How Virginia Was Bought

If you wondered how Virginia went from a red state to a purple state to a blue state, here is part of the answer.

Michael Bloomberg played the long game, made many strategic campaign contributions over the years, and made Virginia his own.

According to the New York Times it started a lot sooner than the last couple of elections.

Soon enough, Mr. Bloomberg ramped up his spending on politics beyond New York. Frustrated at the flow of firearms from Virginia, a state with lax gun laws, Mr. Bloomberg tried to buoy candidates in the state’s 2011 elections who shared his views.

Then, in 2013, he received a visitor in New York: Mr. McAuliffe, by then a candidate for governor of Virginia. He proposed to Mr. Bloomberg that he make the state a decade-long priority, with an eye toward empowering Democratic supporters of gun regulation.

“I walked out with a multimillion-dollar commitment that day,” Mr. McAuliffe recalled.

Mr. Bloomberg spent more than $3 million in Virginia that year through his super PAC, helping propel Mr. McAuliffe to the governorship and electing a Democratic attorney general supportive of gun control, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. He has plowed millions more into the state since then, culminating last fall with a takeover of the state legislature by Democrats who are now seeking to pass a series of tougher gun laws.

It started with Terry McAuliffe, continued with Attorney General Mark Herring, and then down into state legislative races.

You know what happened in 2019 (corrected) – Democrats took both houses of the General Assembly.