Republicans challenge Tim Kaine in the US Senate race in Virginia – News Block

The Republicans seem well positioned to win the US Senate in 2024, as they only have 12 seats to defend compared to 22 for the Democrats. In Virginia, Republicans are seeking to unseat incumbent Senate Democrat Tim Kaine, calling him a “dead weight” and pointing to the success of Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican.

“I think this race is definitely up for grabs, it’s a great opportunity,” Scott Parkinson, a Republican candidate challenging Kaine, told The Daily Signal in an interview Tuesday. Parkinson, who served as chief of staff for Ron DeSantis’ campaign for Florida governor in 2018, has insisted he is the favorite in Virginia’s Senate race, despite no polls so far. . He noted that he has helped elect Republicans for 14 years, “fighting the swamp” in Washington, D.C.

Parkinson has many endorsements from Senate and House Republicans, including Sens. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama and Mike Lee of Utah, and Reps. Jim Banks of Indiana, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Eli Crane of Arizona, Byron Donalds and Anna Paulina. Florida Moon. August Pfluger from Texas and Scott Perry from Pennsylvania. Although Parkinson has close ties to DeSantis, he has pledged to support whichever Republican candidate wins the party’s 2024 presidential nomination.

“I think the ground is slipping away from Tim Kaine’s feet,” Jonathan Emord, another Republican candidate and constitutional lawyer who has the most victories against the Food and Drug Administration, told The Daily Signal in an interview Wednesday. in United States history. “The coalition that Youngkin created, that supported his election, is now growing.”

Emord boasted that he won the Loudoun County Republican Committee opinion poll on June 2 in the Senate primary, garnering 61% of the vote, well ahead of Parkinson and military veteran Eddie Garcia. Former Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, leader of the Libertarian Party, endorsed Emord, as did Suparna Dutta, the American Indian mother whom Democrats voted to remove from the Virginia Board of Education in February.

But Garcia, a 22-year Army veteran who completed three deployments to Iraq and three to Afghanistan, said he is in the Senate race to win.

“I am confident that I will unseat Tim Kaine in 2024 because my campaign is building a coalition comprised of religious and family conservatives, marginalized Democrats, common-sense independents, veterans, and blue-collar workers, including the vast majority of Latino Americans here in Commonwealth,” Garcia told The Daily Signal.

Garcia spent five years serving as a national security adviser and legislative liaison. He launched the MIL-VETS mobile integration app, connecting veterans, military spouses and veteran business owners.

Each of the candidates for Kaine’s Senate seat emphasized parental rights, the key issue that propelled Youngkin to victory in 2021. Parental rights first became an issue during the COVID-19 pandemic when schools closed for months, then required children to wear face masks and then encouraged taking mRNA vaccines, and parents questioned the logic behind these policies.

“COVID-19 has really taken me off the bench and into the game,” Parkinson, DeSantis’ former chief of staff, told The Daily Signal. He pointed out that his daughter was finishing fourth grade when “the schools closed.”

“Nobody really thought about the long-term effect that was going to have on the kids,” Parkinson said. “We took her out of public school and put her in a private school. In the sixth grade, other students bullied her when they found out that she was not vaccinated ”.

“The power of the government was infringing on parental rights and our ability to provide a safe community where children did not feel they would be attacked by adults who were making rules for the children but not for themselves,” he added.

“Tim Kaine talks a lot about having ‘long COVID,’ with a tingling sensation in the extremities,” Parkinson noted. “I think the real ‘long COVID’ is the mental health crisis we have imposed on children.”

Parkinson also brought up the infamous Loudoun County incident in which a biological man raped a girl in a girls’ bathroom after gaining access by claiming a “non-binary” identity.

“When you think about parental rights, school safety, trans issues … all of this creates momentum for people who care more about their children’s future than some of these partisan issues,” Parkinson said.

Emord, the constitutional lawyer, agreed.

He touted his “specific solutions” to problems such as the “destruction of American values, the assault on gender taking place in schools, the critical race theory indoctrination of Marxism,” cultural issues that he said “hit so much like inflation. , high gas prices and unaffordable food.”

Emord noted that most Virginians say they approve of Youngkin in recent polls, while they disapprove of President Joe Biden. A Roanoke College poll in March found that 57% of Virginians approved of the governor, while only 38% approved of Biden.

All 10 Youngkin-endorsed state Senate candidates won their primaries Tuesday.

“People of all political persuasions, except the radical leftists, are moving to the right,” Emord said. He warned that experimental interventions carried out in the name of “gender-affirming care” cause “permanent damage to children,” noting that parents are rightly concerned about them.

“It’s almost transparent to me that Tim Kaine’s agenda for Virginia is an agenda that Virginia has never embraced or accepted in any way,” he argued.

Emord described a grassroots surge, saying attendees at the Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Festival in Falls Church offered their support in May.

He described what he called a “big change in the direction of politics in Virginia.”

“People are saying, ‘Enough!’ They have taken it too far,” Emord said.

Emord criticized Kaine as “dead weight”, an empty suit that “just goes along with the plan of the party”. He noted that Kaine freely called himself “boring” in 2016 when Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton chose him as her running mate.

“We don’t need a boring person in government now,” said the Republican candidate.

For his part, Parkinson said that while Kaine is “perceived as a blue dog Democrat,” he votes with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., a self-described Democratic socialist, 94% of the time.

Emord noted that Kaine endorsed the Del state. Isabel Guzman, a Democrat who co-chaired Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign in Virginia. Guzmán later drafted a bill that redefined “child abuse” to include a parent’s disagreement with the child’s stated gender identity.

Kaine’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment on whether the senator still supports Guzmán.

Parkinson said that when Kaine last won the Senate race, in 2018, he faced a different political environment because Democrats won the House after two years of President Donald Trump.

He pointed to Biden’s declining popularity and Youngkin’s investments in strengthening the Republican Party in Virginia. Youngkin also removed “tens of thousands of bad names” from voter rolls, Parkinson said, restoring some integrity to the state’s electoral system.

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