Some rather frank comments [1] from Ken Cuccinlli on the possible lack of energy in the GOP base, and how that could make things very difficult for him on November:
…grass-roots conservatives in the Old Dominion appear to be “pretty close” to just staying home in his battle royal against prominent Democratic fund-raiser Terry McAuliffe.
“In 2009, it was a whole lot more energetic, the whole grass roots, the tea-party effort,” Cuccinelli said. “In some parts of Virginia, the tea party has been not quite staying home, but pretty close to it. They’re just not terribly motivated, or they’re retired or worn out or depressed or something.
“And that’s a problem,” he added. “That’s a problem when principle-based voters won’t come out to volunteer.”
Despite the apparent lack of grass-roots fervor so far, Cuccinelli said his campaign is “outworking the other side pretty badly on the ground” and “doing much better with our volunteers than they are.”
Virginia’s attorney general added: “I guess I just have such high standards and expectations from the conservative grass roots, and I know we’ve just got to continually do more.”
Voter fatigue. It’s a real thing in Virginia, no matter whether you’re left, right or center. Chris Saxman has some thoughts on all this in his Daily Caller piece [2]:
August is always political vacation season in Virginia and it is easy to doze off in the humid heat as baseball yields to football and families gear up for school, but aside from that I cannot recall seeing more than a handful of new political bumper stickers on cars as I travel the Commonwealth.
Rarer still are the yard signs and roadside 4x8s which used to be customary here in Virginia until political consultants pushed all available resources into direct voter contacts and paid advertising to drive media impressions.
The television ad war is firing up as we head into back to school season.
Both campaigns are building out the infrastructure nuts and bolts to turn out “our” voters and suppressing “theirs.”
Chris offers a way to change the dynamic, so go read the whole thing.
But back to Cuccinelli’s remarks…
That’s pretty strong stuff. Strong enough to make me wonder whether it’s really just a way to motivate the faithful to rally from their summer stupor and get busy.
Or so one might hope. Let’s go back a while to 2005. It’s just a week before the election and a few conservatives are saying, to anyone who will listen, that they would rather go fishing on election day than bother to vote for Jerry Kilgore.
It was then-Sen. Cuccinelli who took to the pages of the Washington Times [3] to give them a reason to get out and vote. At the time, I thought that this piece was extraordinary. After months of campaigning and millions of dollars spent on ads and doo-dads, Kilgore still hadn’t sealed the deal with the base.
He never did, despite Cuccinelli’s late appeal.
Perhaps, then, candidate Cuccinelli is sounding the warning bell now, while there’s still plenty of time left in the contest for folks to get excited.
Then again, it’s summer. A weird summer, with the odor of bad behavior [4] in the air, with just a hint of Hamlet [5]. Not exactly the sort of ambiance one hopes for while running a statewide campaign.
What could change it all, though, isn’t just the calendar, but the ideas. The Cuccinelli campaign turned off the policy spigot for a while, but last week came out with an education proposal [6] that has the left scared.
How scared? Enough that it leads them to say the darndest things:
Meg Gruber, the head of the Virginia Education Association group that represents the state’s teaching community, offered sharp criticism of Cuccinelli’s education plan Tuesday. Allowing parents the option of pulling their child out of a failing school, she said, would “divert money from public education.”
Um, yeah.
Bring on the fall.