I’m putting the finishing touches on Wraithkin this week and preparing to send it off to the Beta readers this weekend (probably Saturday night), which is part of the reason I haven’t really commented on the Virginia elections yet. I’ll have something a little more concrete this Friday, but all I can say now (without going into full-on lecture mode) is that the third party candidate, Robert Sarvis (Libertarian) did not cost the Republicans the election. Their own ineptitude did.
Okay, back to editing.
Jason Córdova 
Jason, I completely agree with you. Ken Cuchinelli was just too far to the right, IMO, for most Virginians. He believes in that “personhood” amendment — something that really worries me, as while personally I do not believe in abortion, I also do not think I should tell other people what to do about it — much less when life actually *starts*, which is what that personhood amendment does. (If that amendment had passed, it’s possible that a woman who miscarries late in her pregnancy could be sanctioned. I saw all sorts of unintended consequences with that law, and *that* one was at the top of the list.)
I’m a Hillary Clinton Democrat, and I like Terry McAuliffe in many ways — but had I voted in Virginia’s election, I almost certainly would’ve voted for the Libertarian candidate. It’s not that I dislike McAuliffe, either — I think he could be a good Gov. for Virginia in the same way Jim Doyle was a better than average Gov. for Wisconsin. But Doyle was never popular in the state, rather being a guy who understood how things ran and helped facilitate things (it’s a style of governance that’s fairly low-key once you’re in there, if that makes any sense, that I feel McAuliffe is most likely to emulate).
The reason I would’ve not been likely to vote for McAuliffe has more to do with the whole process in Virginia. Everything I heard would’ve led me to cast a protest vote. But I also liked what I heard about Sarvis. I felt he was a more mainstream candidate in many ways than Cuchinelli, and had Sarvis had any money behind him whatsoever, *he* might be the Governor of Virginia right now.