Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin had the guy who runs his PAC, Dave Rexrode, put out a memo on Wednesday to try to spin his embarrassing loss in Tuesday’s state legislative elections.
The gist of it: if I can get you to just stop focusing on the losing part of what happened on Election Day, you’ll see that it was actually a success, all things considered.
“At this time, it appears that Republicans will win 49 seats in the House and 19 seats in the Senate, a one-seat pickup. Despite redistricting, difficult odds from the outset, and an onslaught of Democratic spending in excess of at least $50 million, Governor Glenn Youngkin’s Spirit of Virginia PAC contributed to these races in an unprecedented way, providing a roadmap for Republican success even in competitive or difficult environments like Virginia,” Rexrode began the memo, which was distributed to members of the Virginia and national media.
That’s not even spin.
Seriously, a “roadmap for Republican success”?
This is borderline Orwellian.
Chris Graham on the 2023 Virginia elections
When you read through the memo, which notes wins for Republicans in districts won by President Biden in 2020 and where Democratic congressional candidates won in 2022, and how close the party was to winning several other races, you can’t help but come to the conclusion that Youngkin thinks he deserves an orange slice and pat on the back for trying hard.
“The upshot is the outcome, and the resulting media narrative today, was decided by one-tenth of one percent of roughly 2.3 million votes cast this year. In a state President Biden carried by 10 points, Republicans came within just a few thousand votes of winning majorities in both legislative chambers,” Rexrode wrote in the memo, neglecting to mention the obvious – that Biden, in recent polling in Virginia, is very much under water with Virginia voters, which was the stiff headwind that Democratic candidates had to campaign into in the 2023 cycle.
Rexrode scored an own goal in the memo with the observation that “(w)hile the Governor’s PAC raised record resources, four times that of any Governor in Virginia history, and invested a significant amount into targeted races, Republicans were still outspent by the far left’s money machine. Democrats outspent Republicans by more than $7.5M on television alone.”
This is hardly a viable excuse from a private-equity guy in a state with no upper limits on campaign donation who supposedly had designs on running for president in the 2024 cycle, and hosted a gathering of big-money Republicans in Virginia Beach last month to plot his next steps toward that end.
Maybe Youngkin should have listened to his Democratic critics who have been saying for the past 18 months that Youngkin seemed more focused on 2024 than he was on being governor.
He let himself be outspent by the far left because his eyes were on the wrong prize.
Which is why he had to get his guy to send out a tone-deaf memo making excuses for why he’s going to have to spend the last two years of his political career as a lame duck.
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