HAMPTON ROADS, Va. (WAVY) — Recent election results have continued to spark discussion among political analysts looking at who did it right and who did it wrong in getting voters to the polls, and several did so at a forum sponsored by the nonprofit, nonpartisan Virginia Public Access Project Friday.
One of the panelists, WHRO vice president of news Maurice Jones, said that “the things that we focus on day-to-day are based on health care, transportation, education in our schools [and the] safety of our children. Those are the things that we want to prioritize.”
Old Dominion University professor of political science and geography Dr. Ben Melusky said that “in our state, those that voted Republican, it was immigration and the economy, whereas for Democrats, it was reproductive rights.”
Republican political consultant Brian Kirwin, founder of Kirwin Development Strategies, said Democrats lacked a message.
“I think what the Democrats got wrong is they tried to run a Seinfeld [campaign] — a campaign about nothing,” Kirwin said. “They had no issues. They had no message. It was [as people said], Kamala Harris or that Nazi Trump.”
Kirwin also said that Harris saying on “The View” that she would not do anything different than President Biden was a win for Trump.
“She said she can’t think of anything she would do differently from Joe Biden, a guy whose numbers that were so horrible they kicked him out of the party (He was not kicked out of the party, but decided not to run for re-election),” Kirwin said. “They kicked him out pre-convention, and they kicked him out, and appointed his nominee.”
Critics of that process, like former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, blame President Joe Biden for failing to decide not to run in a timely manner and thinks the fact there wasn’t a primary for her to be challenged ended up hurting her campaign with voters who viewed her as untested.
They all agree Trump won because he reached out and brought in new voters.
“I thought the Republicans did a better job of engaging in politics as well,” Jones said. “They actually did appeal to young women. They actually did appeal to White voters. They did a much better job, I thought, in the identity politics. They actually did go to the folks in rural America much better than the Democrats did.”
Said Melusky: “Elements of the electorate that typically you look at as low-capacity voters and you really cannot trust them to [vote] — they have reached out to young men, they reached out to rural areas and Black men, and they drove these people to the polls. And if you look at … the election night results, these groups came out in particular for Trump.”
Burned in 2020, the Trump campaign went all out in early voting, winning that, and then adding to the numbers on Election Day.
“I think the adoption of that strategy, meeting the Republican voters who really don’t want to vote by mail to say, ‘OK, you don’t want to vote by mail, but at least vote in person early if you do not want to keep getting emails. I think that was the shift in that. I think it worked.”
Said Jones: “It is interesting that the Democrats boasted about how well the ground game was. You can see in their campaign. However, I thought it was the Republicans ability to actually use new media, I thought, that crushed Democrats.”
During the forum, it was noted Democrats were once the party to bring together diverse groups of people, like the Rainbow Coalition. In this election, it was Republicans that created a political force from diverse backgrounds that simply could not be denied.
