U.S Senate Candidate Eddie Garcia Visits W&L College Republicans
U.S. Senate Candidate Eddie Garcia Visits W&L College Republicans
Eddie Garcia, hoping to challenge incumbent Senator Tim Kaine, made his pitch to gain youth support.
(Eddie Garcia speaks to a group of students on campus. SOURCE - The Spectator, 2024)
Eddie Garcia (R), a candidate for Virginia’s U.S. Senate seat, spoke to W&L College Republicans on February 21 as part of his effort to secure youth support for his campaign. Garcia hopes to win the Republican primary and challenge Tim Kaine (D), who has served Virginia in the Senate since 2013.
Garcia has drawn on his military service — 22 years in the U.S. Army with combat deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan — to appeal to the approximately 10% of Virginians who are veterans. Their support, Garcia believes, will expand the Republican coalition enough to defeat Kaine.
After serving in the military, Garcia worked as a legislative liaison, helping lawmakers and the Pentagon pass bills that advanced American national security interests. He also runs a small business that created an app to help veterans access local services.
“[Republicans in 2022] failed to build the coalition they needed to win”, Garcia told The Spectator in an interview after the College Republicans event. “It’s frustrating,” he continued, “for somebody like myself, and I see a big glaring gap for a campaign … that comes from the bottom up and not from the top down.”
“If we can turn out the base and we can reach the people we need to, we win. It’s the only way we’re going to beat somebody who’s been around for 30 years and hasn’t lost a race,” he continued.
Virginia hasn’t been represented federally by a Republican senator since 2009, when John Warner, who graduated from W&L in 1949, retired.
Garcia believes that he can flip the state by winning the support of veterans, young adults, and Hispanic voters united by a pro-working class emphasis.
“There’s a generational disconnect between the 60, 70, 80-year-olds that are in D.C. right now and you guys that are in your twenties,” Garcia told students. “They don’t really care that you can’t find a job, they don’t care that your rents are unaffordable … They don’t care because they don’t think you’re going to show up and vote. They don’t think you’re going to do anything, as a matter of fact they are relying on it.”
As a part of his youth engagement effort, Garcia has visited College Republican groups across the state.
He believes that Republicans focus too much on appealing to the upper class and not enough on fighting for working class voters. Current politicians, he commented, “bend over backwards for the $1000 donation, for the $3000 donation. I’d much rather speak to those gardeners and those cleaners … and build support from that community.”
Garcia also spoke to students about the national debt, criticizing the typical Republican approach to balancing the budget. “I lean toward not voting for deficit spending packages without a path to get us onto a balanced budget,” he said. The cuts “can’t come from veterans [or] the elderly … you can’t cut the SNAP program for people who are under the poverty level whose kids get two meals a day.”
“I refuse to be that type of person … I grew up on the SNAP program. I got my free breakfast and free lunch in public education as a school kid,” Garcia said.
Ultimately, Garcia believes that he is the best candidate on the Republican ticket when it comes to beating Tim Kaine in the general election. “Mr. Kaine has been around for 30 years, he’s a career politician … he’s part of what I would call ‘the political elite’,” Garcia told students. “I am the exact opposite of somebody like that … I’m a political outsider who is running for office because I believe [in] a better tomorrow.”
