And it’s a small thing, because Waynesboro isn’t going to turn an election one way or the other all by itself.
But my experience as the Democratic Party chair in Waynesboro the past couple of election seasons can be instructive nonetheless.
It strikes me that I hadn’t even bothered to look at how Creigh Deeds did in Waynesboro in last week’s state elections until this morning. That’s probably a sign of, one, how bad the beatdown was overall, and two, how little I felt I had invested in the effort at the local level.
We had built up quite the effective operation in ’08 to aid Barack Obama, Mark Warner and Sam Rasoul, to the point where all outperformed internal expectations and well-outpaced previous-year Democratic-candidate numbers. Obama, for instance, received 44 percent of the vote in Waynesboro in ’08, 14 percent higher than the 30 percent that John Kerry got in his race against George W. Bush in ’04 – and about a 1,200-raw-vote difference in an election when turnout for the Republican candidate in ’08, John McCain, was near the same level as it had been for Bush in ’04.
Warner also did much better. Two days before the election, he asked me, quite seriously, if I thought Waynesboro was going to be in his favor. I told him I thought it would, but my thought was that he’d get a bare majority, given that he’d lost in Waynesboro in his gubernatorial run in ’01, and he was about to lose in neighboring Augusta County in ’08.
Warner ended up getting 58 percent of the vote in Waynesboro in ’08, and I’m sure it’s not a secret why he and Obama – and even Rasoul, who ran five points better in Waynesboro than he did across the Sixth District – were able to do so.
Because they worked it, baby – canvassing and phone-banking from the early summer, leaving no stone unturned, literally, in their pursuit of every single vote that could come their way.
’09 was a different story, at least in Waynesboro – and I’m putting that caveat out there, that I’m only speaking with specific knowledge of the ground game, or lack thereof, here in my backyard, because this is what I know.
But yeah, the Deeds camp did almost nothing here, outside of a midday, weekday visit in late August that I thought went over well, but looking back I remember was a bear for me to get people to come out to. I tried to write it off at the time to the timing of the event, which was arranged on short notice, and again was held in the middle of the day on a weekday and was thus not necessarily conducive to a big turnout.
I had hoped the Deeds visit would spur activity out of the local volunteer base, but as the weeks went on toward Election Day I realized that there was just nothing there. The lack of support or even basic interest from the Deeds campaign didn’t help there.
After last year, when we knocked on doors and made phone calls until we didn’t even need the scripts anymore because we had them committed to memory, we didn’t knock on a single door or make even a lone phone call for Deeds.
There was no official word from on high, but the sense that we got was that the focus was being placed elsewhere, ostensibly Northern Virginia, Richmond and Hampton Roads.
Which is all well and good, but the Obama campaign didn’t treat us as a backwater out in the middle of nowhere last year, and I would have thought that the campaign of a guy who bristled at having been called a “nobody from nowhere” in a newspaper column four years ago would have taken a similar approach.
In the meantime, Republicans worked their heinies off, both locally and statewide. They saw what Democrats did last year, and give them credit, they rolled up their sleeves.
I mentioned earlier that I looked up the Deeds numbers here in Waynesboro for the ’09 election this morning.
Thirty-one percent. Basically back to where things were in ’04 with Kerry. Ten points off, even, from when Warner lost here in ’01.
Lesson learned: If you want it bad enough, you’ll work for it.
– Column by Chris Graham
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