ELECTION ROUNDUP: 21st District Senate candidates make final pitches

(Everytown is a seed donor to The Trace.) For months, ARS, founded by former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords and her husband Mark Kelly following her recovery from the 2011 Tucson, Arizona mass shooting, worked intensively with Virginia Democrats to tailor messages to voters of both parties they knew to be alarmed by gun violence.

Several of the most competitive House races were in northern Virginia, where Republicans sought to use McAuliffe’s plan to add tolls for a few commuters inside the Beltway on Interstate 66 to attack Democrats. “When you have a legal system that allows for basically unlimited third-party funding in campaigns, you are going to see more and more of that”.

One group that attracted a significant amount of attention this campaign cycle was Take Back Virginia, a newly created coalition of labor unions and minority groups.

McAuliffe really wants his party to take charge in the Senate.

The GOP-controlled Virginia Legislature rejected the governor’s proposal to expand Medicaid earlier this year. But Republicans are confident they’ve successfully matched those efforts.

The Democrats have a serious problem in elections other than those for president – voter turnout. And she said the gun-control group’s spending helped tighten the Richmond-area seat won by Republicans. But he lost that primary. So the Democrat in the race was Josh King, one of the candidates that SEIU members were canvassing for in the weeks leading up to Election Day. McCabe, a pediatric emergency-room doctor, fell by 4.5 points to a staunch anti-gun reform advocate, Senator Dick Black, in a district northwest of D.C. McCollum held Senator Frank Wagner to 54 percent of the vote in the Virginia Beach area, his lowest percentage in seven successful legislative runs. Lewis narrowly won that seat two years ago by 11 votes. A higher ratio implies that more voters who participated in the 2012 presidential election also voted in the 2015 Senate election.

“I need one seat to get control of the Senate, and we can pass common sense gun laws”, said Terry McAuliffe the night before the elections, and he did everything he could to push for those gun laws, soliciting anti-gun groups from out of state to pour almost $3 million into Virginia, primarily in two key Senate races.

“Today, Virginians voted for a fiscally responsible and conservative majority”, Senate Majority Leader Thomas K. Norment, R-James City, said Tuesday. It produced a television ad campaign starring Andy Parker, the father of a Roanoke, Va., TV journalist [who was] fatally shot during a live broadcast in August.

“I should not be precluded from being able to concealed carry anywhere in this state, and we should not as a state or as a country have gun free zones that are target rich environments for people who are mentally unbalanced and sometimes very mentally together and very intentional in the evil they mean to perpetrate”, said Bevin.

The spot, titled “Condolences”, appeared in two different media markets against two different Republican candidates.

In one of those key seats, GOP nominee Glen Sturtevant outspent his opponent Democratic Dan Gecker $915,000 to $770,000, based on the estimated figures.

“While our unprecedented field and targeting programs have helped, all data shows that likely voters this election are still much more Republican”, the memo says.