Virginia’s Lt. Gov.-Elect Winsome Sears (R) has become legendary in conservative circles for pushing back hard on Democrat/media-driven narratives about her state and black voters, and also clearly enjoys that fact that she doesn’t fit into the little political box The Usual Suspects enjoy putting minority voters in.

We haven’t heard much from her or about her in the last month or so as she’s been busy preparing for her new position as well as connecting and reconnecting with the people she’s is getting ready to serve in her role as the first black female elected to statewide office in Virginia history.

Recently, Sears sat down for an interview for the New York Times. Though you wouldn’t think it would be a fair write-up, they actually did her justice. In the article, the Times detailed some of Sears’s fascinating backstory and also shared her thoughts on how the minority vote is undeniably shifting away from Democrats and how Republicans need to move in order to capitalize on it in future elections:

“The message is important,” Ms. Sears, 57, said over a lunch of Jamaican oxtail with her transition team at a restaurant near the State Capitol. “But the messenger is equally important.”
[…]
But Ms. Sears insists that many Black and immigrant voters naturally side with Republicans on a variety of issues — and that some are starting to realize that.

“The only way to change things is to win elections,” she said. “And who better to help make that change but me? I look like the strategy.”
[…]
Republicans [in Virginia], she said, rarely even tried to sever the old ties between Black voters and the Democratic Party. This is partly why she decided to run this year.

“I just took a look at the field, and said, ‘My God, we’re gonna lose again,’” she said. “Nobody was going to reach out to the various communities that needed to be heard from: women, immigrants, you know, Latinos, Asians, Blacks, etc.”

Something else she also suggested is that since Democrats always seem to want to focus on race, Republicans need to be willing to talk about it, too, to correct the record as well as to acknowledge past failures as well as successes.

“If the Democrats are always going to talk about race, then let’s talk about it,” she told the paper.

The Times’ also detailed the “warning signs” Sears pointed to for Democrats on the issue of minority voters:

While Black Virginians overwhelmingly voted for Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic nominee for governor, the analysis found a drop in Democratic support among Black men, compared with the 2020 presidential election. There was notable erosion in Democratic support among Asian and Latino voters as well.

We’ve written previously about the slow but steady erosion of support for Democrats among Hispanic, black, and Asian voters, a drop that seemed to pick up steam during the Trump years and which has continued since then, most recently in the Virginia elections, as noted above, and the California recall election back in September.

As for Sears’s advice for the GOP, I think it’s spot on. Though some might think she’s suggesting playing the types of identity politics games the right hates, I think what she’s doing here is to try and get Republicans to “cancel” such games by running more candidates who look like the voters they want to appeal to, which could have the intended effect of reminding those voters that you don’t have to think a certain way politically just because of what you look like.

In other words, what they’d be saying is that contra the left’s/media’s narratives, it’s okay if you’re a conservative who happens to be black, Hispanic, Asian, a woman, etc. Your opinion matters just as much.

On down the line, this is a strategy that would have a devastating impact on the left’s ability to play the race and gender cards successfully against the right. They’ve been using them to manipulate the minority vote for decades, and yet there have been signs going back the last several years that the strategy is backfiring. Because as it turns out, there is significant degree of correlation between the backfiring and how much more “woke” the Democratic party has become.

The Democratic hold on the minority vote is already slipping. If they lose much more of it, many more elections in normally “safe” Democrat parts of the country are going to be harder for them to win – which is a big reason why the push is on in blue states for aggressive gerrymandering.

I didn’t think I’d ever see them lose their stranglehold on their key voting blocs in my lifetime. But I am pleased to report today that that very thing is happening. Not as fast as we’d like it to, but it is happening. That trickle of voters away from Democrats will one day look more like a dam bursting. I’ve seen enough to say the Democrats are in trouble in future elections. Deep trouble.

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