How Youngkin's top advisers would have attacked Youngkin

[brooklynite]

Politico

On Wednesday, we interviewed Youngkin’s two top strategists, JEFF ROE and KRISTIN DAVISON. We’ll have a full transcript of the nearly hourlong session in POLITICO Magazine on Friday and you can also hear the interview on Friday’s episode of our flagship podcast, Playbook Deep Dive.

...snip...

We asked Roe and Davison how they would have advised the Democrats if they had been working for McAuliffe. Here’s what Davison said:

“I would have hit us on education first a lot harder than they did. That's actually what I was afraid of for most of the time, annoying everyone about it. But TERRY [MCAULIFFE] focused so much on [DONALD] TRUMP and made his campaign so much about Trump, then abortion, and then I think climate change was in there for a minute. It's like they literally took the Rolodex of all the base issues and tried to hit us as being extreme on them. … And what they should have done instead was go towards the typical: Democrats are very good at painting Republicans as being bad on education, saying we’re going to fire teachers and cut pay. Having been governor before, he had a record there. He should have hit us first and disqualified the issue.”

We’ll have much about this in the magazine and podcast, but there are two key points here: 1) Youngkin’s advisers were preparing to lean into a Democratic issue since January and their big fear was that Democrats would retain their traditional advantage on that issue. 2) The race was about education, as many gubernatorial races often are, not CRT, which was only important to a small subset of voters.

[BlueTsunami2018]

1. I would have hit him with the Carlyle group among other things.

But then again, I’m not a huge Carlyle investor, so it would have been feasible for me.

They just ran a stupid campaign.