Lots of interesting interviews by Sam Shirazi over at Federal Fallout, this morning’s with Kevin Holst of the Democratic Lt. Governors Association. See below for a few highlights.
- Why did Democrats have such a great night on November 4th? “Well, I think it’s twofold. One, the environment was incredibly favorable to us in both Virginia and New Jersey. Virginia uniquely…if I wasn’t a professional Democrat and true believer in all these things…I couldn’t paint a better environment than having Donald Trump just come at Virginia’s core economy. When you have one third of Northern Virginia that is a federal government employee or contractor, and the first thing you do in office is to lay them off or to come directly for their livelihoods, that obviously sets up an environment that is very unfavorable to Republicans. Donald Trump continued to crater in popularity throughout the year, and the Republican Party seemed to just go belly up and not put up a fight. The amount of investment that national Republicans had in the gubernatorial, LG and then state legislative races was really close to nothing until very late in the election. And for those of us who do elections for a living, and we know that early money is like yeast – it helps make the dough rise. And it also helps with planning and budgeting. So by the time Republicans had some fantasy that they had a shot in Virginia, it was far too late. The other thing is we had incredible candidates that stepped up who were laser focused on a few key issues, affordability being one of them. You know, it’s not a helpful campaign message for Republicans to say, we laid you off from your job…There was a coalition of people that were not likely to turn out by historical comparison that were so motivated to show their disapproval of Republicans, of Donald Trump, and to show how they believe that Abigail Spanberger, Ghazala Hashmi…”
- On Hashmi winning big, but not quite as big as Spanberger: “Ghazala Hashmi is a history-making candidate. And we see that history making candidates tend to underperform. She is the first Muslim woman ever elected to a statewide position in the country…She was enduring daily, just vicious racist attacks, not just by John Reid, but by Governor Youngkin and other Republicans. You know, John Reid called her ‘Mamdami in heels,’ pro Hamas and Islamist. If I’m remembering correctly, he might even say she has some jihadist ideology. And said that she wants to impose Shari’a law on Virginia. And when he was hit hit for that, he was like, oh, I’m just asking questions. So there were some really vicious attacks on someone that the state did not really know…If this was a generic Dem race, she would have performed basically at the same margin as Spanberger, because there was no negative hits against Ghazala other than just the vile racist attacks that Reid and his allies were hitting her with on a daily basis.”
- On whether it would have been smarter for the Republicans to maybe just stick to the issues: “Yeah, I mean, Reid couldn’t defend his positions on issues. He sided with Donald Trump on DOGE cuts. I mean, the one person I said I felt worse for this entire campaign was Reid’s partner, because, you know, Reid was…against protecting marriage equality in the Constitution. So it’s sort of like, he won’t marry you, my dude. And then his partner also had a federal job that was impacted in round one of layoffs in DOGE. So not only [didn’t] he side with Virginia, he didn’t even side with his own multi-year partner. So I don’t think voters…could really place their trust in him when he was running a campaign that was completely contrary to what Virginians wanted…have someone that put Virginians ahead of Donald Trump…And John Reid had built his career off of just being a zealot for Trump and pushing Trump talking points on the radio. So he ran a campaign that was just Trump based issues, which was very unpopular voters. Ghazala Hashmi had an insane margin in Loudoun County…”
- On the story about John Reid’s Tumblr account never really took off: “So John Reed denied it was his Tumblr, which, you know we hear a lot of some some crazy made up things in politics, but if you were to go to court and say, prove this isn’t your Tumblr more likely than not, the court would find it is because Who in 2012, 2014 was like, you know, I’m going to create an account with the same location, IP addresses, and username that John Reid has for every other account and just post things that are of interest to him. And why would the account be deleted the day Governor Youngkin.. calls John Reid to tell him to drop out before it was leaked to the press three days later. It’s really…it shows, this is was a great example of how Virginians just couldn’t trust him because you know he couldn’t accept that the account was his. He fought with the governor over it. So that became the bigger story because obviously Governor Youngkin was the leader of the Republican Party. And it was kind of amazing how Reid won that fight and damaged Youngkin’s ambitions and showed him that he never really controlled the Republican Party or really had the sway that he thought he did with Virginia voters…I think what did become a big story in some constituents media, the LGBTQ press was huge on this, was the Nazi fetish porn stories that came out in the fall. There were other things happening in Virginia that major outlets were covered rather than this story. But we saw in LGBT media media throughout the country that this was a recurring story.”
- On the DLGA helping to elect Hashmi: “…[Hashmi] entered the campaign broke. All the Democratic primary candidates were broke because they were fighting to win the nomination. So, you know, we made a very large investment. We gave her a million dollars the day after the primary, which I think helped set a level of seriousness for the campaign. John Reid said that the DLGA’s donation was far-left Soros, pro-Hamas money. I can tell you George Soros has never donated to the DLGA, nor has Hamas or anyone connected with Hamas. We are proud of our donors throughout the country who contribute $5, $10, $25 to our efforts.”
- On Ghazala Hashmi as LG: “I mean, she’s a key player in state government now, because as you know, we had a blowout election in the House of Delegates, but the Senate wasn’t up. We still just have a one-seat majority and we cannot always count on every Democrat in the Senate to be unified on any issue. So if we want Governor Spanberger’s agenda to pass swiftly, it’s going to fall on Ghazala Hashmi to ensure that they are building the coalitions necessary in the state Senate and be that tie-breaking vote, which is inevitably going to occur at some point throughout session. I know she she ran on lowering costs, fully funding public education and creating opportunity. I know she has a pretty robust transition team right now, which is focusing on her policy priorities in that area. But one thing I’ve learned about Ghazala is that if she makes a promise about something, she comes through with it. And so I can imagine that’s going to be the bulk of her policy focus in the next session.”