Editors note: This was an interview conducted in late 2019.
Constitutional conservative Daniel Gade won the Republican Senate primary June 23 and will challenge Sen. Mark R. Warner (D) in the fall.
The former Army lieutenant colonel has a substantial chance of defeating Warner. Warner finished with 49.1 percent of the votes; his rival Ed Gillespie, received 48.3 percent with an estimated gap of 18,000 votes in 2014.
Virginia turned blue in November, picking up majorities in the House and Senate.
Gade is confident that voters will see him as a candidate for the people, not the establishment.
“When Senator Warner looks back on Governor Warner, they don’t recognize each other at all across that span of years, because Governor Warner was a businessman, a moderate — and Senator Warner is a party-line radical.”
On The Issues
The Democratic Party lost “its way” when it comes to policies.
“If you look at the people on the top of the ticket on the Democrat side — they’re advocating for what I call the six horsemen of the Apocalypse,” he says. “Which are the restrictions of religious beliefs, the Green New Deal, Medicare for all, gun confiscation, open borders and late-term abortions — the most horrific of them in a lot of ways.”
How exactly do those six policies serve the will of the people?
“They don’t,” says Gade. “As the democrats run hard left nationally, we have to wonder what would Mark Warner do? He votes with his party 100 percent of the time. He votes against Trump virtually uniformly, including against the tax cuts, including for the expansion of all these government programs, including going against the Born-Alive Protection Act.”
Gade believes in term limits, something many Americans wish to see. In the McLaughlin & Associates survey, 82 percent of voters cited they approved of a constitutional amendment imposing term-limits on those elected to the House and Senate. Also, “73 percent of voters are more likely — and 42 percent “much more likely” — to vote for a congressional candidate who supports implementing term limits.”
He signed a pledge for six terms in the House and two terms for the Senate.
“Congress is supposed to do the will of the people. If it just turns into the will of the swamp, [this is] what we have right now. Mark Warner used to be for term limits when he first started running for the Senate,” says Gade who served in the George W. Bush administration and kept the title of Senior Advisor in the U.S. Department of Labor’s Veterans Employment and Training Service.
A Pew Research study from the Pew Research Center reveals evangelical Christians are experiencing an increased prejudice. The study found 50 percent of American adults believe that evangelicals are subjected to discrimination. This is an increase from 42 percent in 2016.
In such a divisive country, Gade’s philosophy is different. He experienced unity across all colors, creeds and party lines when his life was on the line.
Twenty-five Marines and sailors that Gade never met donated blood, saving his life.
“What’s cool about that story is not just that I survived. But nobody asked is he a Republican, is he a Democrat, is he gay, Mexican or black? Nobody does that because when Americans need each other — Americans should be there for each other. We were that way after 911, Pearl Harbor, according to what I’ve read,” he shares, “America at the citizen level is really kind and unified and respectful to one another.”
Regardless of the party, America necessitates a leader who’ll get the government off their backs.
“The fact that individuals should be allowed to thrive and that government should get out of the way and let individuals thrive, is not something for just Republicans,” says Gade, who was nominated by President Trump to be a commissioner of the Equal Employment Commission.
Warner was unopposed in the Democratic primary. He is running for a third term.
–Corine Gatti-Santillo