I had planned to publish a more detailed review of the elections but I ended up spending two hours in the dental chair today getting a filling replaced. I’ve got one more filling to go plus a deep cleaning so I was pretty distracted today getting ahead on work.
As a result I’ll post my more technical analysis this weekend, for those who are geeky enough to enjoy. However in the meantime I thought I’d offer a few comments.
I certainly agree that there is a large degree of history at play here. In every election since 1977 the party holding the White House has lost the race for Governor in Virginia. New Jersey isn’t quite as strong on that trend but they have voted against the Presidential party since 1989.
This pattern reflects not only possible anger at the White House but in time becomes self perpetuating because the reaction is not simply against the White House but against the incumbent Governor. In Virginia the Democrats have run the show for the last eight years so it’s normal that there be some counter reaction by voters. In New Jersey you have the added factor of a very unpopular and fairly corrupt incumbent.
However having said that there is also some credence to the argument that the results are a bad sign for the Democrats.
A minor shift from one party to the other is to be expected but in Virginia you saw it go from either 52% (2005 Governor) or 53% (2008 President) for the Democrat to just 40-41%. That’s a swing of 11-13 points which is a pretty big shift. You also saw major Republican gains in what had been an increasingly Democratic Northern Virginia.
In New Jersey you saw a shift from either 53% (2005 Governor) or 57% (2008 Presidential) for the Democrat to just 45% which is an 8-12 point shift.
In many other suburban areas you also saw GOP gains, where they won contests in Westchester County New York and several counties around Philadelphia.
I’ll provide more in depth analysis on these numbers when I post this weekend.
At the same time, the results in New York 23rd show that the hard right is quite capable of helping the Republicans grab defeat from the jaws of victory. Some areas of this district hadn’t been represented by a Democrat in Congress since Theodore Roosevelt was a teenager. It should have been a easy GOP win.
But as we all know the hard right couldn’t handle a moderate to liberal Republican so they recruited a candidate to run against her and eventually force her out and throw the race to the Democrat. And it’s not just that they picked a hard right candidate in a largely moderate district but they picked a bad one who doesn’t live in the district and has no knowledge (or it seems any desire to gain such knowledge) of the district.
So the question for 2010 will be whether the Democrats will be hurt by what is likely to be a wind blowing against them or whether the right wing will somehow manage to get the GOP kite caught in a tree.
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