Rural Virginia Is The Key To Statewide Victory
With every church a ballot harvester? If Republicans boost turnout 5-7%, Democrats are in for a ride.
The last two weeks have been a rather embarrassing display for Virginia Democrats as they attempt to grapple with the realities of the Youngkin ticket.
I want to give you an overview of the e-mail headlines from the Dems over the last 10 days. Whether through hyperbole or just pure panic, these are hilarious:
We finally know our opponent!
Carville: Trump’s endorsement of Youngkin is a crisis for Virginia (oh noes!)
🚨Donald Trump just endorsed Glenn Youngkin
Here’s how much Glenn Youngkin will spend to buy Virginia’s Governor’s office.
Glenn Trumpkin
I’m freaking out.
Glenn Youngkin is attacking Obamacare, do you agree?
The Trump-Youngkin ticket (as opposed to the Northam-McAuliffe legacy?)
Glenn Youngkin has been pushing Trump’s big lie
$75 million
Ted Cruz in Virginia??
Carville: This is a crisis, friend
The Youngkin Trump agenda
They’d better be freaking out.
The problem of course is that McAuliffe can’t get away from Northam’s blackface/KKK scandal and they know it.
Personally, I want to know how much they paid which staffer to come up with Glenn Trumpkin. I mean, the whole Youngkin team probably cried themselves to sleep for three days (from laughter).
But I digress.
As you probably know, Virginia Democrats legalized a lot of stuff that six months ago would have landed a person in prison. One of those things is ballot harvesting, or the act of collecting absentee ballots — colloquially known as ABs in the world of politicos — and then delivering them en masse to their respective registrar.
In principle there is nothing nefarious about this. Yet in other states, alternate forms of pressure (i.e. unionism where votes are expected) and reward (i.e. gift cards are offered where a $5 donation is made to Obama 2008 and you keep the rest) are utilized in order to dragoon those who might not otherwise vote.
Republicans are mostly allergic to the idea of voter harvesting for this reason alone — that voters ought to exercise one of their most important duties out of their own volition, without coercion or reward, to participate in a process that assigns a bit of their own freedom to a duly elected representative. To cheapen this process with voter harvesting detaches the nobility of the act to some degree, doesn’t it?
Of course, all of this is a moot point. We march with the army (and the rules) that we have at hand.
…and I like these rules.
Perhaps it never dawned on Virginia Democrats, but Virginia Republicans at least still faithfully attend Sunday services.
So here is something to consider as we move into the November elections:
Every church in Virginia is now a vote harvester. That means your local church can indeed have someone come in and collect ABs in order to drop them off at the local registrar.
If we were to increase the rural vote by 5-7%? Youngkin wins. It might surprise folks to know how few Christians actually vote. Or what’s more, how few people in the western part of Virginia actually turn out to vote. By leveraging that part of Virginia as our very own Fairfax County? Forget unlocking victory, we would be coming in with bolt cutters.
If Youngkin wins? Not only do Sears and Miyares win, but we win the House of Delegates as well. House Republicans are targeting as many as 11 key HOD seats this fall. We only need six… and we might reverse the 2017 results if the Virginia Democrats can’t find anything else to run on other than Orange Man Bad (TM).
Republicans are going to be able to match Democrats when it comes to community organizing. For too long, Republicans have outworked the left with meager resources while Democrats simply outspent us. Now it is a high-octane game with small businesses, churches, suburban families and free enterprise organizations hammering home some basic truths about Critical Race Theory, Northam’s open failure as a governor, a broken economy, and the soft bigotry of low expectations that McAuliffe demands we respect as a “new normal”.
Our candidates both look and work like Virginians. Let’s be honest: all the Democrats have left are cubicle dwellers. Republicans are nominating warfighters, prosecutors, business leaders… farmers, doctors, teachers, mothers, and working class Virginians tired of being told what to do and think by those who think they know better than the rest of us.
There are three Virginias at the end of the day: rural Virginia, suburban Virginia, and urban Virginia. For too long, the Democrats have divided us along an artificial divide of urban values vs. rural values and hoovered in the suburbs as they overwhelmed Virginia sensibilities.
With Youngkin challenging Democrats on turf long held by Republicans, the Democrats know that their narrative is crumbling by the hour. But the real trick in an era of voter harvesting is to mobilize the statewide vote in places where we are rich in support yet politically unorganized.
Not without irony, Youngkin won his convention with a suburban conservatism that resonated in rural Virginia communities. No small wonder why McAuliffe’s PR team is “freaking” out.
Shaun Kenney is the editor of The Republican Standard, former chairman of the Board of Supervisors for Fluvanna County, and a former executive director of the Republican Party of Virginia.