Four months after Democrat Mark Warner was re-elected in a squeaker, conservatives are still puzzling why 87,000 Virginians voted for Republican congressmen but failed to check the box for the party’s U.S. Senate candidate.
The result: Ed Gillespie lost by 17,727 votes to Warner.
Die-hard tea partyers who never warmed to the former national GOP chairman say, “We told ya so.”
Shak Hill, the tea party favorite who finished second to Gillespie at the GOP nominating convention, says mainstream Republican prescriptions aren’t working.
“We do not have to open the tent for them, they are already in it,” Hill said of voters. “We do not have to (get out the vote) for them, they are at the polls. We do not have to bring in minorities, youth or (get) the base out to vote, they are already there.”
Kyle Kondik, managing editor of “Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball” at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, confirmed the electoral arithmetic, but suggested that the House races and the Senate race “are just different animals.”
“Just because someone votes for an incumbent Republican congressman doesn’t make them a ‘Republican voter’ up and down the ballot. Some of those voters saw no reason to support no-name Democratic opponents to their local Republican member of the House,” Kondik told Watchdog.org.
Virginia voters do not register by party.
Greg Letiecq, a conservative activist in Northern Virginia, said Republicans had low expectations for the Senate race heading into the fall campaign.
“The mood wasn’t that any challenger was likely to win, it was about who would give (Warner) the toughest fight,” Letiecq recalled. “If you’re going to pick one that would supposedly mount a fairly strong losing effort, Gillespie was the one with all the check boxes marked.”
While some Republicans complained that Gillespie did not get much outside help, Letiecq observed that national tea party groups “wasted their resources enriching organizational insiders. That’s a problem that impacted a lot of potential tea party candidates last cycle.”
“If just one of those groups got involved in the 2014 Senate race, Hill would have had the money to demonstrate a viable candidacy,” he asserted.
Arguably, the biggest wild card was Libertarian candidate Robert Sarvis. As he did in the 2013 gubernatorial race narrowly won by Democrat Terry McAuliffe, Sarvis garnered enough votes to give a winning plurality to Warner.
As for conservatives straying from the GOP fold, Letiecq said of Gillespie and the party establishment:
“I imagine that someone who wasn’t a K Street lobbyist supporting amnesty for illegal aliens would have actually gotten Republicans excited — instead of the ‘hold my nose and vote against a Democrat’ strategy that worked out so well for (John) McCain and (Mitt) Romney.”
Kenric Ward is a national reporter for Watchdog.org and chief of the Virginia Bureau. Contact him at [email protected] or at (571) 319-9824.
