‘We couldn’t afford to have anyone sitting on the sidelines if we were to win these close elections,’ said David Rexrode, who heads Youngkin’s PAC.
Miami — Republicans are already trading barbs over who is responsible for the party’s losses in Virginia’s off-year state legislative elections, in which Democrats recaptured the house of delegates and narrowly held their majority in the state senate. And in Virginia, the GOP’s post-election blame game revolves around the lack of direct cash transfers from outside spending groups — namely the Republican National Committee — to combat Democrats’ millions in abortion-focused advertising.
The fallout from Tuesday’s elections in Virginia and beyond is sure to trickle into 2024, as Republicans continue their reckoning over how the party ought to respond to Democrats’ efforts to turn every race into a referendum on abortion, even in red-leaning states.
In purple Virginia, state GOP Chairman Rich Anderson is taking special aim at the RNC for denying his early October request for cash, which he made a month after President Joe Biden directed the Democratic National Committee to pour more than $1 million into the state. Anderson had hoped that bringing house of delegates speaker Todd Gilbert along to a D.C. meeting with RNC officials would help close the deal.
“That’s where they told us that being an off year, they simply just didn’t have the resources,” Anderson told National Review in an interview Thursday morning. “We never have an off year in Virginia but the rest of the country does. And as a result of that, their giving levels are down significantly, and that was the reason.”
Dave Rexrode, executive director of Youngkin’s PAC Spirit of Virginia, says the GOP’s message got drowned out by the barrage of Democratic spending in D.C. media market, where many blue-leaning Northern Virginia candidates got hit the hardest on TV. That’s when outside GOP groups should have stepped in, he says.
Spirit of Virginia spent $14 million on candidates through November 7 and millions more on polling, voter-contact efforts, and advertising, according to a memo the PAC released on Wednesday. The Republican State Leadership Committee spent roughly $7 million on behalf of Republicans through Election Day, RSLC spokesman Mason Di Palma confirmed to NR.
Spirit of Virginia’s Wednesday memo estimated that Democratic spending in Virginia reached “at least” $50 million.
“We knew from the very beginning that we’d be outspent in this election with every national Democratic group pouring millions into the state,” Rexrode told NR in an exclusive statement. “Our candidates needed every resource available and, as the Governor said many times, we couldn’t afford to have anyone sitting on the sidelines if we were to win these close elections in a state Biden won by 1o.”
RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel has a different version of events.“The RNC’s not a state committee, we’re a federal committee,” McDaniel told WMAL host Larry O’Connor Wednesday evening in the post-debate spin room. “Your candidates can take unlimited state dollars and your governor can take unlimited state dollars. And your governor actually said: ‘We don’t need you guys.’”
McDaniel’s claim that Youngkin denied the RNC’s help was an apparent reference to a separate meeting earlier this summer, when Dave Rexrode — who heads Youngkin’s political-action committee, Spirit of Virginia — reportedly told senior RNC officials that, at that point, the national party did not need to spend money in Virginia.
That summer meeting — on top of the national party’s need to prioritize fundraising for federal races and an expensive presidential-election cycle in 2024 — affected how the RNC budgeted for the rest of the year, as National Review reported in early October.
McDaniel told multiple media outlets Wednesday that the onus was on Virginia Republicans to counteract Democrats’ negative advertising on abortion, which still resonates with independent voters more than a year after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Virginia Democrats messaged almost exclusively on preserving access to abortion, casting Republicans as extremists who wanted to eliminate abortion entirely.
“If somebody’s spending $30 million dollars against you, and they’re lying about you and say you won’t get life-saving care for miscarriages or an ectopic pregnancy, you better get on TV and tell the voters that that’s a lie, or they’ll think that’s the truth,” McDaniel told National Review in Miami.
Virginia Republicans say they did just that, citing the Spirit of Virginia’s $1.4 million ad buy in the final weeks of the campaign calling out Democrats for equating the governor’s 15-week proposal — with exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother — with a flat-out “ban.”
Anderson credits the RNC for spending tens of thousands on voter targeting data efforts. But to effectively fight back against Democrats’ pro-choice advertising and the optics of the DNC’s $1.5 million dollar cash dump, he says, outside groups like the RNC needed to step in with a direct infusion of cash.
“The optics on that are not good and are not well-received by our rank-and-file, grassroots, local Republican volunteers across the state,” he said.
This spat all but ensures that Republican fundraising efforts and disagreements over abortion will continue to be a major inflection point for the GOP heading into 2024. That debate took center stage in Miami Wednesday, when five GOP candidates traded shots over whether the federal government ought to institute a 15-week ban on abortion.
Frontrunner Donald Trump, who counter-programmed the debate with a nearby rally in Hialeah, Florida, has blamed pro-lifers for the GOP’s poor midterm performance and has insisted that, if reelected, he would immediately strike a compromise that would people on all sides of the issue satisfied.
Also on the debate stage Wednesday evening , Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy directed a tirade against McDaniel and the RNC for the Republican Party’s losing streak in 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2023. The ex-pharmaceutical CEO laid blame entirely on McDaniel and called for her resignation on live television, and explicitly mentioned the GOP’s losses this week in Virginia, Kentucky, and elsewhere. Ramaswamy did not, however, blame Trump, who elevated McDaniel to the role.