by Fairfax County Democratic Committee Vice Chair for Finance, Chris Ambrose
Elizabeth Schultz, you are a sitting Republican Fairfax County School Board member and an unabashed Trump supporter, and you lament that the Democrats brought national politics into the School Board race by highlighting the Republican School Board members’ determination to implement the Trump/DeVos agenda in Fairfax County?
You Republicans have the audacity to complain that the race was too partisan, when it was you and the Republican Party who had [Republican School Board at-large member Jeanette] Hough resign early to force a low turnout special election in August in an effort to gain a partisan advantage in the race.
You and your Republican allies are the ones who decided to make this race partisan. Had this race occurred in November, it would have been a typical School Board election. The Governor’s race would have brought out the partisans. That is not to mention that holding a special election cost the Fairfax County taxpayers well over $250,000; when the final bills come in, it will be closer to half a million taxpayer dollars that the Republicans wasted on this election.
How dare you say tweet “A win of ~6.5% of registered voters is a win, granted. Says nothing of being in-touch & willing to represent the other 93.5% of Fairfax.” The only reason such a small portion of the electorate participated is because you and your Republican party insisted on forcing an election that excluded the vast majority of voters. In fact, your hope was for the turnout to be even LOWER. You are upset at the number of Democrats that voted. Had this been held in November, more voters would have had a say and Karen would have gotten many times that number. Even your candidate would have received more than the 3% he got.
Elizabeth Schultz, as you know, county budgets are fungible. Perhaps you can tell parents what resources their children could have had for an extra half million dollars.
You really need to look at the facts if you believe that “[s]mear tactics to label him and his supporters” as “white supremacists” were used against him.
The Democrats never called [Republican nominee Chris] Grisafe or all of his supporters “white supremacists.’ The Fairfax Democrats simply highlighted one white supremacist who endorsed Grisafe, though there were others. The supporter in question went so far as to call for a KKK/Nazi torch march on the Fairfax County School Board Headquarters (an individual whose tweets you have retweeted).
We simply called on Grisafe to reject that endorsement. Not only did he fail to do that, he went on a right-wing radio talk show where the host and Grisafe laughed the whole thing off, calling it “fake news,” and even suggested the Democrats had manufactured the Twitter account.
All Grisafe needed to do was release a statement to the effect that he rejects those people, does not want their vote, and would not even want to win the election if racist votes were what it would take for him to win. That type of leadership is lacking in the Republican Party.
The problem is that the Republican Party is so dependent on the small but significant minority of racist and white supremacist voters, that Republicans from School Board to President are afraid to offend them. The party of Lincoln has become the party of intolerance of diversity and tolerance of hate. As long as the Republican Party does not change course, the Democratic Party should, must, and will call them out on their tolerance of intolerance.
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