Virginia state Sen. Amanda Chase still believes — falsely — that the wrong man is in the White House.
“We want the right president put in office!” Chase told a crowd in Florida last week at a rally headlined by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. “We the people will not shut up.”
But there’s another election Chase believes has been corrupted, one closer to home: a May 8 Virginia GOP convention to select nominees for statewide offices.
Chase, who is running for governor, has sent out fundraising emails with subject lines like “BREAKING: The Fix is In” and “PROOF OF CORRUPTION.” She’s unsuccessfully sued her own party to stop the convention and has publicly floated running as an independent if she believes the nominating process is unfair.
For months, Republicans like Chase have cast doubt on the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. The upcoming vote in Virginia presented the state party with the opportunity to run an election of its own. It hasn’t gone smoothly.
It’s not unusual for Republicans in Virginia to gripe about the arcane rules of party-run nominating conventions, which attract a small fraction of the voters of a state-run primary. But this year’s complaints from Chase and other candidates come at a fraught moment for the party, said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.
“The pieces and factions of this state party are simply reflecting the kind of paranoia we’re seeing from the Trump national party,” Sabato said. “This has been instilled in the GOP now and I think we’re gonna see a lot more of this in a lot more places.”
Virginia allows political parties to choose between having a party-run convention or a state-run primary. Democrats opted for the primary. After months of debate, Virginia Republicans settled on their plan in March: More than 53,000 registered delegates will cast ranked-choice ballots next Saturday. The voting will happen at more than three dozen voting sites, because of coronavirus restrictions. Delegates will choose GOP nominees for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general.
The convention decision hasn’t put to bed the bickering on the party’s state central committee. In recent weeks, it’s clashed on everything from vote-counting processes to whether to allow observant Jews to vote early, ahead of the Saturday Sabbath.
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The back and forth has flummoxed the seven gubernatorial candidates as they try to deliver Republicans their first statewide election win since 2009.
Chase claims that the convention decision was designed to thwart her rise. Conventions attract far fewer participants than primaries and, with ranked-choice voting, they require majority support rather than a plurality — two factors that likely make for a steeper climb for Chase’s divisive brand of populism.
At a GOP event last week at a farm outside Richmond, two other gubernatorial candidates shared concerns over the bumpy process.
