The vote to break the Convention/Primary compromise did not have to happen the way it did. It was decided by one vote and Nancy Dye was one of those one votes.
Nancy Dye is a big name in Roanoke Republican politics. She has hosted many GOP fundraisers at her home and she ran for State Senate in a very difficult race in 2015. Thus far she had not engaged in any controversy within the party. Earlier this year she was voted onto the Republican Party of Virginia’s State Central Committee (“SCC”) and this vote was her first opportunity to show her true colors on so visible an issue: to demonstrate whether she would be a unifier or a divider.
Nancy Dye voted to break the compromise and place fresh fuel on still-smoldering intra-party conflicts.
As it happened, there was a Roanoke City Republican Committee meeting Monday the 29th, two days following the SCC meeting. I expressed, in the main, all of the aforementioned comments regarding the vote and also expressed to Nancy Dye my disappointment with her decision. Nancy then took a few minutes to explain to the committee her decision with the following five points:
• “More people can participate in primaries and that primaries are good for gathering data”
• “RPV doesn’t have the money for a convention”
• “The convention site would not be able to handle 10,000 people getting hotel rooms.”
• “The SCC voted to recommend to the future SCC to vote convention, but there was no obligation to vote for Convention so no promise was broken.”
• “It was a hard decision”
Lets break those points down one by one:
• “More people can participate in primaries and that primaries are good for gathering data”
Here Nancy shifts the topic away from being about whether to keep the compromise and instead restates an old hat argument for primaries. The question of the day was not “What are the arguments for or against primary and convention?”. The question of the day was, “Do we keep or break the compromise?” She employed this argument to either a) duck the question of the day or b) intended it as an argument to break the compromise. If the former, then she is not addressing the issue honestly. If the latter, then the essence of her argument is that it’s okay to disregard your coalition partners if you think you know better then they, regardless of your commitments to them. Neither is flattering.
• “RPV doesn’t have the money for a convention”
The last convention to elect our governor, LG, and AG candidates held in 2013 profited $250,000. Even the relatively small and quite successful convention that nominated Ed Gillespie in 2014 netted the party over $100,000. The very conservative projection for a convention in 2017 was almost $300,000 in profit. Claiming the RPV does not have the money to run a convention is a poor excuse that does not match the known capabilities of the party to raise significant funds via a convention.
• “The convention site would not be able to handle 10,000 people getting hotel rooms.”
– Ten thousand people would not be getting hotel rooms. A lot of people (such as myself) drive in and drive back home the Saturday of the convention.
– There was adequate capacity within the hour radius from the convention site for the regular amount of convention goers who get hotel rooms.
– If not enough hotel space was a genuine concern then the State Party Chairman and Executive Director should be receiving flack by the people who voted primary for having failed to see to the necessary logistics in their proposed convention site. To my knowledge, they are not receiving such flack.
– Even if hotel space were an issue, then the SCC could approve a call for a convention within a particular window of time and delegate authority to the State Party Executive Committee to firm up the location and date. I have seen this happen on the local unit level for mass meetings as well as on the congressional district level for conventions.
The hotel excuse presented by Nancy as a deal breaker for having a convention is a very specious argument that does not stand under examination. It is like saying a country road was an impassible mountain. It simply isn’t so.
• “The SCC voted to recommend to the future SCC to vote convention, but there was no obligation to vote for convention so no promise was broken.”
This is a dodge. It was acknowledged by all at the time that one SCC could not obligate a future SCC to make any particular decision. The SCC went out on a limb with the compromise to operate on trust and goodwill so as to mend fences within the party knowing full well that it was not binding. The promise might not have been an official act of the SCC, but it was a promise. Saying she was not bound by an official act of the SCC dodges the promise made.
This speaks to the larger issue of trust in politics. Lots of Republican office holders do not understand the simple concept of keeping a promise. Their failure to understand that office holders need to stay faithful to the promises that get them elected is the root cause of the dysfunctions within the Republican Party. This isn’t 1980 anymore. Party identification has dropped quite a ways. There are a lot of former Republicans out there. Independents increasingly outnumber both Republicans and Democrats combined across the country. A lot of people who should be within the party cannot tell the difference between the two major parties anymore. That failure is on those Republicans who do not understand the simple nature of keeping a promise. There is a massive trust deficit between the party and the voters. Nancy approaching issues in this manner doubles down on making the larger problem worse.
• “It was a hard decision”
Nancy’s other defenses amount to trying to change the subject, arguing with straw men, ignoring the known capacities of the RPV, and otherwise trying to provide cover for the poor decision she made. I do not get the sense that it was a hard decision at all, nor should someone gain sympathy just because they say something is a “hard decision,” especially since Conservatives are tired of being told how hard it is to vote against them.
I supported Nancy Dye in her 2015 race for State Senate District 21. At the time she professed that she wanted to be a unity candidate. I supported her on the basis that she seemed to be an establishment person who wanted to get along with the conservative side of the party. I wanted to encourage that. Nancy Dye may intend to run again for the General Assembly someday; but if she cannot cross the aisle from the establishment to work with the conservative wing within her own party on internal matters like this, then how can we expect her to work with conservatives were she to attain public office when the stakes are going to be much higher?
Consequently, I am very disappointed with Nancy Dye voting to create a fresh axe to grind within the party, choosing to ignore the path towards party harmony and instead choosing the path of party division. That is not the picture of unity that she has liked to paint for her aspirations with the party.
If this is how she conducts herself in the internal workings of the party, then perhaps it might be better that she does not run for public office again. I would like to hold out hope that Nancy can reorient herself, but she would need to establish a firm and indisputable track record of mindfulness of the wider Republican coalition and of being diligent in working for party harmony. Creating such a track record is the only way to make good on this bad vote. It’s going to take some doing, but it’s not impossible.
John Brill is the former Chairman of Roanoke City Republican Committee and the former Chairman of the 21st State Senate District Republican Committee.
27 comments
This near sighted, misplaced angst against a SCC vote (the SSC being nothing more then a poorly conceived layer of state party structure that could be re-organized out of existence and made more effectively literally over night) is the classic symptom of a group of internal party officials and their associates that have completely mistaken and lost themselves in party mechanisms and ridiculously mistake the voter bases’ ballot box for the secret ballots periodically held by a group of eighty elite party members.
Do you create unity by placing candidates before the voting public that garner significant vote response? NO, you rather endlessly spend your time and effort attempting to create rule based mechanisms to forward “your” candidate rather then “their” candidate on the ballot in the first place. It’s a belief that clearly projects that the successful candidate is only one preordained by one or the other of these secretive party wings and you the base voter’s decision is just a commodity exercise which has already been pre shaped in their out of sight wing caucuses. In the end, as these party wings so fervently oppose each other in the confines of the SCC, well removed from sight of the base voter and accusingly preach unity in the blogsphere at each other while engaging in endless actions that accomplish nothing of the kind and never will as long as they are allowed to thrive in the shadows.
When Trumpism consumes the Virginia state Republican voting base and begins it’s inroads in 2017 to capture state office these groups ( the VCN and CF) will be the first to express shock emanating out of their insular, tidy worlds of political do nothingism much like the Greek legend of Sisyphus, the ancient king of Ephyra, who symbolized and mistook the vain, endless, struggling pursuit FOR the actual goal. In my opinion there is some very bad news for these groups on the near horizon and that is the Virginia voter is more and more frequently expressing the belief of “a pox on both your houses”. But for many retribution is so much more rewarding then actually accomplishing anything tangible to the voter.
There certainly was an under supply of available food at the conventions I went to. Richmond ’13 – water and even snack bars were not allowed to be brought in, long lines for junk food outside, long lines for the few restaurants that were in the area, and we had to be available to go back and vote. Harrisonburg ’16 – At least an hour standing up for a hot dog. Fortunately, I am not a person unable to stand due to a physical issue, or to go long periods without protein, but if I was, I wouldn’t have been able to attend. Even though it was fun, it is not for anyone with low blood sugar, or other physical issues. Next time I will book 2 nights at the hotel, but this is not possible for everyone.
I just don’t get the rationale for the quantity and allocation of delegates. Everybody gets a badge so we have expensive and unwieldy conventions. And the criterion for delegateness is filling out a form — you don’t even need to be a Republican — just like a primary.
• “It was a hard decision”
No it wasn’t, it was an easy decision — 41 voted to jam the taxpayers for $4 million, 40 voted against. Done in a day, time to get a meal and then shoot home.
81 did not vote for a superior solution, 81 didn’t even try. 81 didn’t come up with alternative funding, 81 didn’t consider a canvass or a more fair convention. 81 walked out of the meeting thinking the $4 million paid for the primary was an acceptable course of action for the party. 81 need to resign.
• “The SCC voted to recommend to the future SCC to vote convention, but there was no obligation to vote for Convention so no promise was broken.”
Of course one elected body cannot compel action of a future elected body, but this is just a red herring.
There is a spirit of a compromise and the letter of a compromise. The last SCC resolved the issue by taking turns, this SCC decided their own agendas were more important.
Which SCC members from the last SCC voted against that spirit on this SCC?
• “The convention site would not be able to handle 10,000 people getting hotel rooms.”
This is because our SCC in its infinite wisdom has created a ‘everybody can be a delegate’ apportionment that has resulted in our sorry convention system.
What do you expect from the 80-member SCC that still can’t manage to accomplish much at all. How many members does the RNC have to achieve their level of incompetence? Our SCC is closing fast!
When did the Republican Party split itself intp uniters and dividers? How utterly stupid is it to keep going over and over the same issue, one that has already been decided? How helpful to getting Republicans elected is this constant reliving and bashing those who voted for a convention? A friend of mine stopped speaking to me when I voted for a convention, when I was on SCC. Calling out individuals on a blog is not an answer to solving our problems. If you keep it up, you’re just asking for defeat. Get the hell over it.
Good point, why hasn’t the SCC been able to fix this over several terms? Why is it acceptable to make others pay for our party activities?
• “RPV doesn’t have the money for a convention”
So it’s okay to make the taxpayers pay for OUR nomination event. Does nobody read the creed about where we pretend to be fiscally responsible?
The party didn’t have the $4 mil for the primary either. The SCC are bloody hypocrites and should all resign in dishonor.
Because I don’t post nearly evough on some of these threads, I’m going to post my take on each of these opinions/excuses separately, because it’s hard enough to follow the indents.
• “More people can participate in primaries and that primaries are good for gathering data”
More people than what? Not a canvass, not our brobdingnagian Mass Conventions.
More people means less Republicans. We can’t get a pledge signed, we can’t get a form filled out, this is a stupid argument and the gathering data is specious — the SBE will have more names of voters who will not get active in the party.
I don’t know Nancy from Curlupand but I’ve heard those well-rehearsed points several times. And it’s not just Nancy who cast the deciding vote, each and every one of them voted to screw the taxpayers as well as their fellow Republicans.
There is no excuse for not coming up with some non-primary solution. It was ALL of their faults for being so politically stupid.
Furthermore, there is even more blame to spread around and tar and feather for the bozos who SUPPORTED and ENDORSED the primary votes — Nancy, Puneet, Ron and the rest of them didn’t get there by themselves. Take note and REMEMBER!
Those sound more like talking point excuses
The only people that are dividing the party now are the ones who continue to complain that they didn’t get their way. The vote was had, the decision was made. Move forward, and stop rehashing the past.
The damage is done and those responsible for dividing the party should be held accountable.
How do you hold them accountable, Jeanine?
With articles like this one!
I would like to see the 2-term SCC Members who flip-flopped — I’m thinking there might not be that many and this vote was a new broom sweeping clean a do-nothing SCC???
My representatives vote right, except for one. So I’d like to keep most of them.
Voting right is only part of it — we send them there to do right — there is no excuse for them (even the right voting) to find it acceptable to screw the taxpayers for OUR nomination.
BTW, for those that can’t see the pattern, the RPV is ‘Agenda21-Ing’ itself by systemically eliminating the function of our party apparatus (80+ SCC that is incapable of doing business: the better for the chair to wield the power; Ginormous “conventions”: where size mandates location and favors population centers- just like a primary eh?; Open “conventions” that have little criteria to be a delegate and have utterly NO correlation nor link to Republican grassroots/activists/establishment; and Open primaries that favor population centers and deep pocket candidates but more importantly the political industrial complex which assures our nominees stay on the hook and on the fundraising treadmills )
All of which drive away voters, and make the party vulnerable to non- and undocumented “Republicans”
Thus the cycle continues.
We can keep our right voters (they can run again), but I expect resignations for this unprincipled debacle. The entire SCC felt this as an acceptable outcome — I feel they no longer represent our party and our values!
They already went to the National Convention, not much you can do to them now.
“Stop complaining about that knife in your backs, you whiners”
When something is winner take all, the blades will always come out.
Nope, current party dividers are those not supporting the nominee.
This issue is pretty much the only thing the SCC carps about.
Remember what happened last time? Same ol’ same ol.’
Nancy Dye did not make the promise. She was under no obligation to keep a promise made by others.
If she ran as a unity candidate she did have that obligation.
Nah, unity candidates should be viewed with a jaundiced eye. If they have to say it, they ain’t it.
Did Nancy run supporting or opposing a primary? If you guys don’t vet your representatives at election, you really don’t have room to complain.
If you want to elect by litmus test, then do so. But if you don’t get assurances in advance, well then it’s a case of ‘fool me once.’