ICYMI: REXRODE ON RUTHLESS PODCAST – 
SECURE YOUR VOTE VIRGINIA IS HOW WE WIN IN 2023 AND BRING QUALITY CANDIDATES AND A COMMONSENSE AGENDA TO THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE           Contact: [email protected] 

August 8, 2023  

Spirit of Virginia Chairman David Rexrode joined Josh Holmes and John Ashbrook, hosts of Ruthless Podcast, to highlight Governor Youngkin’s efforts to hold the House majority and flip the Senate in Virginia’s General Assembly elections this November. 

Rexrode discussed Youngkin’s early and absentee voting initiative, Secure Your Vote Virginia, the quality, commonsense candidates running for the General Assembly, the stakes of this election, and the importance of Governor Youngkin’s focus on putting parents at the head of the table in their children’s education.

Highlights of Rexrode’s interview are included below. 

REXRODE: The Governor, as your listeners and viewers know, his background is in basketball. He went to Rice, it’s a big part of his life, and he views this as a basketball metaphor – for too many years now, our party has basically been sitting on the bench. Tip-off has happened, our players are sitting on the bench watching the Democrats run up and down the court making free baskets, uncontested baskets, and then we roll around with two minutes left, and we’re down points and get mad that we haven’t been playing the game.

So, we wanted to take a different approach this year. And we decided that we had to tell voters: you got to get off the bench, you got to get in the game, you have to participate. There are four ways to do that, we don’t care which four ways you do, but you got to trust that if you get your vote by mail, it’s going to count. Through the website secureyourvotevirginia.com, you’ll be able to track your ballot to make sure it’s received, that it’s processed, that it’s counted. We’re obviously pushing people to early vote because we can’t, as a party, continue to try to make up for it just on Election Day. We lost too many races last year, in 2022, because we didn’t have that full operation across the country. We have to fix that this year.

REXRODE: We got the candidates we needed. As you mentioned, the Governor weighed in on primaries – we went 10 for 10. Because if we don’t have the right players on the court, we can’t win. 

When we looked at the races this year, I’ll use the Senate as a great example, we have seven races, and we said: who can win these races? We ended up getting three women as our nominees, including a teacher and an OBGYN. We recruited an African American Naval officer to run in Virginia Beach. We have a Hispanic small business owner in Loudoun County. We recruited two law enforcement officers, one of whom worked for both Obama and Trump fighting child prostitution. Those are our nominees because they can win. 

REXRODE: What’s at stake is remarkable. As we highlight what the differences are, it highlights how important it is that we win. Three things that we’re talking about that the Democrats stopped the Governor and Republicans in Richmond from doing: First, they want to pass a bill that, if you’re a drug dealer and you’re distributing fentanyl, and somebody dies, you should potentially be charged with murder. Democrats said, “No, we’re going to protect the drug dealers.” 

Second, we said if your minor has access to Tik Tok and some of these other technologies out there, they shouldn’t be able to capture a minor’s information and sell it to anybody they want without restrictions. Democrats said, “Nope, we’re going to stand with Big Tech.” 

Third, the most egregious one is when Democrats had complete control, they decided to tie our environmental policies to what comes out of Sacramento and San Fransisco. So, they passed a law that we tried to repeal, that says that in a few years, you can no longer buy a gas-powered car or truck in Virginia – the only option will be electric vehicles and that Californians get to dictate our energy policy in Virginia. We tried to repeal it, and the Democrats said, “Nope, we’re going to let Californians determine our economic interests.” That’s what’s at stake. 

REXRODE: For so long, too many candidates in our party just wouldn’t touch the education issue. They were afraid of it, and the Governor leaned in and said, “We can all agree we want higher academic standards for our kids, we all believe we need the best teachers possible, but there has to be some accountability; we have to allow parents to be involved.” Terry McAuliffe said the quiet part out loud, but that’s what they believe. 

...

So, the Governor said, “We’re going to tackle those issues head-on.” It’s a way for us to win voters over because it’s the right issue. It’s getting parents involved in their kids' education – we saw that in Loudoun; it’s the number two or three issues in all of our targeted districts because parents, for the first time when they were home, actually got to see what their kids were learning through Zoom and it wasn’t what they thought their kids were learning, and so they’ve become much more engaged, which is a good thing.

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Paid for by Spirit of Virginia

Spirit of Virginia, PO Box 3950, Merrifield, VA 22116