Recent Virginia and New Jersey elections were billed as a “referendum on the Trump administration” by both sides of the media, perhaps to the disadvantage of conservative strategy. The results are in — the Virginia gubernatorial election ended with a sizable victory for Democrat Ralph Northam over Ed Gillespie, his Republican opponent.
It was actually a senior Gillespie advisor who made the referendum gaffe when speaking to CNN in a recent interview. After a loss, those remarks only give the liberal media more fuel to attack the Trump administration. There was no reason to reach so far before results were fully tallied, and it was not a smart interview at all.
In New Jersey, a Democrat took the governor’s office from incumbent Christ Christie. Phil Murphy will be the next Governor of the state.
In a weird aside, Hoboken, New York, elected a Sikh as mayor – Ravi Bhalla, also a Democrat. For some reason, Tucker Carlson thought it advantageous to include the results from Hoboken alongside the much more important New Jersey race for governor, so the results from New York received much more attention than they otherwise would have.
Overall, Fox News and other right-leaning media outlets did not seem to handle these losses well. They may have been surprised by the unexpected victories in states that should have been held by Republicans, but that was no reason to flub an entire evening’s worth of programming. Tucker Carlson did not do the cause any favors that Tuesday night, but it was Sean Hannity who perhaps took the narrative over the top that night by attempting to reverse the damage in the wrong way.
Instead of adding more useless information to the fire like Carlson, Hannity took the opposite route. He attempted to bury the story by only spending a little bit of time on the elections. However, Hannity chose to spend the infamous “six seconds” on the elections that were actually important to conservatives and the Republican Party.
At the time when conservative viewers were looking to a pundit to help them regroup and plan for the next two to four years, there was nothing but dead air — then a shift into the next story.
Hannity was correct about Virginia and New Jersey both being states that Donald Trump did not carry in the election. Virginia is a perennial swing state. Whether it is going red or blue, it always sees a good competition during presidential election years. However, he spent the six seconds of the election tamping down this connection as his only commentary on the matter. That only served to make people think that Virginia and New Jersey were actually very important, which they are.
New Jersey is currently and has for a while been considered a stronghold for the Democrats. However, the swing in New Jersey just takes longer to move back and forth. NJ may not have a knock down, drag out fight every four years, but there is a slower political movement that occurs here over the course of many elections. New Jersey is also a much more competitive state on the state and municipal level than it is on the federal level. Conservatives there would do well to redouble their efforts in contested territories for 2020.
Instead of bringing on some talking heads to help Republicans make sense of the elections in Virginia and New Jersey, Hannity chose to deflect. After his six second debacle, he chose to switch the topic of discussion to President Trump giving a speech in South Korea. The Korea issue is certainly one that needs to be watched, but the timely priority should have been clear.
Hannity did not even try to clear up the gaffe of the Gillespie associate. All in all, conservatives were left with a very empty feeling until Laura Ingraham began to make sense of everything that had happened that day. However, there were no real strategies put forth to help conservatives move forward after these losses.
Conservatives can distinguish themselves from the Democrats by having a spine in the face of defeat. Hannity and his ilk (rightly) mock the way liberals are still in blatant denial of Donald Trump’s victory last year. However, by burying our party’s mistakes, we are taking a step in that same direction.
~ Conservative Zone
