Sean Contacts Presidential Candidates

Virginia's Presidential primary takes place on Tuesday, March 5th. Virginia has open primaries, meaning that you show up to your polling place and simply ask for a Democratic or Republican ballot. While this generally doesn't impact the overall results, it does make things interesting. For example, in 2008, I remember some Republicans saying they would vote for Barack Obama in the primary believing he would be easier to defeat in the general election than Hillary Clinton. (I'm not sure if this is true or not since John McCain only defeated Mike Huckabee by about 45,000 votes in the 2008 Republican primary and Obama defeated Clinton by almost 300,000 votes in the Democratic primary).

So that brings us to 2024. Here are your ballots for Tuesday's primary: 

I contacted the campaigns of everyone on both the Republican and Democratic primary ballots and asked one simple question: Why should Virginians vote for you? (Or if the candidate has withdrawn, who do you support and why?)

Here are the responses:

Nothing. No one replied. Actually, I take that back. I received a "Failure Notice" that the email account I tried to reach does not exist message from Vivek Ramaswamy. I appreciate the fact that his campaign completely ended and decided to stop paying for things like email addresses.

While Sean's Ramblings isn't CNN, The Washington Post, Fox News, or any of the local news stations in the Washington, Richmond, or Virginia Beach markets, this seems like a missed opportunity for candidates to communicate directly with voters on a smaller scale. 

So where does this leave Virginia voters? My guess is that most Republicans will vote for Trump, most Democrats will vote for Biden, and others will vote for a candidate of the opposite party as a "protest" vote. And maybe candidates will want their voices heard on Sean's Ramblings in future elections!