Mixed Messages On The Election

John Judis: The Center Again Proves To Be The Most Popular Place In American Politics

(The New Republic)  John B. Judis is a senior editor of The New Republic and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

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Republicans are proclaiming victory after their candidates won statehouses in New Jersey and Virginia. And well they should. These were both states that went for Barack Obama in 2008. But how much do these elections really say about Obama and the prospects of the national Democratic Party? Some network commentators, citing suspiciously high approval ratings for Obama in New Jersey and Virginia, claim the elections say nothing at all about the president and his party. I think that may be true of the New Jersey results, but I don't think it's true of the Virginia governor's race or, in a perverse way, of the congressional race in upstate New York.

Virginia: Voters in the state's off-year gubernatorial elections have backed the candidate of the party that does not control the White House in every election since 1977. So by this measure, it was to be expected that Republican Bob McDonnell would defeat Democrat Creigh Deeds. But there are reasons to believe that McDonnell's easy victory, along with that of other Republicans in state races, had something to do with national politics.

Virginia, once a uniformly conservative state, now has a substantial moderate and liberal electorate, based primarily in the Northern Virginia suburbs. These voters have pushed state Democrats--once as conservative as the Republicans--to the center-left, and they've made sure those Democrats have a real chance in statewide elections. Democrats have controlled the governor's office and most state offices since 2001; and both senators are now Democrats. So there was some reason to believe that a Democrat could win the governor's office, particularly because with the current Democratic governor Tim Kaine remaining popular even during the recession, voters would be unlikely to display hostility toward the incumbent party in Richmond.

But McDonnell won easily, and Republicans also swept other statewide offices. McDonnell was clearly a better candidate than Deeds. He looked and talked like a governor, while the rumpled Deeds looked and talked like a frazzled high school principal. (My colleague Jason Zengerle speculates, too, that Deeds, a genuine product of rural and Southern Virginia, couldn't appeal to Northern Virginia suburbanites, while McDonnell trumpeted his roots in Fairfax Country.) Deeds also appears to have slighted the black vote by failing to court major black figures in the state, including former governor Doug Wilder. And he also didn't bring Obama into the state until it was too late. The final exit polls are not in, but there seems to have been a major falloff in black participation from 2008.

Deeds probably devoted too much of his campaign to dredging up the details of the male chauvinist graduate thesis that McDonnell wrote, and not enough to saying what he would do if he were governor. And what he did say--commendably intimating that he would raise taxes to fix Virginia's transportation mess--got him in trouble. McDonnell, meanwhile, took his social conservative base for granted, and ran to the center, stressing the importance of jobs, transportation, and lower taxes.

In the exit polls, a majority of voters said Obama didn't figure in their preferences, and Obama also scored relatively high in approval on exit polls. But I suspect that Obama was still a factor. If you look at the graphs that pollster.com puts up that average out the polling findings, you find that towards the end of July, or in early August, the margin between Deeds and McDonnell jumped, and remained high for the rest of the election. At the very same time, Obama's approval numbers in Virginia plummeted, and except for some outlier polls, have remained below fifty percent.

In the polls put out by Public Policy Polling in North Carolina, a Democratic firm whose estimates in Virginia and New Jersey turned out to be remarkably accurate, McDonnell's margin over Deeds jumped from six points to 14 points between June 30 and July 31. At the same time, Obama's approval went from plus two to minus nine. On the eve of the election, PPP still had Obama with a minus nine in approval.

In PPP's last poll, there is also another interesting correlation. The poll shows McDonnell winning 15 percent of the electorate that voted for Obama in 2008, and 13 percent of Democrats disapproving of the job that Obama is doing in office. That suggests that Democrats who disapproved of Obama were likely to vote for McDonnell. This is not to say that disapproval of Obama doomed Deeds; only that it may have been a factor in the defeat of Deeds and other Democrats on the statewide ticket.

Finally, there is a dog-that-didn't-bark factor that affects all these races. In 1982, the Republicans under Ronald Reagan suffered relatively small losses in the congressional races partly because Reagan continued to energize the Republican base. In Virginia and elsewhere, Obama doesn't seem to have energized the Democratic base. In the PPP polls in Virginia right before the election, only 38 percent of Democrats said they were "very excited" about the election compared to 64 percent of Republicans. That probably reflects a lack of interest in Deeds, but it may also reflect the lack of identification with Obama's national Democratic Party.

[rexrox2]

The Democrats have 60 senators and (guess) 250 reps., and can't get any major legislation passed?? There is one party, no matter what the spin that has a big problem, and it's not the REPUBLICANS.

[askagain]

Polls show that many Americans are more concerned with unemployment and the economy than they are with health care reform. If this true, having or not having a public option may not affect the outcome of the 2010 elections. Even with a strong public option, the Democrats might be in trouble if unemployment and the economy continue to be troublesome. This will especially be compounded if the deficit goes up without a corresponding improvement in unemployment and the economy. The Democrats must be aware of these things.

[noloyalisti]

Good night for the Dems. The tea bagging, white wing wacko Hoffman lost in upstate NY (a Dem was elected for the first time in that district in 100 years) and we got a REAL progressive Garamendi in CA (to replace the moderate to right wing Tauscher).

Now if the Dems and Obama don't pass a strong public option, they will pay dearly for going against the will of the people. Of course, big corporate money owns and runs everything here in the United Corporate States of America.