Did Kerry make a mistake by not going after Virginia?
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  Did Kerry make a mistake by not going after Virginia?
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Author Topic: Did Kerry make a mistake by not going after Virginia?  (Read 11568 times)
Redban
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« on: June 25, 2013, 10:47:39 AM »

He lost the state by 9%, but he never contested it.

Was that a mistake? Everyone could see that Virginia was trending blue at this point. In the 1980s, it was around 15% red, and it just kept steadily moving left.

Considering that Virginia became relatively easy wins in 2008 and 2012, did Kerry make a mistake by not going for it?
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Cryptic
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« Reply #1 on: June 25, 2013, 10:54:57 AM »

My gut feeling says he'd have narrowed the margin considerably, but Bush would've still carried it.  I can't see Kerry winning Virginia, while still losing Nevada and New Mexico. I think the tipping point for Virginia came in '08.
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illegaloperation
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« Reply #2 on: June 25, 2013, 12:01:52 PM »

I doubt that Kerry could have won it. Virginia was lean R at the time (compare to the national average) and Kerry would have to out perform Bush in the popular vote to carry Virginia.
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sg0508
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« Reply #3 on: June 25, 2013, 01:31:21 PM »

Mark Warner made it a point that Kerry could have won the state had he put time and energy in there.  Warner is a smart man and he says it as it is.  He knew the demographic movement favored the democrats and he criticized the campaign for not going after the Old Dominion.  The final margin proves that it was winnable.  You're telling me that Kerry couldn't move the state 4 points? Nonsense. 

It's also a very good example of how Kerry's campaign (like Romney's) was inept.  Rather than forcing Bush to sweat in many of his 2000 states, he allowed the Bush camp to play offense on many of the Gore states while Kerry played defense for much of 2004 and it proved to be just enough to get Bush the 2nd term.  Romney basically repeated the same mistake.  If you remember, John Edwards was LIVID after the loss about the way the campaign was run.  He thought the campaign should have been expanded to at least 7-8 additional states to get Bush out of the bluish states from 2000.

It was a huge error and in the end, it may not have been enough to carry VA in 2004, but it would have forced Bush to play defense.
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cope1989
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« Reply #4 on: June 25, 2013, 01:51:35 PM »

The Kerry campaign was more concerned with holding down the midwest, which proved to be a very tough fight, as well as 2000 battlegrounds like Iowa, NH and New Mexico. And then of course there was Florida. In 2004 Bush definitely had the advantage and Kerry was just trying to hold on to the states he knew he had could win. The conventional wisdom at the time was that VA was trending towards the Democrats but wasn't worth it that year. It had been Republican for almost 20 years at that point. So the way I see it, if Kerry had decided to contest VA, he would have had less time and money for states like Wisconsin and New Hampshire and might have lost them in the end, while still losing Virginia.

Obama had the Kerry states locked down early in the campaign so he had time and money to invest in Virginia but Kerry didn't have that luxury.
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Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers
olawakandi
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« Reply #5 on: June 25, 2013, 01:55:31 PM »

Warner or Graham could have won a swing state. My guess he would have made a play more so with Ohio and won with 272.
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Mr.Phips
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« Reply #6 on: June 25, 2013, 04:09:43 PM »

Kerry made a lot of mistakes.  Why did he spend all of that time and money on West Virginia, where he ended up doing worse than in Virginia, which he didnt target. 
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barfbag
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« Reply #7 on: June 26, 2013, 07:54:14 PM »

Virginia wasn't ready to be a battleground state yet and Obama has over performed there because of the black voter turnout. Kerry made a hundred mistakes worse than not going after Virginia.
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Fuzzy Stands With His Friend, Chairman Sanchez
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« Reply #8 on: May 18, 2014, 09:10:21 PM »

Kerry made a lot of mistakes.  Why did he spend all of that time and money on West Virginia, where he ended up doing worse than in Virginia, which he didnt target. 

Because early polls in 2002 showed Democratic candidates carrying West Virginia.  West Virginia had gone Republican for Bush 43 in 2000, but not by much. 
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jfern
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« Reply #9 on: May 19, 2014, 02:07:07 AM »

It'd be nice for him to have had some 20/20 hindsight and know to not bother trying to win WV, AR, and MO, and not needing to defend NJ and HI.

But I think it would have come down to Ohio, regardless.
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« Reply #10 on: July 28, 2014, 08:56:21 PM »

no.  he made the right call, Ohio was his only shot.  people forget how hard an election that was going to be for any Dem to win, Bush was running 70% approvals in Dec 2003.
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shua
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« Reply #11 on: August 25, 2014, 02:40:26 PM »

What could he have done to contest it?  Apart from Kerry putting Mark Warner on the ticket, Bush was going to win this.
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bobloblaw
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« Reply #12 on: January 09, 2015, 03:16:43 PM »

Politics is a game of gains and losses.

Kerry spending more time to win VA, means he probably loses MI and/or PA
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bobloblaw
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« Reply #13 on: January 23, 2015, 08:11:38 PM »

He lost the state by 9%, but he never contested it.

Was that a mistake? Everyone could see that Virginia was trending blue at this point. In the 1980s, it was around 15% red, and it just kept steadily moving left.

Considering that Virginia became relatively easy wins in 2008 and 2012, did Kerry make a mistake by not going for it?

Youre over estimating the impact of campaigning. If Kerry contested VA, he would have lost by 7-8 insead of 9.

You said that VA was 15 points Red in the 1980s. But every state was more GOP in the 1980s. VA isnt any different.
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jfern
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« Reply #14 on: January 23, 2015, 08:20:06 PM »

Mark Warner made it a point that Kerry could have won the state had he put time and energy in there. 

Since when is Warner, who just won by less than a point when he was supposed to win by a sizable margin, the ultimate authority on winning elections in Virginia?
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hopper
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« Reply #15 on: March 07, 2015, 11:19:39 PM »

Bush W. did win 13% of the Black Vote in VA which helped him in the state in 2004.
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Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers
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« Reply #16 on: March 07, 2015, 11:51:20 PM »

Mark Warner, was the better fit for Ohio, who is very much similar to Ted Strickland and appealed to hunters.

When Kerry stepped out into that hunting outfit, it made him out of step with the hunters for OHIOians that Edwards, couldn't compete with. Edwards when it came to hunters wasn't seen as one of them.

That's why the Warner for VP made more sense and would have made Ohio, the clincher with 272 electoral votes for Kerry.
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Sumner 1868
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« Reply #17 on: March 21, 2015, 04:06:26 PM »

Democrats were blind to the leftward trend until Jim Webb. Kerry did not consider states that voted against Bill Clinton in play.
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Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers
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« Reply #18 on: March 31, 2015, 10:26:10 PM »

Democrats were blind to the leftward trend until Jim Webb. Kerry did not consider states that voted against Bill Clinton in play.

That's why Mark Warner would have been better, he would have put VA or OHIO, which are very similar, both in play.
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Replicator
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« Reply #19 on: April 15, 2015, 03:09:20 AM »

It would've been close and caused Bush to possibly spend more money there. As a result, Ohio could've tipped. I believe it was 53-47 with basically no campaigning. However, that was a real awakening from the 53-45 victory Bush had there in 2000. Also, consider that Bush and Dole carried Virginia despite losing their elections. It's trended to the left each election since 1996. Trends don't go on forever so we'll see where it ends up. For the last two elections it's matched the popular vote. As for Kerry, he wouldn't have carried a southern state but as I said the spending could've tipped OH possibly.
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Kingpoleon
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« Reply #20 on: December 03, 2015, 08:29:21 PM »

No.

Kerry was awful at retail politics. He might have narrowed the popular vote by ~.5% and made VA under 2.5%, but he didn't turn out the progressive base like Dean would have despite being the most liberal Senator that year.
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Adam Griffin
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« Reply #21 on: December 03, 2015, 10:12:26 PM »

Yes, it was a mistake - but perhaps one very few people truly could have made by virtue of knowing they were making it at the time. Nevertheless, the Kerry campaign was probably aware of the dynamics.

Before I say what I have to say and some people start getting cynical or crappy about it, I feel it is important to simply emphasize the following: the Kerry campaign never pulled out of North Carolina. Now that we have that out of the way, let's proceed.

Unfortunately, Kerry played into the same tragic game that most in his position do: incumbency comes with a lot of privileges. One of them is the ability to play the "expanding the map" game; wherever the incumbent decides to invest, the challenger feels obligated to "defend", bogging down resources. When there isn't an incumbent, this rule applies to whoever has the most/least money. Kerry could have been a wildcard here and put Bush on defense (requiring him to pull investments out of less sure states like NM & IA), but the campaign chose not to (and instead, try to make their wildcard state a ridiculous one like NC).

[...] I would say Virginia flipped on the national level at some point in 2006 or 2007 and has been moving further into the Democratic column ever since [...]

Now I understand that state-level politics (particularly in states that were still somewhat Southern at the time) are different, but the undercurrents of the Republican Party weren't strong enough to overcome the whole "Virginia elects a Governor opposite of the party of the President" and thus the state had Democratic Governors throughout the 2000s.

Furthermore, "Macaca" and all of that, but a literal loser-nobody with hardly any financing or organization won a Senate race just two years later. Even if it was a wave year and the win was slight, that fact is balanced out by the notion that turnout was lower in 2006 and much more favorable in 2004 in racial terms to Dems:



The sheer fact that "Macaca" was what really caused the Allen campaign to begin unraveling to a large degree tells you all you need to know about how much VA had already changed. Now, the rate of change as I described in my full quote above was very rapid - one could perhaps argue that the rate of change was so fast that the state was still a backwater hellhole ideologically in 2004 but had progressed enough in just two years to refute such nonsense and actually make it matter - but I think the reality is that the basis for such a climate was largely there in 2004. In other words, someone like Kerry could have played very well in NoVA at the very least, had he tried. That, combined with the fact that the more people heard about Bush, the less they liked him, could have produced some very interesting results.

Furthermore, take a look at those exit polls one more time, and compare 2004/2008. The white/black make-up of the electorate changed surprisingly little between those two elections - Georgia diversified twice that much in the voting booth between the same two elections. Asians going from 2% to 3% and Latinos going from 3% to 5% - with their support likely shifting by no more than 10-15 points in all - closes the margin by about 2.2 points. So Obama went from Kerry's baseline to 46.6% because of that. The black vote shift between the two cycles is literally 0.1 point of performance. It was white voters that did it, and Kerry could have played here.

A substantial power-play by the Kerry campaign in VA and its subsequent effects would have likely forced Bush to divert resources being invested in IA & NM. Considering both of those states were won by fractions of a percentage point, it's likely that even small diversions of investment would have tilted these two states back to Kerry. Combined with a narrow win in VA, Kerry would have 276 EVs while losing the PV by more than two points (wouldn't that have been a sweet ending for Bush?).

TL;DR: Virginia would have been a nail-biter in 2004 but it also could have been a life-raft as it would have forced Bush to divert funds from states like NM & IA in order to defend it. The dynamics that were in play in 2005 & 2006 in VA elections were already there in 2004. The electorate didn't change wildly despite demographic shifts between 2004 & 2008; generating support among whites and actually campaigning in the state was what gave Obama a victory, as the swings were solid statewide. Minority shifts in the electorate accounted for less than 1/3 of the swing in VA between 2004-2008.
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Californiadreaming
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« Reply #22 on: January 18, 2016, 12:58:55 PM »

No. After all, Kerry's margin of defeat in Virginia was probably too high for him to realistically win Virginia. Plus, having Kerry focus more on Virginia might have resulted in Kerry losing states such as Wisconsin. In addition to this, simply having Kerry win Virginia and keep all of his 2004 states wouldn't have given Kerry the necessary electoral votes to win the U.S. Presidency in 2004.
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blacknwhiterose
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« Reply #23 on: January 23, 2017, 01:04:33 PM »

I don't think NOVA had blow up quite enough yet to flip the state, although there's also another question as to why John Edwards couldn't inspire more working-class rural voters in the state.
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RINO Tom
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« Reply #24 on: January 23, 2017, 01:45:58 PM »

I don't think NOVA had blow up quite enough yet to flip the state, although there's also another question as to why John Edwards couldn't inspire more working-class rural voters in the state.

You say that as if much of the area didn't vote for Bush too but was simply outvoted by the rest of the state.  NOVA is not the same place that it was in 2004.
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