First it was the travesty this week in Virginia Beach, where Sen. Frank Wagner disenfranchised about 1,000 people in favor of himself and 31 of his closest friends. Now, we hear similar stunts are on the way in Henrico and other jurisdictions, engineered by the same people behind Sen. Wagner’s campaign.
A much broader effort is underway to replace certain GOP congressional district chairmen than has previously been made public, sources close to multiple district chairman elections have told The Bull Elephant. In the race for Republican Second District Chairman, current chairman Gary Byler is stepping down. Sen. Frank Wagner’s so-called “slating” strategy was aimed at defeating Byler’s endorsed successor, Curtis Colgate. As has been reported elsewhere, Wagner’s effort to disenfranchise almost all of the people who had registered to become delegates to the Second District convention was lent a great deal of assistance from his fellow elected Republicans in the Virginia Beach area.
What has not been reported is the fact that the ground game there was largely run by paid staff, and that these and other paid staffers are also being deployed in a coordinated effort to undermine the grassroots in the Third District, like they did in the Second. This effort is aimed at unseating incumbent Third District Chairman Christopher Stearns. According to our sources, the organization behind this is planning to conduct a similar effort to slate just a handful of delegates from Henrico County to the Third District convention, in an effort to rob Stearns of crucial votes. We have also heard rumors of similar efforts elsewhere in the Third, including Richmond City and Portsmouth.
Folks, this has got to stop. The fight bubbling beneath the surface of this rush to disenfranchise fellow Republicans is, as always, the debate over using conventions versus primaries to select our nominees. But do not be distracted by that. It does not matter where you stand in that debate. On this issue of slating there can be no reasonable difference of opinion: Slating is evil. Not only is the immediate effect the unconscionable disenfranchisement of fellow Republicans, it does real long term damage to our party, our candidates, and our elected officials.
When powerful elected Republicans unleash funding and campaign machinery to defeat other Republicans at all costs—using the absolute worst slash-and-burn tactics—they undermine the very trust and confidence of the public upon which they depend to get themselves re-elected, and to get their agenda enacted. How many allies will Sen. Wagner have among conservatives going forward? Perhaps he’ll still have many, but he’ll have a lot fewer now, and a whole lot of entrenched suspicion of him and his motives on everything he does. The same holds true for those now paying these staffers to repeat Sen. Wagner’s huge mistake on a larger scale: their road forward to bigger and better things will be littered with landmines they themselves will have lain. It doesn’t have to be this way.
And to those like my friend Brian Schoeneman who think the episode in Virginia Beach performs the useful service of demonstrating how flawed party processes are (and thus why they should not be relied on for anything as important as selecting a candidate), you’re wrong. All that this intentional corruption of the process demonstrates is that some people are willing to let their party crash and burn in a fireball of division and mutual suspicion, so long as it serves their own narrow, short-sighted interests. It must stop.
17 comments
Your link to the Bearing Drift article is broken
Thanks for the heads-up. Fixed now.
This is what the GOP consultants pay these guys to do. Get in the game. It’s an inside game.
The fishy smell, malodorous stench and bitter aftertaste is going to reach back and bite these politicians. What happened at the VB Mass Meeting, when many of us were not aware that it was a meeting to make sure individual delegates won over the slating vote was a travesty of the first order. The rules for delegates had already been set and “closed” by the filing date, March 3rd. The idea that a well-orchestrated, loud-mouthed contingent could eliminate by a chaotic dominating heavy-handed coup of the Mass Meeting left people not only distrustful, but willing to walk away from giving any support to the Republican Party.
Frankly, I hope and pray they pay a heavy price for what they did. The era of people voting just because there is an “R” after a name is long gone, and it’s going to be further eroded as we see unprincipled people running our political party. This isn’t about “politics” – this is about honesty and principles and trustworthiness. Why should anyone trust people like State Sen Frank Wagner and Del. Scott Taylor to do the people’s business in the Statehouse, if they’re so willing to do what they did for a sleazy political “win” at a local GOP meeting?
Well said Lady!
State Central allows slating. And has always allowed slating. The way to oppose slating is to have a larger contingent at the meeting. Parliamentary procedure works.
Then there needs to be a change in the idea that people are expected to file (in this case, March 3rd – after which it was closed) to attend the 2nd District Chairmanship convention. Or, there should be an elimination of people having to “declare” who they’re going to vote for – since it was obvious that the Virginia Beach GOP leadership KNEW that Frank Wagner was behind in delegate attendees (vs what Curtis Colgate had) – because that’s why Wagner was able to do what he did. As far as I’m concerned, what took place (we were there) did not appear aboveboard. I understand there is “right and wrong” and then there is “legal” or as you note, “Parliamentary procedure,” but the “process” certainly seemed corrupted.
So busing in a bunch of “voters” from nursing homes that you have told lies to is perfectly okay?
Can State Central put in a resolution to block this right away.
It begs the question, why was slating ever put in the rules in the first place?
Also, what options are available for we the people to reassert control over the party?
There is no slating rule, per se, only the idea that local mass meetings may elect delegates to represent them at conventions. We’ve gotten very far away from the time when a county sent 10 or 15 delegates to a convention to represent everyone else, but back when delegate elections were actually competitive, “slating” happened all the time. Since then, the state party has made the maximum-delegate-to-voter ratio so high that it means essentially anyone who wants to go can just sign up, so that we do not exclude anyone. That won’t change a county’s weighted vote, but it does spread it out among a vastly arger base of delegates. When people slate now it means shutting out all sorts of people who otherwise would have been able to participate. When they used slating in the old days it was because there was only a small number of available slots.
So this is the kind of thing that the State Central Committee could put a stop to by updating the rules to forbid exclusion of qualified delegates in any number below the county cap?
Yes. And that’s something I could support. Don’t be surprised to see something like that get instituted within the next few months.
The question would be how do you defined “qualified” and who gets to make the decision. I think it would have to be someone from the local unit who goes to the district convention and asserts that they were unfairly excluded as a qualified member from their unit’s delegation, and then the other delegates at the district convention not from that unit would vote on it (after hearing from the delegates from that unit as to why they were excluded). That’s the only way I can see allowing the units to exclude individuals who are say really democrats and should be excluded, but not the vast majority of individuals.
Our role Alexis, is to shut up, knock on doors/make phone calls, and send them money. What we really want is of no interest to them.
Well said Steve.
Thanks!