To hear the press tell it, the public has flipped, shifted, moved squarely into the Joe Biden camp, and abortion is the driving force.

That the Virginia statehouse flipped blue in the last off-year midterms proved it, right? Big Democrat triumph, big public swing to the Dems, right?

Maybe not so fast. 

Turns out one of the 'winners' in the Virginia state Senate race doesn't actually seem to live in her district.  

According to The Daily Wire:

Virginia Democrats last week took control of the state House and retained control of the state Senate by one seat — but a winning senator may have lied about residing in the district, a situation that could lead to the chamber falling into Republican hands.

Democrats are slated to control the state Senate 21-19, but if Ghazala Hashmi is ineligible to hold office because she lied on her campaign paperwork, then a situation could arise where she is replaced by a Republican, and Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears would cast tie-breaking votes.

Virginia Senate candidates are required to live in the district they are running for, and Hashmi filed candidacy paperwork saying she lived in an apartment on Boulder Lake Drive in North Chesterfield in Senate District 15.

Comically, four neighbors were watching, and together compiled the information in a spreadsheet, taking 62 drives past her home to find that she lived there, documenting her car and taking photos of her entering and exiting the house.

Apparently, it was like detective work, but done by the locals.

It also resembles the neighborly intervention that pretty well proved that Chula Vista mayoral candidate Ammar Campa-Najjar, was living with his girlfriend, current Rep. Sara Jacobs of San Diego, in the fancy Banker's Hill neighborhood of San Diego and not in Chula Vista as he claimed.

This whole thing amounts to a pattern by politicians, mostly Democrats, to skirt residence rules and just represent some place they have nothing to do with, for their own ends.

Rep. Adam Schiff, who has lived in Maryland for decades, seems to be one of these characters. There are also reports that Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona also does this, reportedly living in Texas, and the current appointed Senator of California, Laphonza Butler, who filled the late Dianne Feinstein's seat, is one of these, too, having an established residence in Maryland, too. I wrote about that pattern here.

If the facts pan out about this unethical breach of residency requirements, the Senate could flip to Republicans in Virginia. Which would be quite a relief -- and quite possibly a cause for hope for Republicans that they are continuing to advance. Of course, with so much at stake and Democrats crowing so loudly about how the voters supposedly love their leftwingery and want more of it, you can bet that they will fight like cornered rats to keep the status quo.

One can only hope that rule of law prevails in Virginia as it doesn't in places like California where these shenanigans go on regularly, with no politicians ever punished (Richard Alarcon, a powerful Los Angeles city councilman, was kicked out of office, but evaded punishment).

That would be refreshing.

Image: Ron Cogswell, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 2.0