Obama to campaign for McAuliffe next week in tight race for Virginia governor

October 13, 2021

Former President Barack Obama will join a rally for Terry McAuliffe next week as part of an all-out effort by Democrats to win Virginia’s gubernatorial race, The Hill reports.

Obama will join McAuliffe on October 23 in Richmond. The news comes after McAuliffe’s campaign announced that First Lady Jill Biden and former Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams will campaign with him this weekend.

McAuliffe, who is in a tight race with Republican Glenn Youngkin, made the announcement on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” exactly three weeks from Election Day in the Old Dominion. The voter registration deadline in Virginia is on Tuesday, October 12.

Youngkin’s campaign responded to the news, saying it was a sign McAuliffe’s campaign was getting nervous ahead of the election.

“Terry McAuliffe is scared because Virginians are roundly rejecting 40-year politician Terry McAuliffe’s plans to defund the police, strip parents of their rights to have a say in their children’s education, and to fire people who don’t follow his authoritarian vaccine mandates, so his response is to bring in more politicians to help draw a crowd larger than 12 people,” Youngkin spokesperson Macaulay Porter said in a statement to the Hill. “Glenn Youngkin is an outsider focused on delivering for the people of Virginia and making the state the best place to live, work, and raise a family.”

The two are locked in a close contest that may come down to turnout on both sides. Democrats have won the presidential race in Virginia every cycle since 2008, when Obama was on the ticket.

A Christopher Newport University poll released last week showed McAuliffe leading Republican nominee Glenn Youngkin by 4 points, within the survey’s 4.2 percentage point margin of error. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report rates the race as a “toss-up.”

Research contact: @thehill

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