Ken Cuccinelli on why Deeds lost
Democratic candidate for Governor R. Creigh Deeds lost last month’s gubernatorial election by NOT running to the Left according to Attorney-general elect Sen. Ken Cuccinelli.
Deeds “ran the wrong race,” Cuccinelli told a packed room this weekend at the Republican Party of Virginia’s annual Advance held in Williamsburg.
He said that if former DNC chairman and Clinton confidante Terry McAuliffe had been chosen in the Democratic primary that’s exactly how he would have run the race by appealing to the Democratic base.
Cuccinelli said that whilst the Republican ticket of Bob McDonnell, Lt. Governor Bill Bolling and himself ran a positive, forward looking and united ticket as a team, the Democrats were “running from each other.”
According to the Attorney General –elect, Creigh 'Dirty' Deeds, ran an overly negative campaign which gave Bob McDonnell’s campaign the feeling of being more positive than it was.
McDonnell has said it was “the most negative and backwards-looking campaign in Virginia history."
After The Washington Post began a series of front page stories on a thesis Bob McDonnell wrote in 1989 in which he outlined his socially conservatives, the Deeds’ negative campaigning moved into high gear. Ad after ad hit the airwaves and the letterboxes which portrayed the Republican candidate as a right-wing extremist who wanted women barefoot and pregnant and in the home in a bid to secure the female vote particularly in NoVa.
This backfired with independent voters particularly turned off by this approach by the Democratic campaign.
Even the man who Deeds hoped to replace, Governor Tim Kaine, who also doubles as DNC Chairman, criticized the Democratic campaign and both he and the White House distanced themselves even before Election Day saying that their advice was not being followed. Translation: not our fault, it’s all on Creigh.
Ken Cuccinelli said the result for Deeds and his Democratic ticket was a ‘shellacking’ and a ‘slaughter.’ This was mainly due to the fact that the Republican Party stayed true to their conservative principles combined with the GOP faithful being fired up by the losses last year and a massive energized grassroots movement.
Cuccinelli travelled to every corner of the Commonwealth and he said he pushed the grassroots hard, “I killed a car this summer getting around Virginia – God rest its soul.”
He went on to say there is no need to run to the center in politics as there are only “two things in the middle of the road; yellow lines and road kill.”
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