Thread by @greggiroux

"After Virginia Votes" #VAGOV postmortem with Will Ritter, media strategist for Glenn Youngkin's campaign, and Michael Halle, senior adviser to Terry McAuliffe's campaign:
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Halle (D): "What we did not anticipate was the level of turnout on election day and that early voting would make up less than 35% of the overall vote. As the early vote and vote by mail surged at the end, we were expecting it was going to make up a larger proportion." 2/x

Halle: "What certainly I think we didn't expect was that some of the more Republican areas would be performing at near 2020 levels."
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Halle re turbulent Afghanistan exit: "In the couple of weeks after those events took place, I think that was the first and only real shift we saw in our internal polling where things tightened from 4 or 5 points to just around even or within the margin of being even." 4/x

Ritter (R): "We had been very clear about running on Virginia issues" and predicted McAuliffe campaign would "try to nationalize the race because that would work better with his voters." 5/x

Ritter: "We decided to stick with Virginia issues and kind of stayed true to it. I don't think we put a single ad that mentioned Joe Biden on television." 6/x

Ritter: "We had started talking about education early. We never really wanted to cede that ground to the Democrats and allow us to be bludgeoned by it later on the campaign. So we started talking about it early."
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Ritter on McAuliffe debate comments on parents & education: "Twitter was telling me to make it into an ad before we even had a script for it" because "people watching on TV were just kind of jarred that something that concrete would come out." 8/x

But Halle noted big shift to Rs in NJ and other non-VA elections: "It's tough to argue that that moment was this huge shift" and "there's no quantitative evidence that would suggest that, especially when you look nationally at these other races." 9/x

Ritter re Trump: "We understood what they [Ds] were doing" but instead of "falling into that trap and playing that 'do you like him or do you not like him' game, is there a way that we could shift the conversation on to safety, on to schools, on to cost of living." 10/x

Halle: "The national environment and mood certainly played a lot more, I think, into kind of how people were viewing Democrats as a brand than just Terry's
record as governor and what he was presenting in terms of looking forward." 11/x

Ritter on Rs framing race as outsider Youngkin running to shake things up against "triple D" control of Richmond & Washington: "If the frame was Republican versus Democrat and that's it, then we don't win that fight." 12/x

Ritter: "The secret weapon we had was Glenn Youngkin." #vagov 13/13