Youngkin, RNC Chair Whatley: Virginia is a battleground state in 2024 (2024)

Swinging by a favorite post-church brunch spot to pour coffee for GOP activists and to welcome Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley to Richmond, Gov. Glenn Youngkin on Wednesday briefly and privately shared his tips with the party leader about how to win Virginia elections.

“Look, we see Gov. Youngkin as a trailblazer,” Whatley said an hour later, as he left the gathering of area Republican committee chairs and activists at a breakfast gathering at McLean’s Restaurant near Scott’s Addition.

Earlier, Whatley told reporters that he believes Virginia — which has voted Democratic in every presidential election since 2008, by margins of 4 to 10 percentage points — is in play this year.

“We’re very excited about what we see in Virginia. This is obviously a battleground state,” Whatley said.

“I think it’s a competitive state, and we saw from Gov. Youngkin during his campaign back in 2021 how a Republican can win Virginia, and that is by running a common-sense campaign, listening to the issues that families are talking about, and putting solutions on the table for the issues that need to be addressed Virginia,” Whatley said.

He said former President Donald Trump’s campaign here will be tailored for Virginia.

“Virginia is a purple state. You’re not going to be able to win with just Republican voters,” he said. “Democrats can’t win with just Democrat voters. You’re going to have to compete in the middle. You’re going to have to compete for the independents, and you’re going to have to have a conversation with every Virginia family. That’s what we want to do.”

7,700 volunteers in one week

Youngkin has credited his 2021 victory in part to a focused effort to have supporters work their networks of friends and family to get out the vote: his “10 friends” catchphrase. On Wednesday, he worked a small room at McLean’s, pouring coffee and having one-on-one chats — including admiring Noelle St. Laurent’s 4-month-old son Aiden — with the GOP local and district committee members and other activists at the breakfast.

Speaker Don Scott, D-Portsmouth, said that when it comes to mobilizing a ground game for November, Democrats are taking the lead.

“I’ve never seen so much enthusiasm since 2008,” when Barack Obama won, Scott said.

“We’ve signed up 7,700 volunteers in the last week. We had 2,300 people turning out this weekend,” he said, adding that they knocked on 12,500 doors this weekend.

“You never want to take anything for granted, but we’re going to build on November 2023” when Democrats won a House of Delegates majority and held on to their state Senate majority in the face of Youngkin’s aggressive push to secure GOP majorities in both bodies, he said.

Trump has repeatedly claimed cheating or rigged elections remain an issue after what he said was a stolen election in 2020. But Whatley said Wednesday: “In Virginia, we feel pretty comfortable with the election integrity efforts from the government that are in place right now through Gov. Youngkin.”

He added: “We want to see that the federal law that says that illegal immigrants can’t vote is going to be enforced by the state. We want to see voter ID. We want to see the states clean up their voter rolls. We want to see in states that have mail-in balloting like Virginia, basic protections that are going to be in place so things like a witness requirement, a signature requirement, they have to go in mailboxes, as opposed to drop boxes, that they have to be back in by Election Day,” he said.

How the election will play out

Virginia does not require witness signatures and counts mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day even if they arrive a few days later. Whatley said he’s satisfied that the vote will be fair.

Part of the Trump campaign’s effort here, as in other states, means “we want to be in the room whenever votes are being cast or counted with volunteers, with poll workers, with poll observers … when the votes are being counted, we want to make sure that we’re in the room as well,” he said.

Another element of the campaign’s ground game will be much like what U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., has said Democrats plan: an earlier-than-usual effort to knock on voters’ doors to encourage them to vote.

“There’ll be a lot of advertising, a lot of social media but there’s nothing like those five minutes face to face to cut through the clutter,” Whatley said as he left the gathering.

Generally, the issues the Trump campaign will focus on are inflation, immigration and the nation’s international posture, Whatley said.

He did not mention abortion, and when asked about that issue, given that Virginia is the only southern state with broad access to abortion, Whatley said he didn’t think the issue would arise here since “President Trump has said very clearly that this needs to be a state issue. He feels very strongly that having Roe v. Wade overturned and returning to issue back to the States was a core mission for him.”

Whatley also said he did not believe the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on presidential immunity would be an issue, given Democrats’ arguments that it would give Trump excessive freedom to act in a dictatorial manner.

“I think what the Supreme Court did was they codified an understanding that has been in place since the country was formed, presidents have always had presumed immunity,” he said. “I think that if you want to talk about, you know, changes in that dynamic, what you’ve got to take a look at is Joe Biden’s proposal to radically alter the Supreme Court.”