Posted on 11/11/2013 4:09:37 AM PST by Kaslin
Politics is in the eye of the beholder.
Post-mortems now gushing forth about why Ken Cuccinelli, conservative Republican candidate for governor in Virginia, lost to Democrat Terry McAuliffe, a business-as-usual political retread from the Clinton crowd, tell us more about who produces this punditry than what reality actually might be.
We’re hearing that the Tea Party killed Cuccinelli (according to the Wall Street Journal editorial page they “stabbed him in the back”) with the government shutdown and that, once again, a socially conservative Republican candidate has shown he can’t win the votes of women.
What I see is very different. What I see is a Republican Party that still has not learned the necessary lessons to reverse setbacks of recent years.
It was not the Tea Party that stabbed Ken Cuccinelli in the back but the establishment of his own party. Once a real conservative candidate gets nominated, the party loses interest. And because they lose interest, they hold back funds, thus assuring their own prediction that this candidate can’t win.
Cuccinelli lagged in total funding by $14 million. In the early months of the campaign, because of lack of funding, he was brutally attacked in ads that went unanswered.
Regarding the shutdown – supposedly of disproportionate impact because so many Northern Virginians work for the federal government – Cuccinelli was well behind in the polls for months before the shutdown even occurred. Again, largely because of unanswered attack ads.
The Republican establishment can’t seem to grasp that they would have helped their cause by embracing the de-fund ObamaCare efforts of Tea Partiers Ted Cruz and Mike Lee.
Every day Americans see more clearly what a disaster ObamaCare – the Affordable Care Act – is. If Republican leadership would have unified clearly around the efforts of Cruz and Lee, and the American people got a clear picture of Republican unity and commitment to slay the ObamaCare monster, it would have helped the party and Cuccinelli.
It is also clear that Republicans still haven’t gotten the message about race and the changing demographics of the country.
When Barack Obama won the presidency in 2012 while winning just 38 percent of the white vote, Republicans supposedly learned something.
Those lessons appear to have been lost in Virginia.
Virginia has a large black population, 50 percent higher than the national average. Terry McAuliffe got 90% of the black vote, as did Creigh Deeds, the Democratic candidate for governor in Virginia in 2009.
The difference is that in this election blacks constituted 20 percent of the overall vote, up four points from 16 percent in 2009. So the impact of the black vote grew in 2013.
That increase of four points of the black vote as a percentage of the total vote could have made the difference alone, given that Cuccinelli lost by 2.5 points.
The Republican candidate for Lt. Governor was a no-nonsense black pastor, graduate of Harvard Law School, E.W. Jackson.
This would have been a classic opportunity for the Republican Party to aggressively visit black churches, talk about the conservative religious values that these black Americans care so dearly about, and explain the deep damage that welfare state policies and secular humanism embraced by Democrats has done in black communities. Where were they?
Then there is the claim that conservative candidates can’t attract women.
Not true. It’s not about gender but about marriage.
Cuccinelli captured the votes of both married men (50 percent) and married women (51 percent). It was the unmarried vote that McAuliffe captured (51 percent single men, 67 percent single women).
Republicans have not failed in recent years as result of being too bold or too conservative.
They have failed due to lack of clarity, conviction and courage.
The defeat of Ken Cuccinelli in Virginia is not an encouraging sign that Republicans have learned their lessons.
Townhalls’s Star Parker is only partially correct when blaming the COPES (GOP Elite Snobs) running the republican party and controlling the party purse for the Cuccinelli defeat.
The force playing the major role was the local and national media. Case in point Sarvis,and of course the truth about Obamacare.
But to be honest about it I have yet to see any black conservative syndicated writer such as Star go after the media for its reporting on Zimmerman . Challanging the assertions that the attacker was a “victim””shot in cold blood” or connect the manipulation of blacks by this regime and offer suggestions as why that was done.
The black vote isn’t worth it. The amount of time and money spent to educate and deprogram to get small percentage of the black vote would be foolish. Spend millions to get the black vote fro 95% -> 92% fools errand.
<><><><><
A 3 percent shift would have meant a Cucinelli victory.
We need a second party, first.
Damn, I’ll write in Nascarnation. You gotta PAC yet?
It was two things that caused defeat.
The first one was the collectivist GOP abandoning support of this non-collectivist, conservative candidate.
The second is Obama and his minions setting up the Libertarian Sarvis to draw votes away.
GOP and Dem cooperation to keep out this conservative challenger worked.
So how can the conservatives counter this in the future?
Cuccinelli was surging in the final couple weeks. Too bad there was not one more week, for his message was getting through. Too bad, also, that he listened to the warnings of the gop-e and didn’t meet with Ted Cruz, who could’ve pushed him over the finish line BEFORE the elections. I know it is a hard lesson for some conservatives to learn, as the gop-e tries to sink any true conservative with their advice and promises of committal. Too bad Cuccinelli did not see those maps that were shown AFTER the election that showed the difference when republicans put forth a strong conservative as opposed to a moderate. IN one sense, Cuccinelli won huge, compared to a moderate candidate. Had he met with Ted Cruz, it proved that he’d have won BIG over McAuliffe. We have got to reduce the impact that the gop-e has on our party. We have got to get the goods out there for the Americans to see real proof that true conservatives DO WIN, and they are far MORE popular with the majority of people than the media and the gop-e wants you to know!
I do think however that for all his negatives McAuliffe had a large advantage from his access to the DNC databases and get out the vote systems. Those technological advantages are important. The Democrats have developed a very sophisticated system to target likely voters, send them tailored information, and get them out to vote on election day.
Sooner or later every party will have that same level of infrastructure, and at that point we may see different results.
We HAVE to figure that out. The conservative cause can not be limited to southern and Midwestern white people. The demographics are running away from us.
We cannot beat the demographics. We must make arguments that people of all demos can identify with. We need to start educating people about statism vs individual liberty.
I’M SO TIRED OF THE IGNORANT PEOPLE SPREADING THIS LIE!
“And Cuccinelli had a hand in that fiasco, making sure that Romney got the VA delegates. “
Cooch followed the law.
If the other candidates had followed the law they could have been in the primary. They were warned to, they knew it was going to be enforced and they just ignored it.
Why did the Republican party withhold campaign funds from Cuccinelli? Are libertarians responsible for that too? The Republican party usually puts up RINO losers like Romney, John McCain and Bob Dole, and then they lash out at anyone and everyone when they predictably lose. But this is a new sleazy tact: withhold financial support from conservative candidates, and then blame libertarians. Really classy. Let me know how that works out.
In short, the culture is one of control and order, not freedom.
If you vote for Christie, and he pushes the liberal agenda on guns and gay marriage, did you win?
The guy was an actual libertarian, nominated by the libertarians, and representing the libertarians. and he won the votes of his fellow libertarians.
Naturally the democrats also donated to his campaign, libertarians throw a lot of races to the democrats, who share many of the libertarian positions on issues of the day, such as abortion, borders, the homosexual agenda, porn, drugs,etc.
I’ve been away for a few hours and when I got back I saw your comment on post #18.
Thanks for posting that. I think it’s right on the money.
Was he endorsed by Sarah? It would have been great if had also been endorsed by Cruz and Lee.
But Cuccinelli could still have won if the state party had embraced him, Of course, that assumes that he is the sort of guy who can build a personal following.
To hell with minorities and communists
Minorities and communists just stole all of the middle class disposable income via Obamacare
Time to get the taxpayers to declare war on communists and their supporters, which include many minorities but not all, and the DC political class from both parties
The message is to send fighters to DC to smash the system, destroy communists, and dismantle all unecessary parts of the Federal apparatus
Lessee ... how was Cuccinelli "stabbed in the back" if Tea Party people pushed positions in Congress that he, Cuccinelli, being Tea Party himself, presumably agreed with?
Maybe they all believed the poison being decanted by Karl Rove and the rest of the Bushbot clerisy. "He can't possibly win .... lost cause .... it's all over."
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.