Virginia holds gubernatorial elections tomorrow, and if the lines poll lines are reasonably short, I’ll be reluctantly voting for the Democrat.

Both candidates are awful on limited government issues. Virginia Republicans have actually outspent budgets suggested by Democrat Gov. Mark Warner. Normally, that’d cause me to sit the election out.

But Republican Jerry Kilgore’s campaign has been particularly sleazy. Because his party has behaved so shamefully in the legislature on fiscal issues the last few years, Kilgore has decided to fearmonger on the few issues where he differs from his opponent, Democrat Tim Kaine. So Kilgore has stroked the nativist coals on immigration, riled up invective against gay people, and run a particularly slimy series of ads bashing Kaine for, of all things, taking pro bono cases for death row inmates while he was a criminal defense attorney. Kilgore also ran radio endorsements from Sen. George Allen, a guy who once hung a lynching noose from a tree in front of his old law office to show his support for “frontier justice.”

That’s enough for me. Kaine it is.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 7th, 2005 at 3:42 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.