McAuliffe praises removal of Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond

Former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) on Wednesday praised the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue on Monument Avenue in Richmond.

“I’m glad these statues are down. Elections do matter. We now have a Democratic legislature which allowed us to pass legislation so that we could actually begin to take these statues,” the former governor and current Democratic gubernatorial nominee told MSNBC’s Geoff Bennett. 

His comments came hours after hundreds of people gathered in Richmond to witness the removal of the statue from the former capital city of the Confederacy. 

The Virginia Supreme Court ruled unanimously last week that the statue could come down after a protracted legal battle that involved two lawsuits. 

Earlier this year, Charlottesville, Va., took down its own Lee statue following a years-long effort to have it removed. It had been the location of the 2017 “Unite the Right” white nationalist rally that resulted in the death of a counterprotester.

“It’s a perfect bookend,” McAuliffe said. 

The former governor went on to slam the 2017 white nationalist rally, saying it was inspired by former President Trump, who condemned the white supremacists, but added there was blame on “both sides” as well as “very fine people on both sides.”

But McAuliffe has not always been in favor of removing Confederate statues in Virginia. In 2015, the-then governor said that while he supported the ban of Confederate flags on license plates, he was against the removal of Confederate statues. 

“I am sticking just with the license plates because I do think that is a message that is so hurtful, that flag, to folks,” McAuliffe told MSNBC six years ago. “But not statues. I mean, Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, these are all parts of our heritage. And the people that were in that battle, the Civil War, many of them were in it obviously for their own reasons that they had for that. But leave the statues and those things alone.”

However, the governor changed his position after the riots in Charlottesville in 2017. 

“Now what we’ve seen after Charlottesville and around the country is those statues have very similar significance to what went on when I removed the license plates,” he told CNN at the time. 

McAuliffe is looking to serve again as governor and will face Republican Glenn Youngkin in November. The majority of polls show McAuliffe leading Youngkin, but a new poll from the conservative firm WPA intelligence on behalf of Youngkin’s campaign showed him leading McAuliffe 48 percent to 46 percent.