Original Coverage & Source Attribution: www.wtvr.com
RICHMOND, Va. — With early voting underway ahead of Election Day on Tuesday, Nov. 3, it’s time to meet the candidates.
Each of the major candidates in Virginia’s US Senate race and the three Congressional races in the WTVR viewing area has been invited on CBS 6 News at 7:30 p.m. with Bill Fitzgerald to talk about their priorities.
Robert Murray, a Republican taking on incumbent Democrat Jennifer McClellan in the 4th Congressional District, says the government can do better.
“My voters think that this election is about a referendum on Trump, and they think it’s an issue about cost of living,” Murray said. “I think it’s more of a referendum on how government is doing as a whole.”
Murray pointed to affordability as a central concern, describing it as the gap between what people earn and what they pay.
“Affordability, at the end of the day, is a difference between what people earn and the cost of goods that we have to purchase, whether it’s homes, whether it’s the things in the pump, et cetera, and that’s the part that’s getting a big gap that just shouldn’t be happening. So we really have two big failures here. Obviously, there’s a war that’s going on that’s been driving up some costs. It’s a war in Ukraine. It’s a war in Iran. We have a lot of conflicts that are going on, and that certainly has impacts throughout the supply chain and is driving costs up. But there’s a more broad discussion here too, which is how do we grow this economy so that $6 doesn’t seem so bad? $6 is cheap in Europe. So what’s the difference? And we have to be earning a lot more. And that’s where we need economic growth,” Murray said.
Asked about U.S. relationships abroad, Murray said he favors free trade and lower-cost imports, and he tied high fuel prices to neglected infrastructure at home.
“We try to incentivize the right behaviors in all of our relations. I don’t think we have adversaries. I don’t have adversaries. I have a lot of love in my heart, and so I’m always looking for how do we get back to peaceful relations, good trade, etc. That’s what benefits the American people. That’s what benefits the entire world. And so, those sanctions are an approach on one hand, and then at the same hand, we’re also buying from them, which has a momentary relief for some of the fuel prices that we see. But at the end of the day, we’ve got to have free trade. We’ve got to get imports in inexpensively wherever they can come from, and Russia is one of the lowest-cost providers. But certainly, the United States, we’ve neglected our refineries here, and as a result of that, what should be costing us two and a half dollars a gallon is now costing us six. And so, we need to be making dramatic improvements into our infrastructure,” Murray said.
On the war in Ukraine, Murray said European nations share responsibility and called for a return to positive trade relations.
“The Europeans, frankly, have a lot of responsibility in this. The U.S. was not a signatory to the Minsk Accords, and Angela Merkel went on record saying that she signed these things with Vladimir Putin in a deceitful manner. And when the EU backs out of these accords and they start going a different direction, we have to take both sides. We have to understand the entirety of the situation. At the end of the day, I’m rather impressed that we’ve had a fairly measured response from Russia as a part of this thing. But I don’t like what’s going on. The deaths need to end. We need to get back into positive trade relations with all people, and I’m hoping that Congress, through some reinforcement of its war powers declarations, can start driving those discussions and really putting us back on a positive foot with all relations that are out there,” Murray said.
Murray also weighed in on data centers, saying the issue is largely a state decision but one with environmental stakes.
“Part of it comes from the pollution aspects. So at the end of the day, there’s an Interstate Commerce Act, a clause that we can certainly leverage for this. And when you draw power from outside of one state, Congress can get involved. We do have some reasons why we might want to get into that, but for the most part, this is the states’ decisions. What I don’t want to do is have sodium nitrite and the cooling systems that end up leaking into the water supply and whatnot else. There’s a lot of bad ways of doing this, and by having an environmental focus on getting these things correct, we can make sure that the data centers are where they should be, where they’re wanted, not where they’re not wanted, and at the same time, we can do better for our planet,” Murray said.
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