Meet the GOP Convention Pundit!
The storied history of VPAP’s pundit contest shows that amateurs often win. But this year, a professional snagged the crown.
Joe Desilets, 29, has authored articles on convention strategy and has helped direct convention wins for Republican candidates.
“I do this for a living,” said Joe, who lives in Culpeper.
This year’s state Republican convention operated under rules like none ever seen before in Virginia. The GOP’s combination of ranked-choice voting and delegate weighting was so complex that it seemed any guess would be as good as another.
But Joe showed that predicting the party’s nominees for Governor, Lt. Governor and Attorney General was no task for an amateur.
Joe bested 510 hopefuls who offered their predictions. In each of the three statewide races, contestants were asked to pick the first-round leader, the eventual nominee and the number of rounds it would take for a candidate to break 50% of the vote.
Joe correctly guessed 8 of the 9 questions, acing the nominees and the number of rounds. His only stumble? He predicted that Pete Snyder would lead the contest for governor after the first round.
“It was a coin flip between Pete and Glenn [Youngkin]. Either of them definitely could have been leading the first ballot; I gave the edge to Pete,” Joe said. “So I missed that one, but definitely still stand behind that prediction.”
Joe was one of only two contestants who correctly predicted the number of rounds for each race. Nearly half guessed the race for Governor would end after three rounds. More than one-third predicted the Lt. Governor race would be over in two. They took six and five rounds, respectively.
“If this was a traditional convention, it’s entirely possible that it would have been over in two or three rounds. As people see who's in front, and folks want to go home after six hours, and they just vote for the front runner and call it a day,” Joe said. “But knowing that it was ranked-choice voting and folks were picking their second choice, third choice and so on, well before ballots were counted for the first round -- that didn’t play a factor at all.”
Joe was one of 11% of pundit contestants who predicted that Winsome Sears would be the nominee for Lt. Governor.
“I saw on her first-quarter [campaign finance] report that she actually raised a decent chunk of money and I thought that she would have the resources to put up a fight,” said Joe. “Things got so contentious between Tim Hugo and Glenn Davis that it just seemed like they would kind of eat away at each other and someone else could slip through at the end.”
Joe watched as his predictions came true live on vpap.org earlier this week.
“I must have hit refresh like 500 times on the VPAP website.”
Though his knowledge of conventions seems like his secret weapon, he may have had another edge over competitors.
“I’m a big fan of the site,” said Joe, who has used vpap.org for a decade. “I’ve worked on races in 14 states and counting at this point, and no other state has a resource like VPAP.”
Some of those campaigns were in Virginia, including Rep. Rob Wittman and Del. Nick Freitas. Joe led Freitas’ campaign in last year’s Republican nominating convention in Virginia’s 7th congressional district. Before that, he joined the Freitas HD 30 general election campaign in 2019, after a paperwork snafu forced Freitas to run a write-in campaign.
Even outside of campaigns, he can’t escape politics. Even his dog, Mitch, a one-year-old boxer, has a tie to conventions.
“I was actually convinced to get him by Nick Freitas.”
May 13, 2021