Vanke hits the air with two TV spots
Sixth District independent congressional candidate Jeff Vanke has hit the air with two spots that are running in cable markets across the district.
The spots tout Vanke’s push for a balanced federal budget and his pledge to serve only six terms if elected – a dig at nine-term incumbent Republican Congressman Bob Goodlatte’s 1992 pledge to do the same.
The spots are running in every Sixth District cable market but the Covington market.
You can watch the ads below.
Edited by Chris Graham. Chris can be reached at freepress2@ntelos.net.
Vanke releases Contract with Western Virginia
Independent Sixth District congressional candidate Jeff Vanke released a Contract with Western Virginia today at an event in Roanoke – highlighting a promise to voters similar to one made by nine-term incumbent Bob Goodlatte 18 years ago.
“One point of my contract is to promise, on my Eagle Scout’s honor, to hold this seat for no more than six terms, the 1992 promise that Bob Goodlatte breaks with every campaign from 2004 forward,” said Vanke, raising the spectre of the May 1992 promise made by Goodlatte, a Republican, at the height of the early ’90s fervor over term limits in his first race for the seat representing the Sixth.
Vanke also pledges in his contract to support a term-limits amendment to the United States Constitution.
Other planks to the Vanke contract:
- To maintain at least 50 percent of his net worth in U.S. bonds for the remainder of my life.
- To provide his own annual, detailed, draft federal budget that balances no more than five years into the future, and that remains in balance for most of the following 25 years.
- To support cutting agribusiness subsidies by two-thirds or more.
- To support free markets in health care, and to support universal access to health coverage.
- To oppose Social Security privatization, and to support tax-deferred private retirement funds.
- To support democratizing Congressional and Presidential elections with a Constitutional Amendment, including election by no less than a majority of votes, ballot access for any eligible candidate presenting 1,000 signatures of registered voters in the state or district, and prohibition of gerrymandering.
- To democratize his own campaigns, by agreeing to at least three debates per election, including every candidate on the ballot.
Edited by Chris Graham. Chris can be reached at freepress2@ntelos.net.
Vanke defends release of push poll
Independent candidate Jeff Vanke is defending his campaign’s release of a two-question push poll that was touted in e-mail as showing him within four points of incumbent Sixth District Congressman Bob Goodlatte.
“My campaign is not ’tilting at windmills,’ as one journalist asked me about,” Vanke wrote in an e-mail to members of the media Thursday morning in reference to the push poll, which presented more than 1,000 respondents with information about Vanke’s central campaign message of balancing the federal budget and criticisms of Goodlatte’s support from the agribusiness sector in terms of campaign donations and his support for the agribusiness sector in his voting record.
Given that information, respondents to the push poll still favored Goodlatte in the race, but only by a 46 percent-to-42 percent plurality.
Vanke said most of those polled knew little about him before receiving the phone call, “and yet nearly half were willing to support me against Goodlatte based on just a couple of facts that I selected, and that I represented accurately.”
“I won’t pull even with Goodlatte in neutral polling unless my current fundraising acceleration accelerates fast enough. But he is certainly beatable by an independent, based on his big-spending record, and he can be beaten on a fraction of his own funding,” Vanke said in the e-mail.
The Goodlatte campaign has not had any comment on the Vanke poll. The campaign of Libertarian Stuart Bain issued a press release on Wednesday offering the observation that the poll “mimics the same type of poll that telemarketers use when they are calling to ask you ‘Press 1 if you want a product that won’t leave you streaks when you mop the floor or Press 2 if you prefer streaks.’”
“Perhaps in his next ‘poll’ he should tell voters to ‘Press 1 if you want to vote for Jeff Vanke and receive an extension on your retirement age and a decrease in your Social Security benefits or Press 2 if you want to vote for Stuart Bain and shrink the size of the overbloated, overregulating federal government and take strong actions to cut the federal budget and growing federal deficit,’” the release continued.
“Stuart Bain has attended any number of public events. His public recognition and support has increased significantly after each event. At every event, Stuart or members of his staff have been asked, ‘Who is Jeff Vanke?’ Obviously Jeff has not polled any of these people,” the release concluded.
Story by Chris Graham. Chris can be reached at freepress2@ntelos.net.
Fun with poll numbers in the Sixth
A poll commissioned by Sixth District independent congressional candidate Jeff Vanke has him within four points of Republican incumbent Bob Goodlatte.
OK, yes, there’s a catch. The two-question poll, conducted on Tuesday, resembled a push poll, pushing respondents on Vanke’s central campaign message of balancing the federal budget, and taking shots at Goodlatte over campaign contributions from the agribusiness sector and making a claim that Goodlatte backs costly agribusiness subsidies.
The 1,040 respondents to the poll still gave Goodlatte a 46 percent-to-42 percent lead over Vanke. Libertarian Stuart Bain polled at 4 percent.
Vanke will hold a press conference in Roanoke Wednesday afternoon to discuss the results with the news media.
Reporting by Chris Graham. Chris can be reached at freepress2@ntelos.net.
Independents face uphill battle against Goodlatte
The Sixth District is a safe one politically, so safe that Republican incumbent Bob Goodlatte does not have a Democratic Party opponent on the ballot in the November elections, though there are two independent candidates vying for the seat.
The challenge ahead for Stuart Bain, a Libertarian, and Jeff Vanke, a self-described “Independent-Centrist,” is pretty substantial.
“This would be a difficult race even for a Democrat,” said Isaac Wood, a political analyst at the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “Bob Goodlatte has never gotten under 60 percent of the vote. He’s been elected nine times. This is a district that goes heavily Republican at all levels. But when you’re an independent candidate, those challenges are even greater.”
Major-party candidates have built-in access to campaign donors and volunteers, Wood points out, something that independents like Bain and Vanke have to build for themselves.
Link to story on TheNewDominion.com.
Vanke joins Center Party to Modern Whigs
Sixth District congressional candidate Jeff Vanke has joined his new Center Party to the Modern Whig Party and has received the backing of the Whigs in his 2010 campaign.
“The Modern Whigs are inspiring to me in purpose, earnestness, and steadfastness,” Vanke said in a statement. “Knowing the party as I now do, I would join the party even if I were not running for office. The MWP is not the best thing just since Ross Perot, for whom I volunteered. It is better than Perot; it is the best political movement I have ever seen in this country. I am honored to join the ranks of such an outstanding group of people.”
Vanke is running against Republican incumbent Bob Goodlatte in the Sixth District in the November election. Vanke will be listed as an independent on the ballot.
Edited by Chris Graham. Chris can be reached at freepress2@ntelos.net.
Vanke fights Capitol Hill convention
A question for Jeff Vanke. You’re an independent candidate for Congress. Let’s say you’re elected. Who do you caucus with?
The answer will surprise you.
“I wouldn’t caucus with either party. I would have a vote on the House floor,” said Vanke, a self-described “independent centrist” from Roanoke who is challenging Republican incumbent Bob Goodlatte for the Sixth Distict seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.
A third candidate in the race is Libertarian Stuart Bain. The Democratic Party is not fielding a candidate in the Sixth after Sam Rasoul ran head-to-head against Goodlatte in 2008 and received just 36 percent of the vote in the two-way contest.
Vanke’s move to say that he wouldn’t caucus with either party if elected is, by his own admission, “a unique situation.”
“But the party system isn’t in the Constitution,” Vanke said. “I’m sure an independent in Congress can work out a fair set of committee assignments appropriate for a freshman. They can’t run a duopoly to the point where somebody comes in and says, I don’t want to be in your clubs, they can just shut you out.”
Vanke has made fixing the federal budget the centerpiece of his campaign. Goodlatte, at first glance, would seem to have as a conservative Republican some political insulation on budget issues, but Vanke points out the congressman’s support for big-business and agribusiness subsidies and his votes for deficit budgets under President George W. Bush that added trillions of dollars to the national debt.
The disenchantment with Washington reflected in recent polling numbers from Public Policy Polling that have both parties facing voter-disapproval ratings approaching 60 percent is something that Vanke is hoping to be able to capitalize on in the 2010 election in the Sixth.
“The system is broken,” Vanke said. “What can we do about it? That’s what we’re trying to do with this movement. We understand that we’re in it for the long haul.”
Story by Chris Graham. Chris can be reached at freepress2@ntelos.net.
Vanke gives Waynesboro a first impression
Jeff Vanke was a one-man campaign team at Sunday’s Summer Extravaganza in Waynesboro.
It’s called retail politicking – giving people what one voter who Vanke, an independent candidate for the Sixth District congressional seat currently held by Republican Bob Goodlatte, met recently called a “horseback view.”
“It’s just a brief impression, but it speaks volumes,” said Vanke, who acknowledges the uphill battle in the upcoming November election against Goodlatte, a nine-term congressman who easily won re-election in 2008 against his first major-party challenger in a decade, Democrat Sam Rasoul, and this year will face off with Vanke and Libertarian Stuart Bain without a Democratic Party opponent in the race. Continue reading “Vanke gives Waynesboro a first impression” »
Vanke: ‘Both parties’ part of the problem in Washington
Story by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
Republicans are talking tough on federal spending and the national debt right now, but where we they just a few years ago when they had control of Congress and the White House?
“Both parties, Republicans and Democrats, have left these issues unaddressed,” said Jeff Vanke, an independent on the ballot for Congress in the Sixth District who will challenge incumbent Republican Congressman Bob Goodlatte in November.
Vanke is making the budget and the national debt a central focus of his campaign. The 40-year-old former college professor proposes tying federal income taxes to the national debt to ensure that everyone, from the working class to the middle class to the wealthy, contibutes toward paying down our debt, within a simplified system stripped of or reducing many existing tax deductions.
“Not one single person in Congress will propose in specifics how to change the course we’re on, but I do,” said Vanke, noting that Goodlatte, who touts his conservative budgeting stands, is part of the problem as well, going along with budgets passed by Republican majorities in the House and Senate and signed into law by President George W. Bush in the 2001-2007 time frame when the GOP was talking the game of spending restraint but acting very much to the contrary of its public positions.
“He’s part of the big spending and deficit spending problem,” Vanke said. Continue reading “Vanke: ‘Both parties’ part of the problem in Washington” »
