OPINION:
Sixty years ago, in 1966, California State Assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh, speaking about campaign fundraising, pithily observed: “Money is the mother’s milk of politics.”
Six decades later, many in the clueless national Republican establishment seemingly still haven’t gotten the memo. Their reluctance to acknowledge that fact and act accordingly resulted in an avoidable political loss in Virginia on April 21.
Will Virginia Republicans’ narrow defeat in the state Democrats’ congressional redistricting referendum power grab finally be that wake-up call?
Despite being outspent nearly 3-to-1, Republicans in Virginia came surprisingly close to thwarting the Democrats’ redistricting scheme.
The Democrats’ “yes” side, in favor of rigged redistricting, spent $62 million, compared with Republican opponents’ $21 million, according to figures compiled by the nonprofit Virginia Public Access Project.
Yet, despite that enormous spending disadvantage, opponents of gerrymandering Virginia — a state until now regarded as having among the fairest congressional maps in the country — lost by fewer than 90,000 votes out of more than 3 million cast, or 2.9 percentage points, 51.45% to 48.55%.
From Democrats’ perspective, it was money (90% of it from out of state, according to an analysis by The Federalist) well-spent: They expect rigging Virginia’s congressional map will net them four additional seats in Congress, up from the current 6-5 Democratic split to a 10-1 advantage.
Virginia Democrats’ campaign for voter approval of rigging the map in their favor also commenced much earlier than that of their Republican opponents, almost immediately after the Democratic-dominated Virginia General Assembly and faux moderate Democrat Gov. Abigail Spanberger authorized the plebiscite on Feb. 20.
Seemingly caught flat-footed, the Republicans’ countercampaign was slow to get up and running.
“The money that came in, came in late,” Republican former state Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II told syndicated radio talk show host Vince Coglianese on April 23.
“Why national Republicans did not come in sooner and with more money is deeply frustrating,” Katie Gorka, chairwoman of the Fairfax County, Virginia, Republican Committee, wrote in a mass email Sunday.
The National Pulse, a conservative website that bills itself as “radically independent,” faulted the national Republican establishment for being more concerned with saving one of their own, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas. Mr. Cornyn is facing a May 26 primary runoff challenge from state Attorney General Ken Paxton, a fellow Republican.
The Pulse claimed that Mr. Cornyn’s campaign received nearly five times as much Republican money as Virginians for Fair Maps.
Still, this shouldn’t have been an either/or situation, given that the Republican National Committee is sitting on an enormous fundraising advantage over its Democratic counterpart.
“The RNC out-raised the [Democratic National Committee] in February, $18.5 million to $10.3 million. Entering March, the RNC reported nearly seven times as much cash on hand, $109 million to $15.9 million,” CNN reported in late March.
As such, a paltry $5 million more from the RNC and/or the National Republican Congressional Committee might well have changed the outcome of the Virginia referendum vote.
That shortsightedness has now left Virginia Republicans at the tender mercies of the Virginia Supreme Court, which on Monday heard a legal challenge to the referendum’s constitutionality, aimed at invalidating it after the fact.
State Republicans’ court challenge hinges on four separate instances in which Virginia General Assembly Democrats are said to have circumvented the state constitution’s rules for amending the document in their mad dash to get it onto the ballot in time for the congressional midterms.
Mr. Cuccinelli expects an expedited ruling from the high court, perhaps as soon as mid-May.
Still, in the final analysis, the primary reason Virginia Republicans are praying for a court rescue is that the national Republican Party establishment failed to heed Unruh’s aphorism.
A secondary reason is that the Republican Party pooh-bahs likewise failed to learn from former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean. In July 2004, as the incoming chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Mr. Dean vowed to eliminate the downtime in the traditional two-year election cycle and replace it with a “permanent campaign.”
That’s why Virginia Democrats were so much quicker getting out of the starting gate in the referendum campaign.
Perhaps now the national Republican establishment will take House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, New York Democrat, seriously when he crowed last week about the Virginia Democrats’ win and vowed “maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.”
Whether the national Republican establishment gets that message and takes it seriously remains to be seen, but if the past is prologue, then the midterms and Republican control of Congress are in serious peril.
• Peter Parisi is a former editor for The Washington Times.
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