There is one central item that Bob McDonnell accomplished which allowed him to win such a lopsided victory last night: He avoided the trap that many Republicans had fallen into in previous cycles by having a narrative of specificity and not abstraction. If you watched the Republican presidential primary debates in the previous cycle you could not help but notice each of the candidates trying to one-up each other in references to Ronald Reagan and his brand of conservatism. (If you had tried to play a drinking game with "Reagan" as the trigger-word, you would have succumbed to alcohol poisoning within five minutes.) Substantively, the discussion never went beyond this, leaving Republicans unable to speak to voters who were not (and never really are) interested in questions of abstract political thought but who have specific concerns about specific issues.
Bob McDonnell went beyond this. Avoiding fruitless reiteration of how he was a Ronald Reagan Republican or dwelling on his general conservative principles, the Governor-elect used those principles to adopt specific policy proposals that directly addressed Virginians' specific concerns on quality of life issues such as taxes and transportation. In so doing he won by twenty points in a state that had given President Obama a five point margin of victory only one year ago.
If Republicans want to garner the support of the independent voters who ultimately decide elections as McDonnell has done in Virginia than they must do the exact same thing. Stop talking about your fundamental conservative principles and use them; use them to craft specific policy proposals that directly address voters' very specific concerns and talk exclusively about them. Do that and you can win, especially when the party in power is only doubling voter anxiety with their hell-bent effort to enact a radical agenda.
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