Cardinal News: The unconventionally conventional campaign of John Reid

The Republican candidate for lieutenant governor has little money, so he’s running an old-fashioned campaign that involves giving lots of interviews and meeting lots of others. Meanwhile, other candidates have largely taken their campaigns online where they don’t have to answer questions or risk awkward interactions with random voters.

John Reid, the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, came to the Roanoke Valley last week and did something few other candidates are willing to do.

He invited journalists to meet him at the Salem Public Library. For about 45 minutes, he stood there, answering whatever questions were thrown at him.

It’s something his Democratic opponent, Ghazala Hashmi, has never done.

Neither has the Democratic candidate for attorney general, Jay Jones.

It’s something the Republican candidate for governor, Winsome Earle-Sears, has barely done, with one impromptu meeting with the news media at Olde Salem Days that wasn’t announced in advance.

The other two statewide candidates, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger and Republican Attorney General Jason Miyares, have taken questions but only for limited amounts of time and then as part of other events — what’s known in politics as a “gaggle,” a brief Q&A that lasts until some campaign aide signals “we just have time for one more.” Of the six statewide candidates, only Reid has made his willingness to take questions the event — and taken those questions until they run out.

What we’re seeing here — or, maybe more accurately, not seeing — is the confluence of three separate trends. As the state’s population has shifted to the east, and our politics have realigned along geographic lines, statewide candidates see a lot less reason to come through even the biggest metro area in the western part of the state — and Democrats see even less reason. That’s not really news, though. What is new is the third trend: Candidates have become less accessible, not just to pesky journalists but to the general public, as well.

Campaigns have changed.

Lots of things change — fashions, hairlines, waistlines, even our greatest mountains erode over time. However, the degree to which campaigns have changed is a dramatic one when we look back over just a few election cycles.

Candidates used to interact with the general public a lot more than they do today.

They spent a lot of time encountering random voters. They’d go to fairs and festivals. They’d shake hands at factory gates. They’d stop in at iconic diners. If candidates came to Roanoke, they’d almost always do a tour of the Roanoke City Market and stop by the Texas Tavern as a way to show their street cred. In Staunton, Wright’s Dairy-Rite has a wall full of politicians who stopped by. Furthermore, candidates announced all these visits in advance so journalists could tag along. That was self-serving, of course — candidates wanted to be seen mingling with the populace — but their encounters with random voters weren’t staged.

Candidates also subjected themselves to more questioning than they do today. I’ve made this point before but I’m going to keep making it: Candidates used to show up at the state’s major newspapers (and not just the major ones, sometimes) and answer serious questions about policy. Candidates were also expected to put out detailed position papers that would lay out what they’d do in office.

Statewide candidates also once spent a lot of time speaking to “persuadable” voters, particularly in the form of business groups and civic groups. I remember when the Salem Rotary Club lunch meeting was considered almost a required stop for candidates, particularly Republican ones.

Today almost none of this happens. Candidates rarely appear in public in unscripted settings. They also take pains to limit the opportunities at which they can be questioned — by journalists and random voters alike. They still talk to some business groups, but not nearly as many as they used to. That’s why it was so notable to me when Republican Winsome Earle-Sears passed up an invitation to speak to the Virginia Trucking Association, saying it didn’t fit her schedule — when she was in the same town and had no other public events scheduled. That once would have been unheard of. She never did meet with the business group Virginia FREE, as other candidates did.

What passes for position papers today would once have been regarded as flimsy; this year Earle-Sears hasn’t bothered to release any. She’s also avoided being questioned by Virginia-based journalists, so she hasn’t had to take questions about her lack of specificity on state policy. Many of these candidates have done one-on-one interviews with Cardinal (in Jones’ case, that was before his text messages were revealed) so they haven’t avoided questions entirely, but the old-fashioned news conference with the entire corps of journalists is a thing of the past. When candidates do agree to interviews, they’re able to pick and choose who they want to talk with, rather than take their chances with whoever thrusts a microphone in front of them.

Why should people care whether candidates are taking questions from journalists? Here’s why: Because candidates ought to face some questioning about their plans. Once candidates knew they had to endure that gauntlet of questions, from journalists and interest groups alike; now many have figured out ways to avoid much of that kind of interrogation. Spanberger and Miyares have still adhered to certain conventions — they’ve met with journalists more frequently than their opponents — but even their media availabilities have been fewer than what previous candidates for those offices had to endure. The news media is not exactly blameless in this. The very term “news media” today covers a lot of partisan-tinged operations that didn’t exist in the past. Candidates are naturally reluctant to engage with them.

So where is the campaign today, if it’s not out on the proverbial “campaign trail”? It’s online. 

Candidates today have largely moved their campaigns to social media, where they can give the appearance of interacting directly with voters even if they’re not. This is not an entirely bad thing; it’s always better when voters can hear exactly what the candidates have to say and not have it filtered through media gatekeepers. On the other hand, that means candidates don’t have to answer as many questions as they once did — because in some cases they’re not taking questions at all.

The Earle-Sears campaign hasn’t responded to any inquiries from Cardinal since early September; recent stories by the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, the Virginia Mercury and Virginia Public Media said she didn’t respond to their inquiries, either. Jones gave one interview about his text messages (to a Richmond television station) but otherwise hasn’t made himself available for any others. His social media account documents events he’s attended, but none of those were announced in advance so that journalists could attend and ask questions. (He has now announced one event: a late Friday announcement about a campaign event Saturday morning in Norfolk). His political circumstances might be unique at the moment, but his calendar is not. Candidates once routinely announced their schedules and invited the news media to join them; now they rarely do unless it’s some staged event, such as Earle-Sears’ appearance this fall with former presidential candidate and co-DOGE leader Vivek Ramaswamy or Spanberger’s upcoming appearance with former Transportation Secretary (and perhaps future presidential candidate) Pete Buttigieg. Or, in Jones’ case, an event with the Norfolk Federation of Teachers.

There’s always been a certain amount of stagecraft involved in politics, but there’s a lot more now: The idea of a candidate spending their days attending events with random voters, and being available to journalists whenever they want to ask a question, is an anachronism — a quaint relic of days gone by. 

And yet that’s how Reid is running his campaign.

Call it an unconventionally conventional campaign.

Other candidates are spending their days on “call time” — phoning potential donors — and making videos for use online or on television. Reid is actually out doing old-fashioned campaigning — a “minimum of two or three events on a slow day,” he says. Maybe four or five on a Saturday and Sunday.

His news conference in Salem last week came about because of Reid’s insistence that he should be doing something “every minute of the day.” He had a hole in his schedule while he was in the Roanoke Valley, so he decided to fill it with a news conference. “I don’t want to sit in a hotel room,” he said. “It also helps that I’m not afraid of reporters.” Reid is a former Richmond television journalist who later handled media relations for former Gov. and Sen. George Allen and former President Ronald Reagan, then went into corporate communications and hosted a radio talk show before running for office. On this day in Salem, he had no special topic, no particular message of the day — he was there to answer whatever people wanted to ask, and the topics ranged from campaign strategy to economic development to the rhetoric of political violence.

It was like stepping back in time to a different political era.

“If you want to do this kind of work, you better be prepared to knock on doors and talk to people,” Reid said. Other candidates are mostly knocking on email inboxes and talking in recorded videos on social media where there’s no risk of a misstep or running into some voter who might challenge the candidate. If, by chance, these other candidates are out holding events, they’re not making those events widely known, and they’re certainly not inviting journalists to witness them.

That’s not to say that Reid is a better choice than Hashmi. That’s very much a matter of political taste. You’re all adults; you can make your own decision. If you’re undecided, you can check out our Voter Guide to see how the two candidates — indeed, how all six statewide candidates and many others — answered our issues questionnaire.

My point here is to show just how much campaigns have changed and how little candidates today interact with the general public. I’ve gone back through the social media accounts of the candidates for governor and lieutenant governor to see what events they’ve documented since Oct. 1. I’ve left out the two attorney general candidates because a) Miyares is the incumbent so has a day job that keeps him in Richmond a lot, b) Jones was embroiled in his text message scandal, and c) both were involved in debate prep for last Thursday’s debate. The gubernatorial candidates also had a debate the previous Thursday; preparation for that took them off whatever campaign trail they might have been on.

What I found: All the candidates for governor and lieutenant governor posted photos of events they attended on Saturdays; almost all posted photos of events they attended on Sundays, generally church visits. During the week, Spanberger, Earle-Sears and Hashmi often documented no events. They regularly posted campaign messages, or their latest ads, but only sporadically posted about attendance at events. Only Reid documented multiple events a day; I only found one day in October where he didn’t record any events. Many of those events were with what were sure to be friendly crowds. Others, though, were from encounters that could be more unpredictable, such as shaking hands at factory gates.

Reid’s day last Tuesday was typical: He held the news conference in Salem, followed up with a meet-and-greet with local supporters, visited early-voting sites in Roanoke and Salem, toured a medical device factory in Roanoke, then went to Harrisonburg for an evening event with the entire Republican ticket. The next day he was back in Lynchburg for events and, on the way back to Richmond, posted a photo of himself pulled over by the side of the road in Charlotte County to conduct an interview with a journalist via Zoom.

The tradeoff is that Reid is not raising money the way other candidates are. The most recent campaign finance reports show that there were 16 House of Delegates candidates across the state who raised more money in September than Reid did. Maybe he should be spending less time on the road and more time calling donors. His willingness to take questions is, in some ways, a move to get attention since he doesn’t have the money to pay for impressions on social media. Still, his eagerness to campaign is more like what campaigns used to be — it’s all the other candidates who are the ones out of sync with history.

However, the present is also out of sync with the past in other ways.

The classic tale of how campaigns used to be came 40 years ago. In 1985, Douglas Wilder, then the Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor, was walking through downtown Norton (Democrats actually campaigned in Southwest Virginia then) when a stranger hailed him from a passing pick-up truck. The stranger had no idea who Wilder was; once he found out, he invited Wilder to join him to look at a local road that the man thought needed work — and Wilder got in the guy’s truck. A stranger’s truck. They drove off, leaving Wilder’s small entourage flabbergasted. Wilder’s staff and out-of-town journalists asked the local Democratic leader accompanying Wilder if he knew who driver was. He did not; never had seen him before. About a half-hour later, they returned and Wilder pronounced himself better informed about the region’s transportation challenges.

That would never happen today. Some candidates now are accompanied by security; I’m not sure how formal that security is, but they are large men who keep a close eye on who the candidate is interacting with. The world has changed. Even Reid says that every morning, he looks in his closet — picks out his suit for the day and his shirt for the day. First, though, he puts on a bulletproof vest.