It's not about Trump: Jason Miyares keeps a local focus in Virginia attorney general race
by Salena Zito, National Political Reporter |
WINCHESTER, Virginia — A few months after the Republicans lost the 2012 presidential election, then-party Chairman Reince Priebus ordered up a report that told him what he already knew: The GOP’s position on immigration was killing them, and they needed a better message.
Despite that report and Republicans' belief that it was the message rather than the messenger, they nominated Donald Trump, whom critics believed to be the most anti-immigrant, race-illiterate candidate in modern American politics. A funny thing happened: They earned more Hispanic votes.
Establishment Republicans, wedded to the old ways and blinded by their hatred of Trump, were missing this new conservative populist coalition forming right in front of them. The multiethnic, working-class coalition they had sought to create with a liberal immigration policy was indeed coming together, but not at all as they expected.
Republicans made history in 2020 with the number of female and nonwhite candidates who won seats in the U.S. House. By the time Congress was sworn in last January, nearly three dozen Republican House members were female, black, or Hispanic.
All of these diverse candidates ran and won in districts that represent all that America is — urban, rural, and suburban. That number included Democratic seats they flipped that most of the media and even the Democrats didn’t see coming.
The other underreported story is that Hispanic voters are moving toward Republican candidates because of their ideas on entrepreneurship, lower taxes, and small government, as well as their lived experiences involving faith, school choice, security, and family.
The national press only see the Republican Party through the prism of Twitter. They throw "Trump" or "Trumpism" or "insurrection" into every story about a Republican candidate, rarely understanding the nuance that although most Trump voters still like Trump, he is not necessarily the prism through which they see everything.
Democrats are making the same mistake, trying to make every race about Trump. The press and Democratic Party are covering and campaigning, respectively, through a rearview mirror, while the people they are covering or whose votes they want to earn are looking through the windshield and living in the moment.
Here in Virginia, you have front-and-center a Hispanic candidate for attorney general in Republican Jason Miyares. If elected, he would become the first-ever Latino elected attorney general in the Commonwealth and the first son of an immigrant to serve as attorney general in almost 200 years.
He is challenging Democrat Mark Herring, the two-term incumbent liberal activist who, like Gov. Ralph Northam, admitted to dressing up in blackface when he was in college.
Miyares's mother fled Cuba alone and without resources as a teenager. “She eventually married, and our family moved to Virginia Beach when I was in grade school,” he said in an interview with the Washington Examiner.
Miyares, 45, said that since then, he has earned his bachelor's degree at James Madison University and his law degree at the College of William & Mary, served as an assistant prosecutor in the Virginia Beach Commonwealth's Attorney’s Office, and decided to run for the house delegate seat in suburban Virginia Beach in 2015. He won in a landslide.
You don’t have to follow too many of Miyares's events and forums across the state to realize the issues he is running on have little to do with the obsession the press or the Democrats have with all things Trump.
What they are missing is the aspirational message that is moving traditional Democratic immigrants toward a Republican who touches on both the immigrant experience and the importance of curtailing out-of-control crime.
“I tell people all of the time, if your family came to this country seeking hope and opportunity, there's a good chance your family is a lot like my family. And it'd be the biggest honor of my — I'd be the first attorney general ever elected in Virginia to be the child of an immigrant, obviously the first Hispanic elected to any statewide office in Virginia,” he explained.
Miyares said he is mindful of the responsibility to be true to his family’s experiences if he wins because they mirror so many others: “The immigrant story, whether it is Korean American, Indian American, Vietnamese American, or Hispanic American, such as my own, is always the same. We all recognize that this is an extraordinary country, something we don’t talk about enough today.”
If Miyares wins next Tuesday, smart Democrats, Republicans, and members of the press should spend the next week analyzing why. The Republican Party is becoming more diverse, and the Democrats are not.
They should all recognize that voters care about issues that face their lives and have nowhere near the obsession with Trump that some think they do.
“The way I have won every one of my races in the General Assembly is listening to what voters are concerned about and talk to them about how we address them," he said. "I represent an oceanfront district of Virginia Beach. It's one of the classic, highly educated, suburban districts, and each time, I have won it with an average of 60% of the vote."
Miyares said he has won because of his tone, his demeanor, and the local issues voters want him to focus on. “I do find it a little incredible that the Democrats think it's a winning strategy to talk about a 75-year-old former president who's no longer in office and isn't on the ballot, while we're all talking about Virginia-specific issues that are affecting everyday Virginians," he said. "Every day, we're talking about what's going on in our schools, the crime. In Loudoun County, you had this issue where the one-party rule in Richmond ended what used to be a mandatory reporting requirement of sexual assault in schools."
“I'm talking about our murder rate in Virginia — it's the highest it's been in decades — or the fact that the parole board has let out violent killers, murderers, rapists, cop killers, out sometimes with decades on their sentence,” he explained. “We're talking about guys like David Simpkins . He had 56 prior felony convictions and was supposed to be in prison until the year 2066. And this guy had abduction, forcible sodomy, 14 armed robberies on his record. They let him out 46 years early, and what did he do with his 56th chance? He commits his 57th felony. That's what we're talking about.”
Miyares said it is a fool's errand to litigate on a previous president who's no longer in office and is not on the ballot: “I think it shows a little bit of how out of touch they are with what matters to voters.”
Miyares added that he thinks voters are smart enough to recognize that this election is about what's present here in Virginia now and that people have begun to recognize one-party rule in either direction isn't helping Virginia: “That's what I'm telling voters. I'll be that check and balance we need in Richmond, because right now, it's not serving us well. So when you don't want to talk about present issues, when you don't talk about your normal record, you're going to talk about past politicians who are no longer in office and aren't on the ballot says a lot about how out of touch Democrats are with voters.”
Brad Todd, who co-wrote The Great Revolt: Inside the Coalition Reshaping American Politics in 2018 with Salena Zito, serves as a strategist for Miyares.
And:
It is fairly evident, Americans of all colors still like their freedom and have a continuing low regard for government solutions. Seemingly, they prefer what the conservative model theoretically offers. If this is factually the case then why isn't the Republican Party the majority one?
Is it because Republicans got tagged with The Party Of The Rich Label eons ago and never learned how to defend against this smear or are too standoffish to shake off the effect of the bad mouth attachment?
Are Republicans so inept they are incapable of insincerity and guile. They are politicians and insincerity should not be anathema. After all, Democrats, liberals exude/ooze hypocrisy.
Since most of what the Democrats are selling has proven to be destructive why do blacks still prostrate themselves on the altar of welfare? Don't they realize, after all the questionable benefits of dependency, they are still on the bottom of most statistics when it comes to education, home ownership, unencumbered assets, savings etc. Is it caused by a cultural void, the continuing drag of dependency, low expectations etc?
Israel was founded mainly by refugees who were also enslaved against their will, forced to exist in concentration camps by the "Master Race" but once freed created a nation that is the wonder of the world. Why have they succeeded against all odds? It certainly cannot be because their surrounding neighbors embraced their presence.
Meanwhile, Blacks and Hispanics benefitted from Trump's economy, real wages went up, job opportunities expanded yet, they continued to prefer Democrats as they voted monolithically and elected Biden who immediately dumped on them as well as the entire nation.
Chicago is a perfect example of a large urban area where Democrats are constantly re-elected and the plight of the underclass continues to be stuck where it has been for decades. Obviously black Chicagoans do not like watching their children mowed down by gangs shooting at each other but they keep electing city officials who use them as pawns. The current mayor of Chicago is an absolute disgrace and a typical hypocrite who has no idea what she is doing and in Atlanta the picture is close to a replication.
Rejecting the teachings of MLK and embracing the rabble rousing prattle of Reverend Shakedown Al Sharpdown or the lunacy of Rep.. "Floosie" Waters is a check mate move. It might give one a buzz and an opportunity to unload one's frustrations but it does not help get you a living wage.
You have to be some kind of stupid to believe repeating the same thing and following fools will produce different results. I have been told even Einstein knew better.
I am no sociologist and I certainly have no answer but I at least recognize when something is wrong and am confronted by something that ain't working ,I have enough sense to try and figure out how to get out of the trap.
Attacking whitey for what he has not done to relieve yourself of what you did not experience seems to me a tragic waste of time, energy and opportunity.
Thinking and investing in organizations like Black Lives Matter is the solution and embracing garbage like America is systemically and racially flawed is a poor excuse for ones own self-destruction.
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