GOP congressman who lost seat after voter fraud scandal announces Senate run
Former Rep. Scott Taylor (R-VA) just can’t take a hint.
Former Rep. Scott Taylor (R-VA) lost his Virginia Beach-based House seat to Democrat Elaine Luria in 2018 after his campaign engaged in a fraudulent ballot-signature scheme.
But that hasn’t dampened Taylor’s delusions of grandeur.
The scandal-plagued Republican on Monday announced he’s running for Senate in Virginia against Democratic Sen. Mark Warner in 2020.
Why Taylor thinks he has a shot of winning in Virginia is a mystery.
The state has trended heavily Democratic in recent years, with Republicans being wiped out at both the statewide, congressional, and state legislative levels.
Not to mention, the whole reason Taylor engaged in a fraudulent ballot-signature scheme in 2018 was because he was scared of losing his competitive House seat.
The fraud centered around an independent candidate who was seeking to run in Taylor’s district. Taylor’s campaign helped the independent collect signatures to get her on the ballot because they thought the independent would take votes away from the Democratic nominee and help propel Taylor to victory.
However, Taylor’s campaign staffers forged many of the signatures they collected, leading the independent to be booted from the ballot. A former Taylor staffer was even indicted over the scheme.
Ultimately, the attempt to get the independent candidate onto the ballot was a failed scheme by Taylor’s campaign to rig the contest in his favor.
But Taylor now wants to get back into Congress and has set his sights on Warner’s seat.
Running against Warner would already have been tough given that Democrats won the gubernatorial race in the state in 2017 by a whopping 9 points, while Hillary Clinton bested Trump in the state in 2016 by more than 5 points. And the smell of a fraud scandal that still lingers on his skin won’t help Taylor in his quest.
“Virginians remember why they already rejected Scott Taylor,” Stewart Boss, a spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said in a statement laying out Taylor’s ties to Trump as well as indicted GOP Rep. Duncan Hunter (D-CA).
Boss added, “Virginians aren’t strangers to Taylor’s shady brand of self-serving politics, and they’ll make sure this campaign is another one of Taylor’s failures.”
Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.
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