Replies

it’s hard to deny the conclusion that the Republican party decided it was better to abandon Virginia to the Democrat party than to allow the Tea Party and social conservatives to win

It's a little soon to draw final conclusions about this race. I have a couple of questions for Virginians, since I only got the national media coverage for this one.

1) Was Cuccinelli a real social conservative?

2) Was he a real tax cutter?

3) Did he ever say anything, of any sort, about birth control or insurance coverage of same?

4) Did he ever say anything about illegal drugs, especially about Federal laws about same?

I am a hard-core fusionist, and I believe, maybe wrongly, that most of those Sarvis votes should have been GOP votes. However, we do have a real intra-party disagreement over this question.

Just as there are some voters who absolutely, positively cannot vote for a pro-abortion candidate (and who won't vote if there's no choice) there is also a block of voters who will preferentially vote Libertarian but who will vote for the Democrat over the Republican given certain circumstances.

If we don't abandon the GOP and form an outright pro-liberty party, we have to solve the puzzle of how many "Sarvis voters" we can get. We also, as CNN keeps pointing out, need to recapture Perot voters (a/k/a the white working class) if we have any hope of beating the communists.

The problem with both "Sarvis voters" and "Perot voters" is that they are not voting at all, most of the time. This is entirely a GOP problem to solve.

VA Freepers, please break Cuccinelli down for me by answering the questions above.

Even though I have three adult children living in Virginia, I am 5000 miles away in Germany so I will not presume to reply to your questions except to say that my general impression is that Ken Cuccinelli is sound on all the issues from a conservative point of view and there is nothing truly exceptional in any of his utterances which, if undistorted, would give soccer moms occasion to fear him.

I am still preoccupied by the betrayal of the Republican establishment but there are some preliminary observations which should be made:

First, the RNC will produce a postmortem which should be data heavy and BS light but there is no assurance that any data favorable to truth much less to the tea party will be made public. After the last presidential election, I was screaming for us to find data to answer the very questions you raised in your perceptive reply, questions far more perceptive I might add that are appearing in much of the press.

Second, the preliminary analysis is that this is a loss occasioned by a gender gap. My daughter, 43 years of age, originally was under the impression that Cuccinelli missed a step on the issue of birth control so, since she is politically aware, I conclude the depth of ignorance across the board must have been staggering. At least it was potentially there to the degree that Terry McAuliffe's demagoguery could find fertile ground.

Third, I am inclined to believe that this was a momentum election. That is, McAuliffe grabbed the momentum in the beginning with his big television buy, extended his lead during the government shutdown, lost much of it as the momentum shifted because of Obamacare, and saved the day with the extensive shoe leather get out the vote campaign.

I think McAuliffe said that they had made 3 1/2 million doorbell rings which no doubt was facilitated by the apparatus left over from Obama's startling ground game which went a long way toward winning Obama the presidential election. I cannot conceive that our side had anything like that kind of ground game. It is in this context, perhaps more than the TV war, that the stinginess (or sabotage) of the Republican elite did the most harm.

Until the Republicans get this ground game in hand and move up to the 21st century we will face loss after loss.