Right. Didn't his kid qualify for in-state tuition in Virginia for college? I used to live near his NJ office and besides the sign outside, you definitely couldn't tell if anyone ever existed there. Like, it's all just for show.

Ugh. The fact that Smith commands as much of the vote as he does is really disheartening, though not surprising.

• Anti-abortion. Anyone who wants a post-15 week abortion ban should admit they either think women should suffer and die because God commanded it or that they are so ignorant, they have no business even having an opinion about pregnancy, let alone legislating around it. Also, he wants to protect "crisis pregnancy centers", which lie to women and generally do not have licensed medical professionals running them. He also doesn't want Medicaid to be able to cover abortions. (Interestingly, he seems to be against organ harvesting, but has no problem forcing women to be incubators.)

• Anti-public school. If you want tax dollars to go to vouchers for religious schools, you are saying you wish to defund public schools.

• Anti-vaxx. Why should members of the armed forces get special protection for refusing the COVID vaccine as he proposed, when it is a long-established principle that vaccine adherence is a basic tenet of force readiness?

The thing is, he's mostly quiet (completely absent from the public, and the state, actually) presents as respectable, particularly in comparison to some of the elected kooks in Congress, he has been around so long his name recognition claws are in deep, and not everything he proposes is evil or bat-shit crazy, so I guess that gets him pretty far.