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Opinion: Five Reasons Why Virginia Republicans Richly Deserved to Lose

Political writer and activist A.J. Cooke offers a first-person explanation for why Virginia Republicans deserved to lose last week

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A.J. Cooke

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A.J. Cooke is a conservative ghostwriter and journalist based in Maryland. He has previously worked and volunteered for dozens of conservative candidates and organizations in Virginia. His opinion are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Valiant News.

This is not a think-piece about how Republicans lost the 2023 Virginia elections after handily sweeping the 2021 election. There are plenty of theories – ranging from “too much Trump” to “not enough Trump” to “Republicans completely screwed up abortion messaging” to “the RNC should have done more” – but they are completely immaterial to this discussion.

I am here to tell you why the average non-political voter in Virginia loathes and distrusts Virginia Republicans. I will also tell it to you from the perspective of someone who had the misfortune to live and work for years as a Virginia Republican activist.

This also means that I speak as a former member of Virginia’s working poor, an inconvenient fact that very few of us are willing to admit even years after we find decent work: that the average Republican campaign staffer in their 20’s lives in dire poverty with no safety net. I will never forget, for instance, the day I rallied against the Virginia Medicaid expansion while I was poor enough to qualify for Medicaid myself.

I could write an entire paper about the struggles of conservative grassroots within the frankly medieval party organizing system of the GOP, but suffice it to say that – with few exceptions – Virginia Republican politicians treat their dogs better than they treat their campaign staff.

The short story is that the Republican Party is increasingly unable to come to grips with the changing demographics and desires of their own voters. As the GOP increasingly becomes a multi-ethnic and working-class populist party, the cultural gulf is widening between leadership and the base. To make matters worse, party strategists have failed to realize that – after generations of Republicans prayed for rain on Election Day to depress the working-class Democrat vote – low-turnout elections no longer favor them and, in order to win, they need to adopt a turnout strategy that energizes their busy, politically-disconnected voters when Donald Trump isn’t on the ballot.

With that in mind, here are the five biggest reasons why Virginia Republicans deserved to lose:

1) WHY Do We Still Have a Car Tax?

For decades now, the #1 political issue in the state of Virginia is the fact that Virginia not only has an annual tax on the value of your car, but they are the highest car taxes in the nation. To say that the car tax is unpopular is an understatement: it is the single state issue which every Virginia Republican hears the most from any voters in any forum.

Adding to the annoyance factor is these taxes are levied by local counties and cities, which means there’s a ready-made excuse for why state legislators can’t do anything about it. Furthermore, Virginians who move across a county line or – God forbid – multiple county lines over multiple years, can expect to receive a series of obnoxious tax letters from every jurisdiction they’ve ever lived in insisting that they’re owed car taxes for the year prior. And if you don’t manage to successfully explain that you haven’t lived in Alexandria for over 5 years now, they’ll take their cut out of your tax refund.

So in 1997, Republican Jim Gilmore campaigned for governor on one promise: “NO CAR TAX”. Bumper stickers with those three words took the state by storm.

“It was the rocket fuel that propelled him into the Executive Mansion,” explains Bob Lewis of the Virginia Mercury. “It needed zero explanation, at least not to any vehicle owner who had already paid through the nose to buy the car, maintain it, insure it and fuel it, yet still had to stroke checks for hundreds of dollars — maybe even more for the most bougie of rides – just for the privilege of owning it. The rates varied by locality, but no one in any of the 133 cities or counties that imposed the levy considered it cheap or fair.”

It was the biggest Virginia landslide victory in living memory. Gilmore annihilated his Democrat opponent by over 13% and Republicans won both houses of the legislature for the first time since 1869. To be clear: Republicans beat Democrats on such a massive scale running on this issue that the closest historical analogue is from the time when Republicans literally invaded Virginia and rewrote their election laws at gunpoint.

Then Governor Gilmore proceeded to use all of his political capital to strongarm the recalcitrant Virginia legislature into actually following through. Despite his best efforts, he had to reach a compromise: he signed into law a scheme where the tax on the value of every car up to $20,000 would be gradually paid for by the state instead of the taxpayer, reaching 100% in 2001.

That plan was never completed. “Moderates” in the legislature balked at following through in the final years and, after Gilmore was termed out, Democrat Mark Warner took back the Governor’s Mansion with the promise that he would finally eliminate the car tax. In a shocking twist, it turned out that Warner was lying and he didn’t do anything.

Eventually inflation and gradual tweaking of the law by “moderate” meddlers weakened it to the point where Virginians are paying significantly more in car taxes today than they were before, even after state subsidies are taken into account. Adding insult to injury, many Virginians are paying higher car taxes each year after the COVID pandemic because higher demand has driven up valuations for used cars.

What have the Republicans of Virginia done about this in 2023? In a word: Nothing. In three words: Nada. Bupkes. Zilch.

In December 2022, Republican Governor Youngkin pleaded with counties and municipalities to eliminate their car taxes, following up on a law he signed which “allowed” them to do so (something they arguably could have done already, but arguing there was a legal loophole which prevented it was a handy excuse). Since then – for the entirety of the 2023 election – his office has not made a single press release about the car tax.

In 2023, there was one bill in the Republican-controlled Virginia House to eliminate car taxes entirely by constitutional amendment, introduced by Republican Tim Anderson. It didn’t even make it out of committee.

It is an understatement to say that Republican failure to campaign statewide on Virginia’s most popular local issue is a staggering display of incompetence. This is especially true in Virginia’s red and purple counties where public transit is minimal, so regressive car taxes have a disproportionate impact on the working poor who have no alternative to driving.

It calls to mind decades of gripes by Republican base voters that – while Democrats constantly gamble their political careers to get “wins” for their voters – Republican leadership will frequently refuse to take action on wedge issues to “preserve” them as motivation for voters on the campaign trail. The problem is that, eventually, voters will realize that GOP promises have no credibility and lose enthusiasm for voting Republican at all.

 

2) Tolls And Towing Trolls Are Out of Control

This is admittedly more of an issue in Northern Virginia – with an honorable mention for toll-sufferers in Hampton Roads and Richmond – but exemplary of the Republican Party’s failure to understand working people. Traffic in Northern Virginia, especially during rush hour, is a constant stress on commuters and locals alike. Interstate 66 and Interstate 395, in particular, are notorious for unpredictable bouts of stop-and-go traffic at any time from 2 p.m. to 2 a.m.

The favored “moderate” “free-market” solution for this extreme congestion? Toll roads! Not just roads that require a toll to use them at all, but reclassifying lanes on existing interstates to “toll lanes” as well. And, to ensure that the toll lanes provide a smooth ride commensurate with the cost, they are programmed with “dynamic congestion pricing” which increases or decreases based on the current level of use.

Sounds reasonable so far, right? Libertarian flagship Reason Magazine surely thinks so.

Reasonable until the dynamic pricing model produces a toll to travel from the Loudoun County suburbs to Washington D.C. that costs over half a day’s wages for Virginia’s poorest workers. Near-$50 toll pricing is an extreme example, of course, but – in an era of extreme inflation – the average working Virginian must be prepared to spend hours a day in traffic if they want to get to work on time because even the average $10 per day in tolls is too big of a dent in their family budgets.

Obviously the only sustainable solution to D.C. Metropolitan Area traffic congestion is more infrastructure, but tacit Republican support for a system where working-class second-class-citizen commuters languish for hours on highways while coastal elites may pay a bribe for the privilege to not have to drive with them- and tut-tutting from “free market” conservatives at local Republican efforts to address the problem – is a giant neon sign to the new conservative GOP base that Republican party leaders don’t care about them or their quality of life.

Predatory towing is another massive gripe for ordinary Virginians that Republicans have made no efforts on whatsoever.

“Under the current system, there is no due process for motorists. Predatory towing companies are allowed to unilaterally decide whether a car was parked legally, how much the owner must pay, and when they will get it back,” complains Coalition for Motorist Rights President Richard McCarty. “Tow truck drivers are so hurried to swipe cars that they have towed children and pets in vehicles as they have dashed off. These companies’ tow lots are public nuisances; the police are regularly called to them, fights break out, and sometimes deadly violence ensues.”

If Virginians do not come up with the money to pay their exorbitant fees – which may easily represent a significant fraction of or even exceed a vehicle’s market value – predatory towers are permitted to sell their vehicles and keep the cash with no compensation to the owner.

Advanced Towing in Arlington is notorious for this, with hundreds of 1-star Yelp reviews from Virginians, Washingtonians and Marylanders attesting to fines of up to $1,000 within 24 hours of towing, massive damage to towed cars and instances of physical intimidation by staff. Former Democrat Attorney General Mark Herring took Advanced Towing to court in 2021 and failed to get more than a $750 token judgement against them; Jason Miyares – his Republican successor who, by statute, is the sole official in the state responsible for policing predatory towing – has so far refused to litigate further.

One would think that Republicans with their eyes on securing legislative majorities in 2023 would pursue landmark legislation to establish reasonable limits on fines and basic rights for motorists… instead, Republicans passed a bill in March allowing tow companies to charge even more.

 

3) Tenant Rights Are a Joke

Virginia has by far the worst protections for renters in the entire DC Metropolitan Area. While arguably the opposite problem exists in the District and Maryland – with deadbeat tenants being extremely difficult to evict – Virginians who rent put themselves at the mercy of utterly unaccountable landlords and corrupt courts.

One key distinction from neighboring jurisdictions is that Virginia landlords who are found liable for wrongly withholding security deposits are only liable for compensatory damages, not punitive. In other words, when your landlord steals from you in Virginia, the best you can hope for is that – if you are lucky enough to win against them in court – they will only return to you exactly what they stole, plus a token amount of interest depending on how long they dragged out the case. If a Virginia judge miraculously were to grant you attorney’s fees, they would almost certainly be far less than what a competent landlord-tenant lawyer would charge.

This means that landlords have no incentive against stealing part or all of your security deposit, regardless of the circumstances. In the roughly 10 years I spent living in Virginia, every single landlord I have ever rented from has attempted to do this. Over time I have essentially become an expert on Virginia landlord-tenant law with more knowledge of the relevant statutes than most practicing commercial real-estate attorneys, specifically to forestall these ceaseless attempts to rob me.

Usually, I was successful in intimidating landlords into dropping their demands or negotiating for a more reasonable degree of larceny. One time, I was able to terrify a slumlord into shaving thousands of dollars off of her security deposit deductions by pointing out that she’d been illegally charging for pest control in violation of common law statute which placed responsibility for rodent infestations on the landlord.

However, I was not always so lucky. One time, I had to break a lease so I could take a job out-of-state. Fortunately for me, the lease I signed had an ironclad boilerplate notice clause:

Notwithstanding anything to the contrary contained herein, either Landlord or Tenant may terminate this lease at any time and for any reason whatsoever after providing thirty (30) days prior written notice to the other party.

Unfortunately for me, my landlord had a different interpretation. He told me, “That doesn’t apply, because I didn’t give you permission to give notice.”

What followed was a three-year legal battle over a matter of roughly $3,000 that he stole from me, which eventually ended up costing me over $30,000. I spoke to some of the best landlord-tenant lawyers in Virginia and they all told me that – while I had an ironclad case – it simply would not make sense given the total amount owed to retain their services. Competent representation would easily cost twice as much as I could hope to recover. Notwithstanding my complete lack of legal education, I poured myself into studying the relevant statutes and rules of the court… then made my case against my landlord’s actual lawyer at trial… and won in General District court!

That wasn’t the end, though. My landlord’s attorney filed an appeal with the Circuit Court and, a year later, I went to trial representing myself again. Once again, I consulted with real estate attorneys who advised me that there was no way their representation would be worth the pittance I hoped to win.

The judge in that case, who was appointed by a Republican legislature, proceeded to declare that I had never given notice. Records of emails, text messages, contemporaneous recording of phone calls, eyewitness testimony from third parties, acknowledgement from the landlord that I had moved out and given him my key… none of these were sufficient evidence of “notice”. In fact, the letter that I sent to my landlord explicitly informing him that I had given already him notice months earlier and was planning to sue him for failure to return my security deposit did not count as notice either.

This happened after breathtaking irregularities at trial. Having realized shortly before trial that his original legal filings had essentially admitted that he was at fault, my landlord’s attorney filed amended defense documents less than 48 hours before trial. Not only did the judge handwave his violation of the rules of the court and lack of notice, he flatly refused to allow me additional time to prepare my case in light of the changing goalposts and did not consider the defense’s previous admissions to be material.

The judge finally ruled that I was liable for the entire 6 months of the lease term that remained after I had left. He then had a sidebar with my landlord’s attorney – without myself present – to do the napkin math for damages on a notepad. Total damages were assessed at nearly $10,000, including attorney’s fees (because apparently arguing that I had given notice by text, in person, by email and by letter was “frivolous”). Infuriatingly, the judge did not even count the $3,000 that had already been stolen from me as a credit against that number.

Having learned my “lesson” that it is impossible for a pro se litigant to succeed in a Virginia Circuit Court or higher, I hired one of the best up-and-coming landlord-tenant lawyers in the state to present my appeal to the Virginia Supreme Court. His services cost me another roughly $20,000. Yet, despite a beautifully-argued appeal that outlined both fundamental breaches of law as well as basic math and interesting unanswered questions in the interpretation of statute that the court had not had a chance to consider before, not a single Supreme Court justice agreed to take the case.

The bottom line is that there is no justice for the working poor in Virginia, and any attempt to seek it in a Virginia court is liable to cost you the shirt off your back. Corrupt actors on both sides of the aisle represent the interests of the powerful over the people and, to the extent that legislators attempt to curb landlord abuses at all, the ones responsible are almost exclusively Democrats.

 

4) The Virginia Employment Commission is a Perpetual Kafkaesque Nightmare

This is going to be the most difficult issue for Republicans to grapple with, because most traditional Republicans could not give a flying fart at a rolling donut about people collecting unemployment – even if they’ve collected it themselves. There is a stigma attached to accepting money for being out of work, even if it’s from an insurance policy that you’ve paid into.

Republicans need to drop this mentality like a tungsten rod from low-Earth-orbit if they want to win elections in the future. The new Republican voter depends on programs like unemployment insurance, Medicare and Social Security to survive, especially in lean times. Anyone who wants their votes needs to be able to credibly say that they will protect them. If it helps older Republicans get behind it, just pretend that these workers are corporations and you’re giving them a bail-out to increase GDP.

And Virginia Republicans need to address the raging dumpster fire that is the Virginia Employment Commission, the worst unemployment system in the country. This is especially true in the wake of COVID-19, when the economy was crippled by government and countless Americans were unceremoniously dumped into the system as a result.

I will start with a painful admission for a conservative: I was on unemployment myself in 2022. It was, by far, the most painful and mind-rending bureaucratic experience of my entire life. Though I won’t “out” them here, I know that I’m not the only Republican activist to have had a similarly nightmarish experience with the VEC.

There have been plenty of stories throughout the Youngkin Administration’s term about gross incompetence at the VEC, with “thousands” waiting for months for claims to be reviewed and one man being hounded by the IRS over a VEC accounting error which falsely credited him with tens of thousands of dollars that he never received. I myself experienced more systemic issues that, at the time, nobody was reporting on and – despite my best efforts – I could not find a single journalist in Virginia willing to do so. In fact, the only reports I could find about the VEC in 2022 were statements from the Youngkin Administration bragging about how unemployment enrollment had been dropping.

For starters, at one point the VEC’s online system was down for five months straight. From about September 2022 to January 2023, practically nobody enrolled in Virginia unemployment could access their online accounts at all. A panic ensued where everybody attempted to file their claims by phone, the only other alternative, which jammed the phone lines for weeks. In that time, my claim “aged out” due to inactivity and I had to reapply.

Reapplication involved certifying that I am in fact a real human at a private contractor’s office (the VEC maintains no in-person offices open to the public), which took three different visits waiting in line for a whopping 8 hours total. That is not an exaggeration: dozens of us waited for hours in a parking lot for our name to be called by the heavily-armed security guard at the facility entrance. At times when we left our cars in the blistering December cold to get some minimal social interaction, most were vociferous in blaming Youngkin. When I finally met a real person and thanked her for soldiering through what must have been extremely difficult conversations, she started crying. It was heartbreaking, she explained, talking to so many desperate, furious people constantly threatening to either do her harm or commit suicide.

Once my account was reinstated – a torturous process which took weeks in and of itself – I was finally able to file for my back-dated weeks. I managed to file exactly two before my account was locked. You see, I had worked a part-time gig that particular week that paid me $1,000 and – as required by law – I reported that income to have my benefits reduced in accordance with what I had made. In most states, this is a fairly painless process where under-employed workers can still contribute to the economy as part-timers while not endangering their unemployment benefits as they continue to look for full time work.

What I did not know is that any report of income to the VEC results in an automatic account lockdown pending a fraud investigation before the claimant is allowed to continue filing. Let me repeat: if you follow the law and report part-time income to the VEC – the opposite of fraud – then they will lock down your account in perpetuity while they “investigate” your lawful activity.

My “investigation” took over two months. Despite all my issues, I could not find a single Republican legislator – two of whom I’d volunteered for on their first winning campaigns – to hear me out. After weeks of emails and calls, the one legislator who eventually helped me was a Democrat, Senator Chap Peterson, who somehow managed to get somebody to prioritize my case in early January.

When my account was finally unlocked with Chap’s help, I discovered that it was impossible to make enough filings over the phone – limited to one per day – to bring my account current before it aged out yet again. So, at the suggestion of the VEC phone operator that Chap managed to get me in touch with, I let her file reports for all 11 my back-dated weeks manually.

She warned me that these reports would take “weeks” to process. It has now been 10 months and not a single one has. I’ve long since gone back to full-time work, but have called the VEC about 9 times since then and – each time – have been told that my concerns would be “escalated to a supervisor”. I have yet to receive a call back.

In January 2023, the first reports emerged that the VEC had an appeals backlog of over 98,000 claims (that’s over 1% of the entire Virginia population). To be clear: this represents people who were denied unemployment, not all the people who were approved – like me – but weren’t able to operate in the system. Eventually, in April, the Youngkin Administration stopped bragging about how great the VEC was doing and started overhauling the commission by firing over 100 employees. If the service improved at all, I have yet to experience it personally.

The VEC has been a problem in Virginia for many years, so it’s not entirely fair to lay the blame exclusively on Youngkin, but it is pathetic to say the least the fact that Republicans failed to anticipate until April that – in the wake of COVID – the fact that the VEC is completely unfit to task would be a serious issue for enough Virginians to make a dent in the election.

 

5) Conventions vs. Primaries is the Cancer Killing the RPV

For those not familiar with the internal politics of the Republican Party of Virginia, allow me to enlighten you as to the most counterproductive waste of time for conservative activists in the Old Dominion: whether to hold conventions or a primaries to select nominees for office. There are very good arguments for both sides, but there is no sane argument for the sheer amount of time, effort and vitriol that goes into this debate every single year among party officials. Primaries are direct elections by voters run by the state, while in conventions rank-and-file Republican Party members who enroll as delegates select nominees. By state law, state and local parties must pick one or the other – hybrid models are not allowed.

Those who argue for conventions are traditionally the more conservative faction, who point out that they cost less and routinely select more ideologically-sound candidates with better social skills. They also function better at whittling down a large field of candidates to ones that a majority can get behind. They say primary nominees tend to be Establishment empty suits funded by big donors who cannot connect with voters.

The moderates, on the other hand, historically pushed for primaries, arguing that they’re scientifically proven to increase performance in the general election because voters tend to get more personally attached to candidates that they had a chance to vote for previously. They also frequently complain that convention nominees too often represent a far-right fringe that alienates regular voters and, since minimal investment is required to win a convention, they often are dead weight when it comes to raising money, leaving the GOP at a massive financial disadvantage to better-funded Democrats.

This dynamic was flipped on its head in 2021 when MAGA Republican Amanda Chase – who was running for Governor – realized that her Pro-Trump bona fides made her much more popular with primary voters than with party activists, some of whom viewed her as abrasive. All of a sudden, some of those who previously supported one side unceremoniously flipped to the other, while deriding those who held firm in their original opinions as traitors to the cause.

The perpetrator is unclear, but someone took the opportunity to robocall legions of Republican voters to “warn” them that GOP Central Committee members were considering inflicting a “tax” on voters before they could cast a vote for the Republican nominee – a fairly disingenuous way to describe a convention, to say the least. These robocalls then gave those angry voters the personal phone numbers of their Central Committee members, who proceeded to get lambasted with death threats.

Chase eventually lost her bid despite a short-lived legal battle attempting to get a convention declared illegal. Whether or not she was ultimately responsible for the acrimonious harassment campaign, the entire debacle illustrates the danger of allowing the RPV to be turned into a mudslinging clown show every year over an issue that has absolutely no bearing on what voters actually care about.

A more sensible GOP would take measures to solve this perennial crisis by either picking one or negotiating a lasting compromise. An even more sensible GOP than that would leverage a majority in the House of Delegates and a Republican governor to change the law to effect a permanent solution, such as a hybrid model.

But we don’t have a sensible GOP. We have the Republican Party of Virginia, where the only shared passion between “MAGA Conservatives” and “Establishment Republicans” is a deep, abiding love affair with failure. Where, poetically, the biggest enemy of Republicans is always ourselves. This may not be why Virginia Republicans lost this year, but this is why they deserved to lose.

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A.J. Cooke
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A.J. Cooke is Cuban-American freelance journalist and ghostwriter based in Northern Virginia. He grew up in Japan, Malaysia and Portugal. His father, Don Cooke, was one of the 1979 Iran Hostages and his grandfather, the late Ambassador Diego Asencio, was held hostage by M-19 guerrillas in the 1980 Bogota Embassy Siege. A veteran political campaigner, fundraiser and ghostwriter, Cooke writes mostly political news with a focus on data science and legal analysis.

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