The Terry McAuliffe campaign team knew that it wasn’t going to do well in my part of Virginia, that committing resources to Augusta County, Rockingham County, Rockbridge County, would only take away from what it could commit to Northern Virginia.
So, they ignored us.
Democrats might be better advised to follow the Mark Warner approach to contest in all corners of Virginia in the future.
Just in my little corner of the Commonwealth – the three counties listed above, plus the independent cities of Buena Vista, Harrisonburg, Lexington, Staunton and Waynesboro – the Glenn Youngkin campaign grew on what Ed Gillespie was able to do by 23,595 votes.
Turnout was up among Democratic voters, too, but only by 4,475 votes, according to my analysis of voting data from the Virginia Department of Elections.
The difference: 19,170 votes in Youngkin’s favor.
In an election that Youngkin looks to win by less than 80,000 votes statewide.
I mention the Warner approach. I could also call it the Barack Obama approach.
I was the Democratic Party chair in Waynesboro in 2008, and the first person to congratulate me upon my election in May was an Obama staffer.
We actually had two staffers assigned to Augusta, Staunton and Waynesboro who would be in contact with me practically every day over the months leading into Election Day.
Two paid people assigned to a rural area that would end up giving 36.3 percent of its votes, 19,300 in total, to Obama.
But that was after John Kerry had gotten 13,567 votes here, 28.7 percent of the votes cast in 2004, in his run against George W. Bush.
Kerry, that year, had famously committed 10 paid staffers to Virginia – as in, the entire state – before deciding in the early fall to reassign those staffers to states where it was deemed that there was a better chance to win.
Kerry lost Virginia, receiving 45.5 percent of the vote.
Obama won in 2008 with 52.6 percent.
The Obama strategy was built on the foundation laid by Warner, who won his governor’s race in 2001 by running in all 133 localities, and replicated that strategy to Senate wins in 2008, 2014 and 2020.
I remember meeting Ralph Northam at a rally in Waynesboro in the waning stages of the 2017 governor’s race.
His staff got it, that you have to run everywhere.
The McAuliffe team in 2021 … didn’t.
There was a final days stop in Harrisonburg, but that was it.
There were hardly any campaign signs in front yards – not even mine, and I’m not only a former Dem local chair, but the editor of a progressive news website.
No outreach to me from the McAuliffe campaign at all.
The strategy being followed is the old strategy that didn’t work for Democrats in the 1990s.
You can’t just run up margins in NoVa and Richmond and ignore the rest of the state.
There are lots of counties and tiny cities, but our votes count out here just as much as the ones up in Northern Virginia.
And, you know, if Dems actually touch the ground out this way, they might learn more about what we want to see out of Richmond.
Funny how that kind of thing works, right?
You want something from us, our votes, we want something from you, laws and spending on things that make our lives better.
Memo to the folks in Richmond reading this: book this for the next cycle.
Story by Chris Graham
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Chris Graham
