it has to be very close.”
Virginia Ex-Congressman Could Cost Romney the Election - The Daily Beast
