I didn’t vote yesterday. Really, it would have been nearly impossible for me to do so as there wasn’t any voting in Maryland when we left and nothing to vote on that we would have been reasonably informed where we were going. I did however pay attention to some of the bigger races out there and watched how they fell.
The big news seemed to be that the GOP made a statement with high profile wins in New Jersey and Virginia and that somehow this is a indictment on the Obama administration. After looking at it, meh…not so much.
First of all, look at the New Jersey race. You have a corrupt Democrat incumbent in a state riddled with scandal up against a Republican former prosecutor. You can look at this mis-match and decide from a distance that the Democrat didn’t have a chance. Fair enough, he didn’t deserve another chance. This really should have been an easy win for the GOP.
The Virginia race wasn’t very exciting at all. I had the fortune to be in D.C. at the time to keep an eye on it and it was pretty obvious that Bob McDonnell was going to win this pretty easily. Creigh Deeds won the Democratic primary largely on the endorsement from the Washington Post, then tried the never successful strategy of just riding it out. After getting the nod, his strategy against McDonnell primarily consisted of bringing up the damning paper McDonnell had written in grad school which enraged women but didn’t seem to carry much voting consequence beyond. I’m sure someone will say that Obama didn’t help enough or this is a slap against the Democrats, but the truth is the Virginia Democrats simply did nothing to present a positive forward vision, which is exactly what McDonnell had done from the start framing himself as a “jobs” governor. True or not, the tactic worked and anyone could see that Deeds (who had lost to McDonnell before) was not going to win this one.
Two things that the Democrats did here seemed to put the nail in the coffin for their pride in holding Virginia governor’s seat for so long. I don’t know what it is but Democrats seem to nominate for governor guys that have “put in their time”. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s difficult to present something exciting when your candidate is pretty much same-old same-old. Second thing was that they didn’t seem to either stir up their base nor did they appeal to independents. You can almost bet for sure that the GOP is going to get their base out…it’s what they do and they do it well. The Dems really should concentrate at bridging that gap and stretching their vision to be successful.
It’s surprising that not much is being made of the race in New York where a Democrat won a special election seat which has been in Republican hands since the Civil War. This is particularly worth noting seeing that not only was there a Democratic candidate, but a Conservative Party candidate which essentially forced out the Republican incumbent. This happened because they were “too liberal” in their views. Now what seems to be the bell-weather for the Republican party, it seems that moderates are being shown the door if they do not toe the party line.
I’m sure we’ll all hear the GOP start to crow about their party victories in the next year and they’ll continue eliminating the moderate parts of their party. None of the high profile wins are that surprising and I don’t think that the GOP should get their hopes up. They continue to isolate and vote out moderates which is never a winning proposition when more and more voters want more consensus and identify themselves as independents rather than ascribing to a party affiliation. Win big in 2010 and then maybe you can start feeling a bit more optimistic.
Update: Well, shoot. John Scalzi over at Whatever beat me to the punch on this one, pretty much saying what I was saying only more eloquently. His is a pretty good read overall and I recommend that you scoot over there and have a gander.
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