Are Democrats getting desperate in the Virginia attorney general’s race? In a sign that things may not be going well for Democratic candidate Steve Shannon, a new Facebook campaign targets Republican candidate Ken Cuccinelli for not denouncing fellow Republican Catherine Crabill’s recent remarks. Crabill, who is running for the Virginia House of Representatives, told an energized “Tea Party” rally earlier this month that “we have a chance to fight this battle at the ballot box before we have to resort to the bullet box.”

The new Facebook group features a video of the comments. Crabill has responded on her own website. She says that the video takes her quote out of context and insists that she’s advocating for peaceful change, not violent revolution. Still, the Shannon campaign is trying to link Cuccinelli to both Crabill and the broader Tea Party movement, hoping this will boost his negatives.

But Cuccinelli has been pretty vocal about his support for the Tea Party activists, and it doesn’t seem to have hurt him. A recent poll has the Republican candidate besting Shannon by 7 percentage points. As I pointed out in my NRO profile of Cuccinelli, he wears his conservatism on his sleeve. Going after the Tea Partiers seems like the wrong line of attack for the Shannon campaign.

– Michael Warren, a Collegiate Network intern at National Review, studies economics and history at Vanderbilt University.