Today’s installment of campaign-related news items from across the country.
* With two weeks remaining before Election Day in Virginia, Republican gubernatorial hopeful Ed Gillespie is now attacking Ralph Northam (D) for supporting the restoration of voting rights for former felons.
* On a related note, Gillespie recently claimed that there are “more than 2,000 MS-13 gang members just in Fairfax County,” a populous county in northern Virginia. When the Washington Post asked Gillespie and his campaign to back up the claim, they couldn’t.
* Democrats who agreed to serve on Donald Trump’s voting commission have no idea what the commission is doing, when it might meet again, or whether it still intends to do any work.
* Two writers from Breitbart, a right-wing website, resigned last week from Kelli Ward’s Republican Senate campaign in Arizona. According to a Vox report, the writers, Jennifer Lawrence and Dustin Stockton, had come to believe, after six months of work, that Ward is “not the true believer she claimed to be.”
* Following up on an item from yesterday’s round-up, NBC News’ Mark Murray found an instance from November 2015 in which Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) publicly vowed to run as a Democrat in future elections. The Vermont independent has apparently decided not to keep that commitment. * In Tennessee’s open U.S. Senate race, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R) will not have the Republican field to herself: former Rep. Stephen Fincher (R) is launching a campaign of his own. * With Rep. Tim Murphy (R-Pa.) resigning in the wake of a sex scandal, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (D) has scheduled a special election for March 13. It’ll be the nation’s seventh congressional special election since the start of this Congress. * And in Montana, Russell Fagg, a former state judge, kicked off his Republican U.S. Senate campaign at an event featuring eight people. The GOP candidate asked a local reporter “not to emphasize” the crowd size in the newspaper’s coverage of the campaign kick-off.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past." Recommended
