Nov. 11, 2013 (FRC) – “You know what makes a good loser?” Ernest Hemingway once wrote. “Practice.” And if you know anything about Virginia's gubernatorial race, then you understand that the real loser wasn't conservative Ken Cuccinelli. It was the Republican Party. Last week, politicos clacked away at their computers, performing their own postmortems on a race that proved to be more unpredictable than anyone expected. Double-digit leads, the ObamaCare effect, gender gaps — they all managed to turn the media's foregone conclusions about Democrats' invincibility on their head.
Despite his deadbeat party, lackluster fundraising, a third-party candidate (funded, it turns out, by Obama loyalists!), and a constant barrage of lies, Ken Cuccinelli finished last week's race only three points behind liberal Terry McAuliffe. He won over Independents (47-38%), outperformed expectations on women (41-52%, while handily winning among married women 51-42%), and swept the 53% of voters opposed to ObamaCare (by a whopping 81%).
By late Tuesday night, the candidate who enjoyed a double-digit lead heading into the election — McAuliffe — didn't even win a majority of the vote. That's not, as the media would have you believe, the result of a flawed candidate in Cuccinelli — but a flawed campaign. Unfortunately for Virginia conservatives, Ken's biggest opponent was never Terry McAuliffe. It was his own party. While the Democrat watched millions stream in from outside groups, the state's biggest GOP donors walked away from Cuccinelli — and took their money with them.
Outspent an estimated 10:1, Ken had neither the cash flow nor the infrastructure to beat back the Left's constant drubbing (Democrats ran more than 5,600 spots on the abortion issue alone!). Even when McAuliffe hitched his campaign to a reviled law like ObamaCare (which even the President refused to mention on the stump), Democrats rallied around their own. And what did the Republican Establishment do? It starved their candidate, who happened to be one of the most prominent leaders in the legal fight against ObamaCare. That kind of reckless abandonment is inexcusable for a party that claims its first priority is repealing the policy that Ken Cuccinelli took to the Supreme Court.
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Like us, RedState's Erick Erickson knows where the finger-pointing will lead. “The GOP will take the lesson from Virginia that if they aren't suddenly socially liberal, they're going to lose nationwide. Instead, they should pay attention to how quickly the polling gap closed once Cuccinelli turned the race into a referendum on ObamaCare. And they should also note that being pro-life in Virginia was not what did in Ken Cuccinelli. McAuliffe tried to mobilize his whole base with a 'war on women' strategy and nearly lost once Cuccinelli attacked ObamaCare head on. The war on women got trumped at the end by ObamaCare.”
The Republican National Committee (the same RNC that spent triple on the Governor's race in 2009) insists that it did what it could in Virginia. But when push comes to shove, NRO's Jonah Goldberg explains, it's the grassroots who come out on the losing end. “For all the talk about how the base needs to cooperate with the Establishment more, it's worth remembering that the base almost always does its part on Election Day. It's the Establishment that is less reliable in returning the favor.”
Does the Republican Party resent pro-family conservatives so much that it will desert them to fit their own faulty narrative — that social issues are losing ones? If the GOP would rather concede races to corrupt liberals than go to the mat on values that a majority of Virginians support, then it's clear who the real extremists are.
Tony Perkins is the president of the Family Research Council.