Live from Virginia Monday morning on The John Fredericks Show – weekdays on WNTW AM 820/ FM 92.7 – Richmond, WJFN FM 100.5 – Central Virginia, WMPH AM 1010 / FM 100.1 / FM 96.9 (7-9 PM) Hampton Roads, WBRG AM 1050 / FM 105.1 – Lynchburg/Roanoke and Weekdays 6-10 am and 24/7 Stream – host Fredericks welcomed House Delegates member Nick Freitas to the show.
During the show, Freitas weighed in on the current ground game and enthusiasm for Trump that he was seeing in Virginia and explained some of the main concerns that voters relayed during door-knocking sessions in regards to the local elections.
Fredericks: House of Delegates member running for Congress, Republican Nick Freitas. Hey Nick, great to have you, man.
Freitas: Hey great to be on John. Thank you.
Fredericks: Nick, one day to game day. You’ve analyzed early voting I know the RNC is doing that in the key districts. We got some of the analysis last night. Early voting seventh, what are you seeing Nick?
Freitas: So we’re actually doing far better on the early voting than we expected to. The vast majority of Republicans still plan to vote on Election Day. And so
our job was just to stay close to the Democrats with respect to early voting. We’ve done well. Overall voter turnout’s been very high. And we’re excited about election day.
Fredericks: So when you say you’ve done better on the early voting than anticipated based on the RNC analysis, can you shed a little insight on that?
Freitas: Sure. So the idea was is if you ask the typical Democrat 75 percent of them were planning to vote early. Typical Republicans, 75 percent were planning to vote on election day. So you can see it’s a complete opposite with respect to how they’re gonna vote. And so that’s what we anticipated the numbers to look like with early voting as well. Whether it be absentee, whether it be early voting in person. It hasn’t even been close to that.
And so Republicans have been voting. We would have a great turnout with respect to early voting but we’ve been calling through lists and we still have a lot of Republicans that plan to vote on election day. So you know typically speaking if we would have at least gotten maybe 40 percent of the early vote we would have been pretty happy going into election day. We’ve been beating those numbers. And so we’re very confident going to election day that we’re going to have a really good in-person turnout. And again we’re confident with our absentee numbers and we are confident with our early in-person numbers.
Fredericks: Well you know that is a consistent story I’ve been hearing in the second district also is that the numbers where the Democrats had to be on early voting, they’re simply not there. They’re underperforming. And then Republican areas where we didn’t expect to get as many were over performing. And this seems to be a trend. It’s the same trend we’re getting in Florida. It’s the same trend we’re getting in Pennsylvania. It’s a trend now we’re getting in Nevada. It’s across the country.
And you look you juxtapose your race to Dave Brat against Spanberger in 2018, I mean Spanberger had a massive one of the biggest ground games for a Congressional challenger I’ve ever witnessed in my lifetime. And I’ve been covering this a long time. I mean it was stellar. I remember driving down Henrico just going to work at 5 a.m. and they had already tents up with coffee and donuts. And they had this for days! you don’t see that now Nick.
Freitas: No you don’t. They have not had much of a ground game. And even that the only time she’s really spending with voters because even the online presence hasn’t been much. She’ll show up to an early voting site and she’ll spend some time there. Meanwhile, we’ve got knockers all over the neighborhoods going out and actually talking to people. Actually reaching out to voters and our online presence has been strong. She’s really tried to win this thing in just constantly negative attack ads.
They are ads saying what a moderate she is even though she votes with Alexander Ocasio-Cortez 90 percent of the time. So that’s how she’s trying to win that race. I don’t think people are buying it. I think the President did an excellent job in the last debate. Joe Biden was accidentally honest about what he wants to do with respect to the oil industry. You know he’s got reports coming out about what his tax plan would actually do. Look, we’re going into election day feeling good.
Fredericks: Tell me about what residents are saying. I know you’re now going in the final days to lower propensity voters and to softies and swing voters. When you go to their door nick and you meet with them I always ask this question. And I’m looking for specifics. What is their trend? What are they saying?
Freitas: So yeah, the trend tends to be one they’ll if they’ve been seeing the attack ads they might ask about an attack ad. But honestly the response we’re getting from swing voters has been overwhelmingly positive. So you know when we started knocking on doors and we will have knocked down close to 200,000 doors between us and we know some outside groups that are knocking too by election day. And we’re not going out there knocking hard.
We’re knocking people that are either soft Republican or swing voters. And generally what that means is that there’s some indication that the person in that House has voted both Republican and Democrat in the past or they might not consistently vote in every election. So those are the people that we’re we’re spending our time talking to. And a couple of the trends that we’re seeing is people are one, they’re scared especially the closer you live to Richmond.
They’re worried about what went on in Richmond. They’re worried about the rioting that took place. They’re worried about the fact that the governor and the mayor didn’t do anything about it. Some of the groups, not the protesters but the groups that actually engage in rioting are threatening to go into other areas. They’re upset about schools being closed. And they’re overall worried about the government’s response to COVID.
And part of that’s from a healthcare component and part of it is from the economy. The idea that we would lockdown the economy again is something that people looking at. And they, just you know, it’s hard enough for them to have kept their jobs, it’s hard enough for them to keep their businesses open. And the idea that we’re going to go through a massive government lockdown under Joe Biden when the world health organization and medical experts after medical exporters come forward and said that is not the right thing to do from an economic perspective or a healthcare perspective. That’s the part.
And then contrast that with again we just have 33 growth in the third quarter you know predominantly in those places where they’re actually allowing people to get back to work safely and responsibly. That’s what people want to see. They want to see its plans for it. They don’t want to keep hearing doom gloom and the new normal that the Democrats are offering us. What is the plan to get through this? And we are offering one and the other side is not.
Fredericks: I think this has been consistent now across the country. Trump is surging now Nick. We look at the numbers now in Florida and Pennsylvania. He had 58,000 people on a Saturday night. Nick, who does that? I mean, this stuff is unheard of. We have caravans going through Richmond. We got another 35o people last night. I did a rally in Virginia Beach where there were 300 people there yesterday in the rain. Now we are doing one this evening in Richmond. Tell everybody about the Tim Anderson one.
Freitas: We have the Tim Anderson one that you are going to be hosting. We are going to have Daniel Gade there. Leon Benjamin and I will be there. Tim is going to be talking, and I think we’re going to have a great turnout for that as well. And you are right. They completely disregarded this in 2016 to their peril which is the enthusiasm. I heard a speaker say it best the other day when we were having a rally up in Culpeper where we probably had 300 people come out and the speaker got up and said whoever is parked in the two places on the side of the parking lot that’s where the Biden rally is going to be.
There is no excitement on the other side. There is a lot of hatred that has been in large part fostered by the media that is just openly hostile to the President. It doesn’t matter what he does. And they’ve tried to drive that narrative home for the last four years. They’ve done everything they can to possibly obstruct him. But ultimately when you look at the other side, our voters are excited about getting out for two reasons.
One, they feel like the President has made good on what he’d said he would do. He said he’d cut taxes. He cut them. He said he’d cut regulations. He cut them. He said we were going to restore peace through strength and now we’ve got peace deals through the Middle East and the Balkans. Democrats can’t even get peace deals in Portland. (Fredericks laughs)
Listen to the full show here:
https://youtu.be/XlqfK5Vl8_g
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Monday morning on The John Fredericks Radio Show, host John Fredericks welcomed Virginia House of Delegates candidate Nick Freitas to the show to discuss the Virginia election races and the enthusiasm for Trump that he was seeing on the ground.
Photo “Nick Freitas” by Nick Freitas. Background Photo “Virginia Capitol” by Anderskev. CC BY 3.0.
