How is that so, you ask? The VCG starts by taking credit for the statewide wins of Bill Bolling and Bob McDonnell. I guess I can give them that - both of those guys pounded away at their anti-tax message, and they turned out the conservative Republican grassroots. I won't point out how easy this is to do in a "whipsaw" primary where well under 10% of the total electorate turns out.
Anyway, I'll slide away from the sarcasm and get back to the latest Rodokanakis Rant. After convincing himself of VCG's decisive victory statewide (and completely ignoring the fact that their gubernatorial candidate, George Fitch, couldn't even get to 20%), he goes on to tell us how important these results are for the future of the anti-tax cause:
And in the Delegate races the taxpayers sent another clear message. In the 67th
Delegate District, two-term incumbent, Gary Reese was trounced by Chris
Craddock, a newcomer to the political scene. Reese was humiliated by
garnering less than 34% of the vote.
This is very true. Reese got trounced, and as Not Larry Sabato will point out about every three hours, I thought this result would be much closer than it was. But could it have anything to do with something Rodokanakis pointed out much earlier, which is that Gary Reese was for the tax increase before he was against it? Most political observers agree that when you upset the people on both sides of the political divide, you've now annoyed roughly twice as many people as you should have annoyed legitimately. Unfortunately, Delegate Reese never paid much attention to who would be upset by the votes he cast, and that came back to haunt him. He couldn't find a decent block of voters who would support him because no one really knew where he stood. Reese was also politically untested. He barely won a three-way primary against two conservatives in 2001 and ran unopposed in 2003.
Next, Rodokanakis moves on to Michael Golden, who got the GOP nod to succeed retiring Republicrat Jim Dillard:
In the 41st Delegate District, Michael Golden defeated the Republican
establishment’s choice by walking way with 74% of the vote. A few months ago,
Golden was also instrumental in convincing Jim Dillard, the long-term incumbent
Delegate, to retire rather than face the anger of the voters over his
out-of-touch liberal record.
Like Rodokanakis, I thought Jim Dillard was more at home as a Democrat. But the last line in this paragraph is just plain laughable. I've never seen someone, Phil Rodokanakis included, make such a baseless charge. I've known Jim Dillard for years, and he will not back down from a fight, even one he's convinced he can't win. He is just too stubborn for that. I hate to burst Rodokanakis' bubble, but Dillard retired because he wanted to retire, not because he suddenly thought that after years of fighting with these guys he was finally going to get beaten. In fact, Dillard was set to retire in 2003, but decided to give Golden a thorough trouncing first. Dillard's impending retirement was one of the worst-kept secrets in Richmond, and it had absolutely nothing to do with a fear of Club Rodokanakis.
Rodokanakis then doubles back makes a very good point:
They [Craddock and Golden] ran classic grassroots campaigns, proving that these campaigns are only won from door to door.
This is the part of the message that shows Rodokanakis does indeed have some political sense - both Golden and Reese ran great ground games, flooding their districts with road signs and knocking on doors until their knuckles were raw and their shoe budgets were busted. Neither Reese nor Finerfrock did that, and they paid for it dearly.
Alas, we move from common sense straight back into the Spin Zone:
The PAC had also endorsed five other challengers. Although these candidates
did not enter their respective races until earlier this year, they all managed
to score impressive returns—in two cases losing by only 5% of the
vote. Also, the impact of the Democrat crossover vote cannot be
underestimated, that’s why the PAC is supporting initiatives for closed
primaries.
“Defeating long-term, entrenched incumbents is a hard
business” said Rodokanakis. “Nonetheless, all of the candidates we endorsed
showed that politicians who campaign as fiscal conservatives while govern as
tax-and-spend liberals will be held accountable at the polls. At least one of
these incumbents hadn’t faced a challenge in about a quarter of a century, yet
he barely held on to his seat by a mere 4.84% plurality.”
This section of the piece befuddled me, so I went back and looked at the "unofficial" results reported by the State Board of Elections. Sure enough, Rodokanakis is using some odd numbers here. The "4.84% plurality" appears to refer to the race between Harry Parrish and Steve Chapman, where there is, in fact, a spread of over 9 percentage points. The other "close" race is Kenney v. Orrock, where the spread is a full 10 points. For the uninitiated, 10 points is the threshold we hacks generally use to denote "landslide" status.
The only thing I can deduce from VCG's numbers is that Rodokanakis was incorrectly using 50% as the magic number for a victory and pointing out that Parrish and Orrock only managed to get roughly 5 percentage points above that victory mark. This is not how the rest of us measure such things, especially since 50% is not always the point at which victory is assured. 50% is merely the point at which you obtain a majority of the ballots cast (which makes Rodokanakis' comment about Parrish's "plurality" win all the more mystifying). All you have to do in any race is get one more vote than the other guy.
I should concede that write-in ballots are not permitted in Virginia primaries, so in a two-way race one guy has to get to 50% of the ballots cast. But I still don't buy Rodokanakis' fuzzy math. These guys got 10 points, not 5.
There you have it. The anti-tax guys won last Tuesday and all of us over here missed it. According to the Club for Growth, the Reese and Golden victories were not flukes after all. But that doesn't explain why Phil has been a no-show on his blog over at Bacon's Rebellion. Maybe he'll show up over here to explain why I'm wrong.
