A far-right third party candidate might ruin Mitt Romney's chances at winning Virginia, Alex Wagner reported on Tuesday's The Last Word. That candidate: Virgil Goode, the former Republican congressman who is now running for president on the Constitution Party ticket. A recent poll has him pulling nine percent of the vote, with seemingly nearly all of it coming away from Romney's conservative base. That leaves President Obama with a comfortable 14 point lead over Romney.
Prior to his third-party presidential run, Goode was perhaps best known as the Republican representative who warned Americans they needed to "wake up" after Keith Ellison was elected the first Muslim member of the House. He objected particularly strongly to Ellison's decision to be sworn into Congress on a Koran, rather than a Bible. (The Koran that Ellison ultimately used originally belonged to Thomas Jefferson.)
On The Last Word, Wagner ran through some of the highlights from Goode's current platform: Cutting the deficit, making English the official language of the United States, putting a moratorium on green cards, ending the "anchor baby situation," and opposing any union between the United States, Mexico, and Canada.
It would be difficult for Romney to run to the right of that, but they might not have to. The Virginia Board of Elections has asked Virginia's Attorney General to investigate possible fraud in Goode's efforts to get on the ballot.