No, Jeanine; no, Mick; you are wrong. The stats say you are.
This was clearly an election where Trump was responsible for turning out Democrats. This actually happens a fair bit in Virginia, most recently in 2009 in the opposite direction. In that one, the Dems nominated a moderate who came close last time (sound familiar?) but who didn’t have a message and got hammered like no other. It was brutal. Well, 2017 was like that for us.
In fact, the Dems turned out 71% of Hillary’s votes from 2016. That’s huge turnout for an off-year election. Like I said, they were jazzed to vote against Trump. And as my colleague Chris Beer mentioned, they don’t care if you run from Trump; if you have an R next to your name, you’re a racist and a knuckle-dragger. We must accept their hate as being a fact.
Running from Trump clearly didn’t save Gillespie. And it won’t save Comstock. The nine Democrats running for that nomination don’t care that she is an anti-Trumper. They will hang her for every time she voted to rename a post office that Trump wanted. Look at the awful ad one of them already put out; it accused her of “losing that centrist feeling”. That guy raised over $500k so far.
Delegate Jim LeMunyon worked hard but also ran the hardest away from Trump of anyone in the GA. He tried to pretend he had never even heard of the guy. He also got smoked by the widest margin- 58-42. Running away from Trump will never work.
Northam won the 10th by 12 points. Trump lost it by 7. Unless we energize our base to come out in numbers proportional to the Dems’ outsized base turnout, we are smoked- and we are smoked no matter what else we do.
Why does this matter?
Because Trump beat Northam. In Virginia, and in the 10th. Not that it’s easy to turn out that many people in an off-year election, but the fact that Trump did it means that those votes can be turned out by someone.
The key is to turn out 80% or more of Trump 2016 voters. You don’t have to be Trump, but you have to run on Trump’s agenda and be willing to run with him. After all, every Republican- even Comstock- is going to be saddled with the President’s negatives. You might as well get his positives too.
The issue of the corruption and inactivity of Congress is the means. Congress has been worse than useless- they have clearly lied, refusing selfishly to enact anything they ran on. Obamacare, Tax reform, Budget, and many other issues….. they have failed. Hang that failure around their necks and run to change it.
That should be the motivator. Candidates should run against the failure of Congress. Run against the least popular entity in the country.
Barbara Comstock is a part of that failure. Heck, she is an author and enthusiastic protagonist of it. (And yes, before any of you wiseacres mentions it, I am full-throated behind conservative businessman Shak Hill in that primary.)
The key to survival- or success- in 2018 is to embrace the President’s agenda while running against Congressional Republicans. Anything else won’t work. Running to clean Congress is something the base can unite behind. Congress sucks, they are awful and out for no one’s agenda but their own re-election. And as Rand Paul has ably demonstrated, Trump will listen to liberty candidates.
Pissing off our base will not win. Running from the sitting Republican President won’t win. Running against the least popular people in the country?
Aye, there’s the rub.
32 comments
Our underlying problem as Virginia Republicans is how do we win state and federal offices in a state that is increasingly dependent on federal money while we are the party of less government? We have no answer to this dichotomy.
I’ve said it before several times and I’ll say it again. We have to figure out how to win over Fairfax (actually, lose by less) in order to be successful at the state level.
IMHO, the VA GOP is going to have to concoct a special brand of republicanism in order to succeed at the state and federal level.
There is no way forward. Virginia is California… The last GOP candidate to win California was Poppy Bush… note the striking similarities to what has happened to VA.. and let’s note that the changes to California electoral patterns came after that great conservative Ronald Reagan signed the greatest mass amnesty in the history of the US. Here is the results in 1988 and note how the changes were occuring:
“In 1988, ”
California voted for the Republican nominee, Vice President George H. W. Bush, over the Democratic nominee, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis
by a margin of 3.5%. Bush won 44 of the state’s 58 counties, but the
election was kept close by Dukakis’ strong performance in the Bay Area and his victory in Los Angeles, the state’s most populated county. Also, Dukakis won at least 31% of the vote in every county and at least 40% in 40 of them.
To date, this is the last election in which the state of California
was carried by a Republican candidate in a presidential election. Bush
is also the last Republican to carry the following counties in a
presidential election: Imperial, Monterey, Napa, Sacramento, San Benito and Santa Barbara,
and the last Republican to win any county in the Bay Area (Napa). Bush
is also the last candidate from either party to carry California without
winning Los Angeles County.[1][a]”
His idiot son W will be the last election for which any Republican carried Prince William, Faquier, Spottsylvania, Loudon…..
Trying to compare the turnout of the Presidential race to the Governor’s race is comparing apples to oranges, and is a useless measure. You are comparing two different races with two different sets of issues and two different interest levels.
You try to point out that running away from Trump won’t work, but what you fail to point out is that running TO Trump was even worse. Bob Marshall didn’t run from Trump, and he’s gone. Scott Lingamfelter was a full throated Trump supporter and he is going home. Both these men were long time incumbents with strong bases of support, AND embraced Trump… and they got demolished.
At least you had the intellectual honesty to admit that the reason the Democrats turned out in such high numbers is because of their hatred of Trump. Most Trump supporters can’t even do that. But your analysis is fundamentally flawed.
This idea that all we have to do is get people who vote once every four years to suddenly start showing up year after year to vote for races they don’t know in races they don’t care about is the kind of naive fantasy that wastes the money of good candidates while they tilt at windmills.
Yep. Neither did Ron Villanueva. He typically won his district by 10% every election and embraced trump
“Delegate Jim LeMunyon worked hard but also ran the hardest away from Trump of anyone in the GA. He tried to pretend he had never even heard of the guy. He also got smoked by the widest margin- 58-42. Running away from Trump will never work.”
Intellectually dishonest as Jim’s district was won by Hillary Clinton with the highest margin of any Republican Incumbent on the ballot in 2017. Correlation doesn’t equal causation.
So I was right. He tried to run away from Trump but it didn’t work.
Fun fact: Donald Trump got more votes in LeMunyons district than Kerrie Delaney.
Also fun fact: Shak Hill beat Kerrie Delaney for a city council seat while both lived in FL.
If you and Shak have cracked the code to getting Presidential turnout in off years I predict a Shak Hill presidency in no time.
I didn’t say it was easy. Just that it was possible and our only realistic path forward.
You are extrapolating too much from the results. From the down ticket candidates It’s clear that being pro-Trump doesn’t hurt candidates statewide but less clear that it helps.
In House of Delegate races it gets more murky. Leymunon ran ahead of Gillespie by 6 points. There is nothing to conclude that he lost Republicans because he ran away from Trump.
I think you are correct that it is usually better to be with Trump than against him. But I disagree that it will create a win in a district like Lemunyon’s.
I didn’t say that it would. All i said was that Trump outperformed Kerrie, and that running from Trump doesn’t help. That has been proven.
Where has that been proven?
Umm, Tuesday. A lot.
How long did Shak hold that city council seat?
Until he and his family moved to VA.
So, of the how-many-year term, that Shak ran to serve, how long did Shak serve?
Not sure. When I am active duty air force with a wife who is a cancer survivor, then I will ask him.
?? No need to go through all that, just tell me how much of the term that he ran for he ended up serving?
If Congress repealed Ocare, passed tax reform, and more, there could be a different path. But I doubt that will happen.
I’d also love to see more federal support for education choice.
Steve – Exactly how many campaigns have you won? I have known of you (and you) for many years and yet I am hard pressed to find a single campaign where you have been successful. Listening to you dole out your pearls of political wisdom is a bit nauseating.
The reality is the following. The Republican Party, for which I am a member, has spent a decade singularly focused on President Obama and Obamacare. While this focus provided short-term political gains, it will lead to long-term political loss. We have no intellectual conservatism anymore. The days of Reagan, Kemp and others are long gone. Instead, we have nativist factions that think the road back to power (or keeping it) is to antagonize minority groups and spend time singularly obsessed with repealing Obamacare.
Another issue we need to address is President Donald Trump. People can sugarcoat it, rationalize it, and throw out fancy facts and figures all day long – the reason Republicans lost on Tuesday was because of President Trump. This election was 2009 in reverse except it was worse. President Trump is toxic and while I will admit he has been treated unfairly by the press, he has brought a lot of this upon himself. His style of delivery is abrasive and his inability to effectively communicate has made him a weak President. You note in here it is important for Republicans to embrace the President’s agenda. What agenda? Every day his Administration sends conflicting messages and when those messages are not coming from his people, he decides to conflate the messaging with his Twitter account.
As for Shak Hill – where to begin? You always seem to wash up on the campaign of some guy making a long shot bid for an office for which he is entirely unqualified. Having known him for years, I used to think Shak was a nice guy but the reality is he is neither qualified to serve in the U.S. Congress nor would he win a General Election contest. I am sure voters are excited to see his interest in penis enhancement methods and prostrate milking ideas.
Seriously, where do you find these people?
Well, I would put my all time 26-9 record against any one. It’s even more impressive since most of those were NOT incumbents and nearly all were outspent.
But to the second part of your incoherent rant, all I will say is that any d-bag who calls someone else out without having the stones to put his actual name to it, doesnt deserve to be taken seriously.
Appreciate the viewpoint .
Don’t know Shak Hill , name sounds like
That of a free safety that gets beat
By other receivers and can’t read coverages .
Don’t care if you use your name or not,
I recall reading that may not be Hill’s real name in fact.
So what’s in a name ??
That’s his name.
Upvote for the Shak shot, downvote for the Trump shot, so you get nothing.
I agree that there is no way for Republicans to run away from Trump. That’s why we will lose both Houses of Congress next year.
Well, if Trump can keep a healthy three percent GDP growth going with the lowest unemployment rate since 2001, it is highly conceivable that any Democratic mid-term success, which is expected, could be limited to Republicans in districts won by Trump. That unfortunately could be the Virginia 10th, but who knows, maybe the left’s vitriol will be tempered by the positive economic indicators.
Archived to the future gloat file.
Like it or not (and I’m probably a “not”), this is probably the best prescription for stopping the bleeding now. Longer term is a different story. Good post, Steve.
Yeah. I agree, that if all we care about is the short term, Steve is right. But that isn’t all we care about…. is it?
Except that Trump didn’t carry Virginia. So taken to it’s logical conclusion — both parties push as hard as they can to get as many Trump or Hillary voters to the polls as possible — Gillespie or any other statewide GOP candidate still loses, all other things being equal. And if the Dems are turning out because they hate Trump (which is pretty clearly the case), will Trump voters turn out for somebody other than Trump out of love for Trump, even though he’s not on the ballot? Not likely — that’s just not how people’s minds work. People will vote against a party to send a message out of anger, but they are far less likely to come out and vote for somebody for positive reasons. There’s an emotional imbalance in the electorate that favors the Dems. This is the same dynamic that makes negative advertising effective: fear of the unknown. I can tell you that the largest category of responses to emails that we sent from my official Fairfax GOP account during this cycle did not come from GOP voters who liked what I said about Gillespie, or from Trump voters upset that Ed didn’t align himself with the President. They came from very nasty, angry Dems, and from Republicans saying they would not support the party as long as Trump is the face of the GOP. None of this is meant as a knock on the President — I’m just stating facts. There is no simple “embrace Trump” solution. Last year, we traded one group of voters for another. That trade worked out well in other states. It did not work out well here. One reason for that is the long-standing differences between registration and turnout rates in Northern Virginia vs. other parts of the state. Even if a candidate fully embraces Trump, you have to change voting habits and political culture in SW Virginia and other areas to overcome the historically higher rates in Fairfax. Again, not knocking anybody — just making an observation.
In the long term, listen to your buddies at Bearing Drift. We need to pass an amnesty (and God knows Trump probably will as Little Ryan will gladly hand him that to sign), and then it will prove you are not racist. And the natural conservative wave of immigrants that come will be singing the praises of Constitutional conservatism!!! And they’ll gladly vote for the next generation of the Bush family. Just the nativist racism keeps immigrants from voting for you. Wanting to have a border and enforcing immigration laws is racist. Of course the nitwits at Bearing Drift proclaim to want to have a border… but then darn it… we just can’t enforce it and when millions of people come… damn it we have to legalize them… Again and again and again!
When you point out to your friends at Bearing Drift that you know the last GOP candidate to win California was Poppy Bush in 1988 (Mass Amnesty in 1986 called IRCA was passed that year) they will call you a racist.
Sigh… there is no way forward… you are California.
There is no longer term. Triage or morgue.