Thanks to VAPLAN/Cindy for this video and highlights of VA Speaker Don Scott speaking earlier this evening at Del. Marcus Simon’s “Latkepalooza” event (which apparently was packed tonight). Great stuff!
- “When I became the minority leader in 2022, June 1, my first idea was what do we need to do to have an enduring majority? We had been in the majority when I first came in. We lost the majority. We got it for the first time in 20 years. And I need you to think about this. I was just telling someone that means Mark Warner never saw a Democratic majority in the House of Delegates. Never. Tim Kaine never saw a Democratic majority in the House of Delegates ever. Terry McAulliffe never saw a Democratic majority in the House ever. Ralph Northam got it for two years and then we promptly lost the majority. So think about the kind of harm that they were able to do over 20 years, the type of impediment that they were to progress for 20 years straight. And so my mindset said, what do we need to do to really have a plan and a disciplined approach to building an enduring majority? What does that look like? And so we began the idea of having a disciplined approach to messaging. I know disciplined Democrats is an oxymoron, but we can do it. And we decided that we were gonna have a disciplined approach to how we communicate, how we message, how we recruit candidates. And then when we did that, we were able to win back the majority in ’23 after Youngkin had won in ’21…We won the majority. That was the first time that anybody can remember. We tried to find it when a sitting governor had lost the majority in the House of Delegates. It doesn’t happen. Mind you, we won it by 51-49. We barely won it, but we won it. And we won it with Biden at 40% approval in the Commonwealth…because we focused on the things that Virginians were most afraid of at that time. And at that time it was reproductive health. The Dobbs decision had just come down overturning Roe v Wade….and we focused on the message that would win and we were able to win that majority.”
- “But then how do you build an enduring majority? And so at that point…we got with our team, we did focus groups, we listened to voters, folks are worried about affordability. And then, thank God, we actually ran the play that we needed to to win. We focused on, at that time 13 seats. In 2023, 2024, we said, ‘we’re going to focus on these 13 seats.’ We added the 14th seat later on in the cycle in the summer. But I need y’all to understand something. We targeted 13 seats, recruited 13 great candidates. And we thought that any one of those 13 could win. We thought that they were doing the work. If they did the doors that they were supposed to do, if they exercised the discipline, if they raised the dollars, we thought that they could all win. But we didn’t think all of them were going to win. Every single one of them won. And so we went from 51 seats to 64 seats.”
- “And I need y’all to understand something. Like this time last year, I was in Israel last year this time and the whole wide world was looking at us. They were like, ‘has America lost its damn mind?’ And I was telling them, I’m in Virginia, we get to be the first ones to send a love letter, not only to the nation, but to the whole wide world. Virginia is for lovers. And so we’re going to be the first to send a love letter to the rest of the world and the rest of the nation that we do not believe what Trump believes. We believe in an America that is inclusive. We believe that an America that is loving. We do not believe in the chaos, the cruelty, the corruption. We don’t believe that your success is determined by what zip code you you you grow up in. We don’t believe that your race or your religion or your creed determines how far you can go. We truly believe that we are one nation, that all men are created equal – and women – created equally, endowed by their creator with certain inalable rights, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. That is what we believe. We are a country that is founded on that idea.”
- “And there are some folks that want us to go backwards. They want us to give up on that idea. You know, next year we’ll be celebrating 250 years of America. That’s pretty young by European standards. That’s pretty young by other parts of the world. So, it’s only natural that in this 250 years that we’d have a temper tantrum…I’m only surprised, you know, some people like, ‘oh, I can’t believe Trump is here.’ I’m only surprised that somebody like him didn’t come along sooner. Because what happens is every blue moon we have to check to see if we…are who we say we are. We have an opportunity to prove that our talk and our walk matches. This is the opportunity we have. Now, Virginia, we did our work. We got an A on the test every single time. We need to show the rest of the country, show the rest of the world that it is ok, that you’re going to be ok when you stand up to a tyrant. You’re going to be ok when you stand up to a bully. I don’t believe that you just sit there and get pummeled when a bully’s fighting you. All I know is you got to punch back.”
- “That’s why we’re going to do the redistricting amendment here in the Commonwealth of Virginia. If we can 10-1 this thing, we’ll 10-1 this thing…We’re going to fight back. We’re going to level the playing field to make sure that we we still have a voice in this democracy…. And mind you now, if we do these three constitutional amendments…that put into our constitution a woman’s right to have bodily autonomy (I never thought I never thought that my 17-year-old daughter would be living in a place that she has less rights than my 90-year-old mother). That is what they are trying to do; we need to enshrine it in our constitution that every woman has the right to bodily autonomy, has a right to contraception, has a right to postpartum depression drugs, the whole nine yards…We need to make sure we put that in the constitution. We need to make sure that people like myself who made a mistake and got back up, they don’t have to beg the governor to get their rights restored. This automatic restoration of voting rights, we’re going to vote on that and pass that….these are huge. And finally, you know…in Virginia…it’s illegal to have same-sex marriage…It’s in our Constitution right now. Same-sex marriage is banned in Virginia, but the United States Supreme Court in Obergfell overruled. If they have their way and you know they fickle, if the Supreme Court overturns precedent, which they’re not afraid to do, it immediately triggers Virginia’s current constitution where same-sex marriage is illegal. This cycle, we’re going to pass a constitutional amendment – again. We’re going to do it on the first day of session where we make it clear that you can marry whoever the hell you love and the government will not be in your business. If we do those three things alone, that’ll be huge in the Commonwealth of Virginia. So, we’re going to continue to do more. We’re going to address health care needs. We’re going to make things more affordable. We’re going to address our energy crisis…”
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