DAY FIFTY-THREE - DR. CAMERON WEBB

Oct 21

Day Fifty-three | Dr. Cameron Webb | VA-05
791 Sawbuck Patriots | $8666 pledged today | $499,895 donated overall

Team:

First to the mailbag - we've got two thank you notes to share, the tones of which certainly do represent the big-tent nature of our party these days:

Alex, I wanted to send my thanks to you and the Sawbuck Patriots. Right now is such a critical time in our race. We're working hard to put together the funds we need to keep our voter communications going, and the Sawbuck Patriots have provided such a helpful boost to our fundraising efforts. Thanks again for everything, and grateful to have you all on our team!

Truly,
Jill Schupp

“A big <salute> to the Sawbuck Patriots! I’m leading in the NC 11 race to fill the seat Mark Meadows abandoned to serve Trump. My utterly unqualified 25 year old nazi-cozy misogynistic opponent who’s trying to make a seat in Congress his first adult job is totally owned by corporate dark money special interests who tell him what he thinks and what to do. The generosity of the Sawbuck Patriots will help me fight back against their efforts to Swiftboat my record of military and public service to hide the fact that my opponent has never served anyone but himself.”
- Moe Davis

(Man, do I ever want my party represented by BOTH of these people in Congress, for fantastically disparate reasons!)

THE SITUATION: Virginia’s fifth. (The fightin’ fifth, to be sure.) It’s HUGE. Sure, it's bigger than Rhode Island and Delaware and Connecticut combined, but LOTS of things are. However, it's also bigger than Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Hawaii. It's bigger than NEW JERSEY. It's bigger than VERMONT, even.

So what I'm saying, in truly unnecessary detail, is that by clocking in at over 10,000 square miles in size, this district is gargantuan. It’s 64 percent rural, 75 percent white, and +6 R in registration. It was a traditional hotbed of southern politics – James Madison and James Monroe squared off in the fightin’ fifth to represent it (Madison won) – and each of them went on to be, you know, President. It voted for segregationist George Wallace back in 1968 - yup, the third-party racist outpolled the R and the D here.

And the district hasn’t supported a D for President since 1946.

It's been represented by conservative Ds or actual Rs basically since the dawn of time, with one exception – in ’08, a normal-seeming D won it for one term, and was then promptly defeated, because VA-05. But because of a bunch of self-inflicted R wounds, and the excellence of the D candidate in the race, all the handicappers have this race - this year - as a jump ball.

THE OPPOSITION: First-term Representative Denver Riggleman (what a great name!) was defeated at the Virginia R nominating convention a few months ago, quite unexpectedly. Pilloried by his hard-right opponent for officiating a same-sex wedding (narrator voice: “We call it ‘a wedding’”), he got tossed overboard by his own party.

Farewell, Denver Riggleman. We hardly knew ye.

Bob Good is the charming fellow who ran to Rep. Riggleman's right when Ol' Rigs was found by VA-05 R leadership to be insufficiently Paleolithic for today's Trump Republican Party. Good served on the Campbell County Board of Supervisors, before that as a fundraiser for the athletics department at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University (which itself has been in the news quite a bit this year!), and before that at CitiFinancial as a branch and district manager.

Good describes himself as a conservative with a “biblical world view,” but he has a slippery and well-documented relationship with the truth. For instance: Good has for years, filed financial reports saying that he had zero financial assets – but oops, a couple weeks ago, under scrutiny from the news, he had to amend a bunch of years of disclosures, after it turned out he owned perhaps $1M worth of stocks during that time. (We can all misremember a mil here and there, right?) And, of course, several of the stocks in his portfolio were with companies that had business before the Campbell County Board of Supervisors – upon which, you’ll recall, Good sat. And yes – you’re doing the math correctly – while sitting on that Board of Supervisors, Supervisor Good didn’t disclose that he owned any of those stocks, which means that there are questions about ethical behavior being correctly raised. There’s currently a hue and cry in VA about whether or not Good has the integrity to serve in Congress.

Good praises Trump on his website, and touts the President's endorsement of his campaign. And his platform is basically SecondAmendmentTrumpWallsLockUpCriminalsNotEvenInWhenItWasRapeOrIncestSocialismAntifaSantuaryCitiesTaxes. (And that’s just scratching the surface.)

Disgustingly, Good has run TV ads superimposing images of his Black opponent with images of rioting. He also, of course, categorically denies that making those ads that way was racist in any way, shape, or form.

However, this is all possibly a great thing, because he’s proving to be so staggeringly hard-core dinosaur conservative that one can find plenty of news stories bouncing around the Virginia Internets quoting Rs who are voting for the D – not so much because of the D, but because of the stunningly inflexible views of their own party’s candidate.

So: cool cool. Cool. Hoist yourself on your own petard, dude. Hoist away.

OUR CANDIDATE: Dr. Cameron Webb. A thirty-seven year old doctor of internal medicine with an MD from Wake Forest and a JD from Loyola Chicago, Dr. Webb was chosen to be a White House fellow under Obama. (His fellowship continued into the Trump administration, during which they moved his desk into the hallway and wouldn't talk to him.) He defines himself primarily as a scientist. He continues his medical practice (during the campaign) with his patients at the UVA Medical Center during the week, where he serves as the UVA Director of Health Policy and Equity.

He’s running on kitchen-table issues – access to affordable healthcare, dealing realistically with climate change, education, affordable housing, and criminal justice reform, his opponent is (of course) calling him a radical socialist.

If Webb wins this seat, it’ll be substantially about the voters rejecting Good, and we’ll need to fight hard to keep this seat blue next cycle. But right now, this is a fantastic pickup opportunity in a quite red district in a blue state – and the D candidate is a remarkable human being with a strong resume, great training, and a bright future as a political leader.

And wonderfully, current polls are matching what the handicappers are saying – recent ones show Dr. Webb in the lead in this race. THE MATH SAYS HE CAN WIN, folks – let’s help him out as we collectively punch through the $500K level of investments these important campaigns!

Sawbuck Patriots, it's go time: click HERE to send $10 (or more!) to support Doctor Webb's campaign. Our collective effort will invest $8666 today.

Thank you!

- Alex / www.sawbuckpatriots.com

Alex Clemens

DAY FIFTY-THREE - DR. CAMERON WEBB

Sawbuck Patriots, it's go time: click HERE to send $10 (or more!) to support Doctor Webb's campaign. Our collective effort will invest $8666 today.

DAY FIFTY-FOUR - DIANE MITSCH BUSH

DAY FIFTY-TWO - MOE DAVIS

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