Story by Chris Graham
The word from Dick Cranwell: “caution.”
“This time last year everybody was saying the Republicans were bordering on extinction, they’re almost irrelevant, we’re in for 15 or 20 years of Democratic rule. When people were telling me that a year ago, I was saying, Hey, not so fast, I’ve been around a long time, and political winds can shift and change, and they can change rather quickly in today’s world,” said Cranwell, the chairman of the Democratic Party of Virginia, in an interview today with VirginiaPoliticsToday.com, in the aftermath of the GOP sweep of the three statewide races and the six-seat Republican pickup in the House of Delegates.
That things can change and quickly in the world of politics is evident in the realization that the attention of state Democratic Party leaders is on a pair of State Senate seats that will be contested in the coming weeks in special elections – currently held by Ken Cuccinelli, who was elected attorney general on Nov. 3, and Ken Stolle, who was elected sheriff of Virginia Beach in the November election there.
Gov. Tim Kaine, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, indicated in an interview with the Washington Post editorial board this week that Democrats were going to focus on the race for Cuccinelli’s seat, but Cranwell said today that the party has its eyes on candidates in both districts.
The situation in the 37th, the Fairfax-based district represented by Cuccinelli, seems to be coming along more quickly. Cranwell said the party “ought to know by tomorrow who our candidate is going to be, and I think we’ll be off to the races on that one.”
Cranwell shrugged off the notion that Democrats need at least a split in the special elections to at least slow down the momentum gained by Republicans with their run of landslide victories earlier this month.
“What I say to everybody is, A single election does not a trend make,” Cranwell said. “Nobody should be pushing any panic buttons. We still have a superb cadre of volunteers, grassroots workers out there. We still have a deep bench of candidates for the Senate, the House and statewide races. What we’ve got to do is just keep doing what we’ve been doing for the last five or six years, and that is having good candidates and putting our message out there, and making sure that we do what is necessary to get our voters to the polls. One of the things that hurt us in this past election was Democrats were not successful in getting their base energized like the Republicans were, and we paid a price for that.”
A lesson learned for the future – Cranwell thinks it’s worth the party examining how it nominates candidates in future statewide-election cycles. “Look, we were eight months behind in organization and $3 million in the hole in terms of getting the campaign started because of the primary,” Cranwell said, “which means to me that Democrats need to step back and take a long, hard look at whether we’re going to have late primaries, or if we’re going to have primaries, whether we need to move the dates up maybe into January or February so that we’re not handicapped so much in terms of organization and fundraising.”
But even that observation could be taking things too far to Cranwell’s mindset.
“We’ve seen four or five elections that have gone well for Democrats, and everybody starts saying, Virginia is no longer a red state, it’s a purple state. Now, if we were winning all the races, it would be a blue state, right? So what this election tells me is more people wanted Bob McDonnell to be governor than wanted Creigh Deeds to be governor, and the fact that Virginia is going to bounce back and forth between Democrats and Republicans from time to time indicates to me why we’re a purple state,” Cranwell said.
“We’ve got a great organization, we’ve got great people, we’ve got a great cadre of volunteers. We’ve just got to hitch our belts up and keep plugging,” Cranwell said.
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