Overall, the 2023 election was another disappointing night for Republicans. The most notable loss occurred in Kentucky, where Daniel Cameron didn't even give Democrat incumbent Gov. Andy Beshear much of a race. Polling had shown Cameron taking a slim lead just days prior to voters going to the polls.
Naturally, the post-mortems began immediately. Some blamed Cameron's lackluster campaign, which seemed to revolve completely around being endorsed by Donald Trump. It wasn't that the former president was a drag on the ticket himself as much as his name wasn't enough of a factor to flip voters. A candidate needs to be their own person with their own ideas and vision. If they instead come across as a cheap copy, trying to ride someone else's coattails, that rarely works out in a competitive race.
RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel had a different idea, though. She blamed a failure in messaging around the abortion issue. Specifically, she criticized Virginia Republicans, claiming they didn't address the issue.
“I watched all the ads in Virginia; the candidates on our side did not address it,” McDaniel said on a Wednesday taping of Ruthless, a conservative podcast after her party lost both houses of the state legislature. “We cannot cross-advertise and run only crime ads, and then the Democrats run abortion ads, and then we sit and pretend like that’s not being discussed.”
In her attempts to pass the buck for the RNC's failures (she rebuffed a request for money from the Virginia Republican Party prior to the election), McDaniel is being misleading. Before you judge whether abortion was a decisive factor in the Virginia outcome, you first have to establish what the actual outcome was.
As RedState reported, contrary to topline assumptions, Republicans actually performed very well in Virginia. The only reason they lost the House and didn't take the Senate (which they missed by one seat) was a gerrymandered map ushered in by a new redistricting commission. Republicans actually won the popular vote in the state, and they nearly matched the huge overperformance that happened in 2021.
In the end, the GOP won every district up to Biden +9. They would have needed to flip a Biden +26 seat in order to secure the Senate, an essentially impossible task in an already fairly blue state.
I say all that to say that McDaniel is simply wrong. Virginia wasn't a failure because of abortion because Virginia wasn't a failure at all. In fact, it serves as evidence that Republicans can do really well, even in an incredibly tough state, by speaking clearly on the abortion issue. Far from a 15-week ban being a net negative, it might have even been a position for Glenn Youngkin and his slate of candidates.
Virginia Republicans were defiant in the face of McDaniel's unsubstantiated criticism.
“Saying that we did not run enough ads on that issue is a remarkable revision of the last two months,” said Dean Goodson, chief of staff to outgoing House Speaker Todd Gilbert. “Maybe if we had gotten some help from the RNC, we could have run some more ads in the DC market.”
This kind of dysfunction at the top of the GOP is not acceptable. McDaniel seems more concerned with protecting her cush position than saying the right things and making the right moves. Virginia should be treated as a way forward, showing that Republicans can compete in unfavorable states when they meet a certain level of competence. McDaniel's rush to blame others instead of speaking about how the RNC itself can improve is going to continue to divide. The party needs to take a different path.
