Last Call For Team Cooch

Just how bad are things for the GOP in Virginia ahead of next Tuesday's gubernatorial election?  As Greg Sargent points out, it's somewhere between "horrific" and "Have Jeeves bring around the car, we're making a run for Switzerland."

With Democrat Terry McAuliffe taking a double digit lead in the Virginia gubernatorial contest, leading observers are increasingly looking at Virginia as an indicator of national political trends.

New Washington Post/SRBI polling in Virginia, which puts McAuliffe up 51-39, also demonstrates very clearly the dangers these trends pose to Republicans.

The crack Post polling team has produced a chart based on this poll that shows the GOP brand has collapsed among the very constituencies Republicans must improve their standing among in order to remain competitive in the future, both in Virginia and at the national level:

 


 Not a single one of those groups has an unfavorable opinion less than 69%, and it's 65% overall in a supposedly purple state.  You can put VA firmly in blue territory in 2016, I'm thinking.

Lindsey's Done Hucked Up

Monday:

Looks like Sen. Graham must have gotten a really dismal post-shutdown internal primary poll going into his 2014 race, because he's suddenly gone all Rand Paul on things.

Indeed, Huckleberry Graham went on to say this weekend that he'll block every single Obama appointment until he gets ANSWERS ON BENGHAZI.

Today:

His re-election campaign looming, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has seen his approval rating steadily decline in 2013, according to poll findings released Wednesday.

The survey from Winthrop University found 37 percent of South Carolina voters approve of the job Graham is doing, compared with about 48 percent who said they disapprove. Winthrop showed Graham with an approval rating of 48 percent in February, and 44 percent in April.

Perhaps even more disconcerting for Graham, who is staring at a GOP primary in 2014, is his steep drop among Republican voters in South Carolina. The latest survey from Winthrop showed 45 percent of Republican voters approving of Graham, compared with 40 percent who disapprove.

Those mediocre numbers represent a massive decline since February, when nearly 72 percent of GOP voters said they approved of Graham. In Winthrop's April survey, about 57 percent of Palmetto State Republicans approved of Graham.

Called it, 100%.  Like clockwork.

Zandar's Thought Of The Day

If The Atlantic's resident "reasonable conservative" Conor Friedersdorf had actually been paying attention to the emo left, he'd have figured out that this actually logical statement:

Hillary Clinton is poised to be the candidate of continuity. Like Bush and Obama, she would govern as an executive-power extremist, is implicated in the civil-liberties transgressions of recent years, and would almost certainly seek to expand rather than rein in post-9/11 powers given to the national-security state.

...has nothing to do with Clinton's policies or logic or continuity and everything to do with the fact the emo left loves her because she's not Obama.

StupidiNews!

• European Parliament officials will meet with the White House today over NSA monitoring of heads of state, with new revelations that some European countries were cooperating with the US.
• Israel will continue building new settlement homes in East Jerusalem as Palestinian officials deny any deal to increase Israeli building in occupied areas exists.
• The mother of slain Florida teenager Trayvon Martin testified Tuesday before a Senate panel on so-called "stand your ground" laws, urging lawmakers to amend the legislation.
• Retail giant Wal-Mart is scrambling to embrace solar panels on its stores, the company now generates more solar power than 38 US states.
• With assurances to Sen. Ted Cruz that tougher political ad disclosure rules are "not a priority", new FCC chairman Tom Wheeler was approved unanimously by the Senate.