Amanda Chase is still in the race for the Republican governor nomination, for now, but I’d say it’s not looking good for her.
Chase, a former state senator who spoke to a MAGA mob at the U.S. Capitol on a certain Jan. 6, and hasn’t won even a party nomination since, filed her paperwork for the gubernatorial race 20 minutes ahead of yesterday’s 5 p.m. deadline.
The effort was so harried that Chase conceded in a message to supporters afterward she was “still counting signatures in the back seat of my car on the almost two-hour trip from Appomattox to Richmond.”
Sounds organized.
The Republican Party of Virginia has five days to review her petition for ballot access.
State law requires 10,000 signatures of state residents, with at least 400 coming from each of the state’s 11 congressional districts, to qualify for a party primary ballot.
That the candidate was counting signatures in the back seat of the car on the way to drop them off doesn’t seem to bode well for her continued candidacy.
From experience, you’d want to have a buffer a decent bit above the required signature threshold, assuming that there’d be a number of signatures that won’t pass muster.
If Chase beats the odds and gets on the ballot, she’d be going one-on-one with Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, who has the backing of the party establishment, including Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Attorney General Jason Miyares, the latter having bowed out of a potential primary fight to run for re-election to the AG post.
Earle-Sears has the party stalwarts on her side, but the MAGA wing isn’t on board, entirely because she has wavered on Donald Trump, including her famously telling Fox News back in 2022 that she “could not support” Trump in the 2024 cycle, earning Earle-Sears the dreaded “Never Trumper” label from the far right.
Former state delegate Dave LaRock was the first MAGA to go public with an 11th-hour challenge to Earle-Sears, but the clock struck midnight on him before he could get his 10,000 signatures, and he dropped out of the race ahead of Thursday’s filing deadline.
ICYMI
That Chase, who has teased a Trump endorsement for her candidacy, was driving from Appomattox to Richmond is worth a sidebar here: she moved there after losing a primary in her redrawn State Senate district in 2023, the move done to give her a chance to run for another State Senate seat.
She lost that primary, too, which means she’s 0-for-2 in primaries since she spoke to the MAGA mob that would later overrun the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, telling the mob that “we know this election was fraudulent, and they have stolen the vote,” and referred to the insurrectionists as “patriots” in a video that she posted to social media that night.
Her record goes to 0-3 since Jan. 6 when you factor in her third-place finish in the race for the 2021 Republican nomination at the party’s state convention.
Chase referenced her failed 2021 run in her message to supporters on Thursday.
“After months of receiving your calls to run for Virginia Governor, five weeks ago, I accepted your request to finish the 15-month race for governor that I began in 2020,” she said. “Many of you said you wanted to have a say in who your next governor would be, and you wanted to have a choice. I’m honored that you asked me, yet again. Thank you.”
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Chris Graham
