back to media coverage
Scott Rigell never stopped believing
By Brian Kirwin, BearingDrift.com – 11/19/2010
“Don’t Stop Believin’” was the anthem playing as Scott Rigell hit the state to declare his victory for the Second Congressional District. With a musician’s showmanship, he shook hands across the stage, turned to the audience, and raised his hands in victory in perfect time with a drum crescendo.
Believing is something Rigell never stopped doing. Judging from his 53%-42% drubbing of one-term wonder Rep. Glenn Nye, you couldn’t fault a few people if they forget the rough road it took to get there.
Rigell’s primary opponents kept his nomination under 40%, and many of them campaigned far to the right of Rigell, who didn’t leave much room on his right to begin with. The primary got negative, all focused on Rigell, but all faced on issues and never got personal.
Still, the major accomplishment that set the stage for a November victory was not his victory in that primary, but who joined him in his victory. Ben Loyola. Bert Mizusawa. Scott Taylor. Jessica Sandlin. Rigell’s primary opponents.
In what could’ve been a divisive split among factions in the Republican primary, these candidates immediately endorsed Rigell and each one worked event after event, face to face and in media, to support Rigell for Congress.
The press presumably would’ve written enough stories about a GOP-Tea Party split from June to November but never got the chance.
Rigell and his political consultants worked hard over the summer solidifying that base and expanding it to independents with great success. It proved to be a worthy time investment when the Democrats made the strategic decision to go after that base themselves.
Typical attacks on Rigell from the Democrats were abandoned. Typical defenses of Nye were similarly back-burnered. Democrat strategy, tipped weeks earlier in polling calls to Republicans to test attacks on Rigell, was to peel conservatives from him and direct them to gadfly independent candidate Kenny Golden.
Mailboxes and televisions were full of Democratic-funded ads touting the conservatism of Golden over Rigell, and the most it gave voters was a slight pause. Their political consultants miscalculated immensely.
By Election Day, Rigell’s work uniting those on the right and center-right showed its power. Conversely, Democrats’ almost singular focus on promoting Rigell-Golden vote splitting left very little messaging about why anyone should vote for Glenn Nye.
Nye’s vote percentage in polling never escaped the low 40s and his 42% finish was more due to shoulder-shrugging Democrats than Tea Party conservatives.
Conservatives paid little attention to advertisements supporting Kenny Golden that were “paid for and authorized by the Democratic Party of Virginia.” In the end, Golden’s 4 %, once thought likely to be the difference between a Republican win and a Republican loss, was too insignificant to warrant a footnote.
Rigell’s campaign and political consulting firms were not without missteps, but they were missteps that were quickly overcome. Early drama from the Rigell camp about which candidates should debate gave way to an “anyone, anytime, anyplace” stance that robbed Golden of his last decent press coverage. Even last-second smears from Democratic bloggers and political consulting firms landed nary a scratch on Rigell, who frequently and rapidly responded in classy fashion and built an air of inevitability about this race in the closing weeks.
Perhaps it’s human nature to examine a blowout as a collapse of the loser rather than the excellence of the winner. Rigell and his political consultants truly ran an exceptional race that won Hampton and Norfolk, as well as landslides on the Eastern Shore and Virginia Beach. Nye won all of these in 2008.
How similar 2012 is to 2008 will decide if Rigell is our own one-term wonder or a Congressman that has built coalitions in Virginia Beach, Hampton, Norfolk, and the Eastern Shore to gird a conservative majority for years to come.
With the help of his political consulting firms, Rigell has launched a mission of ethics reform for Congress with ideas that have great popularity and promise: term limits, limits on Congressional office perks and franking, and bans on non-defense earmarks.
All these ideas have supermajority support and go a long way to attracting the independent, change-oriented voters that made up the 2008 voting population. The longer Rigell wears the reformer’s hat, the stronger his polling will become. The reality that Congressional re-election campaigns begin the day after the election ends was never more clear than when Rigell announced these reforms in a package he will advocate, with the added pledge to follow them whether they are passed into law or not.
In one day, Scott Rigell showed more leadership than Glenn Nye did in two years.
Perhaps that, more than anything, tells the story of the 2010 election in Virginia’s Second District.
Contact for political reporters
Brian Kirwin, political consultant
(757) 718-3225
brian@rourkpr.com
About our political consulting firm
Brian Kirwin is one of Virginia’s top-notch political consultants and works with various political consulting firms to serve clients in Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Hampton, Eastern Shore, and throughout Virginia.
