Michael Bloomberg is hoping to ride to the rescue of Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam two weeks ahead of the Virginia governor’s race.
Everytown for Gun Safety, one the foremost gun control groups in America that is bankrolled by the former New York City mayor, will drop another $400,000 in the election after an earlier $1 million commitment, the Washington Post reports. That makes the race very much a referendum on gun control.
While the Bloomberg cash could rile up the Democratic base and bring Northam victory, it could just as easily backfire and deliver a win for Republican Ed Gillespie. Without new voters to win over, the race is about getting reliable voters to the polls.
Right now the race is all tied up, and Gillespie has the momentum. While polling from Monmouth University has the race deadlocked at 48 percent to 47 percent, the Republican is surging in more conservative, rural Virginia and gaining ground in Northam’s home region of Eastern Virginia.
The Bloomberg money hinges on a simple calculation: Gun control will hopefully motivate the Left more than the Right. “If the Democrats can get their base out,” Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute, tells me, “they can win.”
That move also smacks of a certain desperation. Northam is cleaning up in wealthy, liberal, elite Northern Virginia but losing momentum in Central and Eastern Virginia.
“From Hampton Roads all the way to Chesapeake Bay,” Murray notes, “should be an area where Northam does well. It’s his home region and Democrats have done well there in the last couple election cycles. But he doesn’t appear to be as strong there with his base as he needs to be.”
Currently that eastern part of the state is roughly split per Monmouth: 48 percent for the Republican and 45 percent for the Democrat. Bloomberg might help Northam in the candidate’s eastern backyard, that anti-gun mayor could just as easily shoot his guy in the foot in the central part of the state. It’s happened before.
Two years ago Bloomberg’s group dropped $700,000 in Virginia’s critical 10th District state senate race. At the last minute, the pro-gun Republican surged over the anti-gun Democrat. Asked what happened, former chairman of Virginia’s Democrat Party, Paul Goldman, said at the time that the “amazing” last-minute turnout was “definitely Bloomberg backlash.”
Either way, whether Bloomberg hits his mark or misses, gun control will be on the ballot and will become a template for congressional races in 2018.
Philip Wegmann is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
