On his “The Awakening” radio program yesterday, Religious Right activist E.W. Jackson lamented the “anomaly” that prevented him from becoming lieutenant governor of Virginia back in 2013 despite the fact that won the vast majority of counties in the state.
After saying that his Democratic opponent in that race, Ralph Northam, was “full of the devil” and that everything he stood for “is an abomination to God,” Jackson bemoaned the fact that he lost the election even though he “won 70 out of 100 counties.” Jackson lost the popular vote by several hundred thousand votes and 10 percentage points.
Jackson blamed his loss on Northern Virginia, which has a large Democratic population, claiming that this means that the people who live in the rest of the state “don’t really have any say” in elections because their vote “doesn’t really count.”
“Since it’s a straight popular vote, not county by county, you get this anomaly where a candidate who wins 70 percent of the geographic region of the state I won, and yet the small 30 percent of the geographic region where there were the most people I lost, and as a result of that, I lose the election.”
Actually, it would be more of an “anomaly” if the candidate who lost the popular vote was nevertheless declared the winner, which is what happened in the most recent presidential election and is probably why Religious Right activists keep insisting that winning a larger geographic area is far more important than actually winning a greater number of total votes.
