Patrick Ruffini wrote a fairly good postmortem on last week’s Virginia elections and the lessons the Virginia GOP should draw from the results:
First: It’s time to fire the consultants who ran the same ImmigrationTaxesImmigrationTaxes cookie cutter race in every district, using the same message that killed Jerry Kilgore in Northern Virginia two years ago. So Ken Cuccinelli survived… by 90 votes… against a laughable opponent the Washington Post wouldn’t even endorse.
Second: Cutting and running from the GOP is even worse. Jeannemarie Devolites Davis’ anti-gun ad flopped, leading to the most lopsided unseating of the night. Didn’t 2006 teach us that there is no refuge for the Chafees and DeWines of the world when the GOP fails to advance an aggressive agenda?
Third: The days of Tom Davis giving us lectures about how to win elections in NoVa are over. See #2. (Yes, that was his wife.)
It’s time to say what needs to be said. Whether they were running to the right (Cuccinelli) or to the left (Devolites Davis), Republican Senate incumbents were running campaigns out of touch with the Northern Virginia electorate, whose bugaboos right now are traffic congestion and education.
The voters aren’t much interested in slash-and-burn attacks on illegal immigration or revisiting the wedge issues of ’80s and ’90s (the death penalty for Kilgore; guns for Davis).
Hitting hard on immigration might make sense in a place like MA-5 which doesn’t have a huge immigrant population, yet. But unfortunately, Republicans in Virginia are running on messages that are about a decade late. This isn’t your father’s Fairfax County anymore. The fact that there were a tangle of elderly Asian immigrants ahead of me in the voting line today requesting help filling out their English-only ballots is testament to it.
So if immigration isn’t the wedge issue that Corey Stewart claims it can be, then what is ? Well, if you live in Northern Virginia, you should already know:
Finally, traffic is the new wedge issue — on both sides. In the 2002 tax increase referendum, we used environmental concerns (or they used us) to wedge advocates of higher taxes from liberal inner suburbanites who ride Metro. In 2005, the Democrats used long commutes to pry away out outer suburbanites who would gladly pay more taxes for an extra half-hour with their families. We need to highlight the inherent fissures within the Democratic coalition again. And at a minimum, hold Democrats accountable for their promises on traffic and road-building. The RPV needs to launch a “Tim Kaine Commute-o-Meter” tallying the rise in the total commute for Northern Virginia drivers since Kaine took office. And our message could look something like this: Democrats like _____ are in the pocket of extreme, pro-regulatory special interests. They won’t build the roads we need to solve the traffic crisis.
Maybe. The problem is that, with an issue like congestion, you can’t just criticize without having a plan of your own and, so far at least, I haven’t seen much from the GOP that is any different from what the Democrats are talking about.
H/T: Mason Conservative
