Conservatives Monitoring The Liberal Left
2009 Elections
What They Told Us: Reviewing Last Week’s Key Polls
Nov 8th
One year can be a lifetime in politics.
Just 12 months after sweeping into the White House and expanding their majorities in both the House and Senate on a wave of anti-Bush fervor, Democrats are on the defensive. Big Republican gubernatorial wins in New Jersey and Virginia this past Tuesday have changed the dynamic.
Forty-nine percent (49%) of U.S. voters now say it is atleast somewhat likely that Republicans will win control of Congress next year. Fifty-two percent (52%) say Republicans are the party most likely to gain seats in Congress in next year’s mid-term elections.
Republican congressional candidates also continue to hold a lead over Democrats in the past week’s Generic Congressional Ballot. Forty-two percent (42%) would vote for their district’s Republican congressional candidate while 38% would opt for his or her Democratic opponent.
Given the anger in the overall electorate and the unhappiness rank-and-file GOP voters have with their elected representatives, Republican gains in the mid-term elections are far from assured, though. After all, they’re a year away. For the third straight month, too, the number of Americans identifying themselves as Democrats inched up while the number of Republicans fell slightly.
Fifty-five percent (55%) of voters expect politics in Washington, D.C. to become more partisan over the next year. Fifty percent (50%) say the president is governing already like a partisan Democrat, up 11 points from when he took office in January.
But then Americans are a little less enthusiastic about Obama’s presidency. Forty-five percent (45%) of adults say they would be at least somewhat likely to vote for Obama if he was up for reelection right now, but 49% say they wouldn’t back the president’s reelection.
One possible explanation is that voters for the first time are blaming Obama nearly as much as his predecessor, George W. Bush, for the country’s continuing economic problems.
The president and his team ran a nearly flawless campaign and handled the transition just as well. But once the campaigning was over and the governing began, his numbers began to slip.
The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll shows Obama’s job approval ratings so far in November unchanged from the month before. The president’s ratings dipped slightly in October after stabilizing in September.
Still, when tracking the president’s job approval on a daily basis, people sometimes get so caught up in the day-to-day fluctuations that they miss the bigger picture. To look at the longer-term trends, Rasmussen Reports compiles the numbers on a full-month basis. Looking back to January highlights how bumpy the president’s ride has been since he became president.
Just 14% of voters now say Hillary Clinton would be doing a worse job as presidentthan Obama if she had won last year’s Democratic presidential nomination.
The president is also suffering from the public’s unhappiness with the health care reform plan he has proposed with congressional Democrats. Forty-two percent (42%) now favor the plan, but 54% oppose it. These numbers have been roughly the same for weeks.
Seventy-two percent (72%) of voters nationwide say passage of the legislation could lead companies to drop private health insurance coverage for their employees which would then force them into a government-run “public option” insurance plan. But voters are evenly divided over whether passage of the health care measure will actually force them to change their existing health care coverage. Still, repeated surveys show that most Americans are very happy with the coverage they have and don’t want to change it.
Eighty-five percent (85%) of voters are insistent that anyone seeking government services should have to prove that they are legally allowed to be in this country. Whether illegal immigrants will be able to get health care assistance under the president’s plan has been a highly charged element of the debate.
Voters also are getting more worried about the president’s handling of national security issues. Forty-five percent (45%) say Obama is doing a good or excellent job in this area, but 37% rate his national security performance as poor, up 17 points from when he first entered office in January.
Voter confidence in America’s conduct of the War on Terror has fallen to its lowest level since the first week of January in 2007. Voters are much less optimistic about the course of the war in Iraq, too.
Despite the president’s high-profile outreach to global Islam, most notably in a speech in Egypt in June, only 16% of voters now say America’s relationship with the Muslim world will be better one year from now. That’s the lowest level measured all year.
The president continues to be bruised by the economy as well. The government announced on Friday that the nation’s unemployment rate hit 10.2 percent in October, the highest level in 26 years. Even before that announcement, most Americans favored extending unemployment benefits for an additional 20 weeks,which Congress passed this week and the president signed into law.
As part of the same bill, the federal government extended and expanded a tax credit program for first-time home buyers. Most Americans like the idea of providing tax credits for those buying their first home but are less enthusiastic when told it will cost several billion dollars. They strongly oppose expanding it to existing homeowners, although Congress did just that this week.
With most of its economic stimulus plans drawing substantial public criticism this year, it’s no wonder that voters are sharply divided over what the chief legislative role of Congress is. Forty-eight percent (48%) think passing good legislation is a more important role for Congress than preventing bad legislation from becoming law. But nearly as many voters (46%) believe it’s more important for Congress to stop bad bills before they’re passed into law.
The Rasmussen Employment Index held relatively steady in October, but for the 13th month in a row, the percentage of firms laying off employees exceeds the number that are hiring. Yet employed Americans are slightly more confident than they were this summer that leaving their current jobs will be their own decision rather than their employer’s.
In the United States today, workers expect to change jobs on a regular basis. Just 37% of working Americans expect to be working for the same employer in five years.That figure is 10 percentage points since July and may partially reflect discouraging short-term economic conditions. However, data from recent years consistently shows that Americans plan on a career path with multiple employers.
The Discover Consumer Spending Monitor, which tracks consumer spending confidence, fell slightly in October but is still up a modest eight points from the first of the year. However, consumers had a more pessimistic take on the economy this past month, with 46% saying it’s getting worse while 29% believe the it is getting better.
The Rasmussen Consumer Index, which measures the economic confidence of consumers on a daily basis, slipped a bit in the past week but is up 14 points from the beginning of 2009. The Rasmussen Investor Index, which measures the economic confidence of investors on a daily basis, rose slightly this week and is 26 points ahead of early January. But overwhelming percentages of consumers and investors continue to believe the economy is in a recession.
In other surveys this past week:
– The president recently signed into law “hate crime” legislation that adds sexual orientation to other protected categories. Forty-nine percent (49%) of Americans feel criminals should be prosecuted more severely if it can be proved that their crime was motivated by the victim’s race, color, religion, national origin or sexual orientation. Thirty-one percent (31%) disagree, and 19% are not sure.
– On the heels of Ford’s better-than-expected third-quarter profits and its promise of solid profitability by 2011, 68% of Americans adults hold a favorable opinion of the one company that passed on a government bailout. Ford continues to far outdistance public perceptions of General Motors and Chrysler.
– Thirty-four percent (34%) of voters this week say the United States is heading in the right direction, but 61% continue to believe the nation is heading down the wrong track.
– Fifty-two percent (52%) of voters feel that America’s best days are in the past. This marks the highest level of voter pessimism in two years and is up 13 points from a year ago when Obama was elected president.
– Sixty-eight percent (68%) of working Americans identify themselves as middle class.
– Some National Guardsmen returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan are finding that their civilian jobs have been eliminated by companies forced by the economy to make deep budget cuts. Sixty percent (60%) of Americans think the law should be changed to prevent employers from eliminating any jobs held by those called forNational Guard duty.
–Just eight percent (8%) of baseball fans said they were going to place a bet on the World Series this year. Eighty-eight percent (88%) said they would not place a wager on the series this year.
– We’re assuming everyone has been on time this week despite the end of Daylight Saving Time because 84% of Americans said they would be – correctly - moving their clocks back an hour before they went to bed last Saturday night.
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Scott Rasmussen, president of Rasmussen Reports, has been an independent pollster for more than a decade.
Tuesday’s results on top and down ballot: The closer you look, the worse it was for Democrats
Nov 8th
Posted by Brad Smith (redstate.com)Saturday, November 7th at 12:47AM EST
The more one digs into Tuesday’s election results, the worse they look for Democrats. Let’s start by reviewing once again the three high profile races: New York’s 23rd Congressional District special election, and the gubernatorial in New Jersey and Virginia.
The Democrats have to know that NY-23 was a fluke – they can’t count on gross Republican miscalculation in 2010. Meanwhile, Democratic efforts to write off the New Jersey and Virginia losses by blaming them on bad candidates simply don’t ring true.
In Virginia, Creigh Deeds was not a bad candidate. In the primary, despite being vastly outspent, he hammered the powerful Terry McAuliffe. He had the endorsement of the Washington Post, which argued that of three strong Democratic primary candidates, in the general election, “Deeds’ moderate platform would have the broadest appeal.” On liberal blog sites, Deeds was the overwhelming favorite as the best candidate, the one most likely to win the general election.
Jon Corzine was not a bad candidate, either – he could self-fund his race, an enormous advantage, and outspend any opponent 3 to 1, as he did to Chris Christie. He had been elected statewide twice before. What Corzine was, was a bad governor. And why was he a bad governor? Because he followed the same type of policies that the Democrats are now pursuing on a national level. Maybe someone will notice that.
It has been noted lately that the Democrats plan to hold on next fall is to go negative, and to do so early – to “vaporize” opponents, as Harry Reid says. But that is exactly what both Deeds and Corzine tried to do. Corzine, who won by 11 points in 2005, lost by 4 this year. Deeds, who lost to the same man in the attorney general race 4 years ago by fewer than 350 votes, this time lost by 18 percentage points. Meanwhile, President Obama embraced and campaigned with both men. Yet McDonnell won by the biggest margin for a Republican ever, and Christie by the largest margin for a Republican in 24 years. Thus, the Democrats’ two key strategies to hold on in 2010 (other than pray for a better economy) failed miserably – Obama couldn’t save them, and relentlessly negative campaigning couldn’t save them. These men were not bad candidates, as their past success and praise for them suggests – rather, they were running on bad issues in a time in which Democrats are increasingly blamed for the nation’s difficulties.
In the other Congressional special election, California’s 10th District, Lt. Governor John Garamendi won by 11 points after heavily outspending his opponent in a district won by his predecessor in 2008 by 34 points, in which Democrats have an 18 point edge in voter registration, and which Obama carried by 31 points. Not much to crow about.
Down ballot, in races for lower offices, including state legislatures and mayors, it gets worse. Republicans rolled to easy double digit victories in the Virginia Attorney General and Lt. Governor races. In the Lt. Governor’s race, Bill Bolling, who won by just 1 percent in 2005, won by 12 points. Republicans gained 6 seats (pending one recount) in the State Assembly, giving them a 61-37-2 majority. Republicans gained a seat in the New Jersey House. Republicans took control of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and won six of seven statewide races in the Keystone State. Republicans gained in the heavily populated New York City suburbs , taking control of both Westchester County and Nassau County for the first time in a decade. They even gained a couple seats on the New York City Council (in addition to the re-election of their sort-of Republican Mayor Bloomberg). In Michigan, in a special election for a state senate seat that had gone Democratic by 61-39 when it was last up in 2006, the Republican flipped the landslide around and won 61-36. Republicans also flipped a New Hampshire state house seat in a special election.
When the Republicans are rolling up victories in the northeast corridor and in Michigan, the Democrats have to be worried. But Republican successes weren’t limited to such recent Democratic stomping grounds. In liberal Washington state, a Republican captured 58 percent of the vote to win a state House seat controlled by Democrats for 22 years, and Republican candidates steamrolled to landslide victories to easily retain seats in two other special elections for state house.
We might also note that the Republicans picked up two Democratic seats in special elections last month, winning a previously Democratic state house seat with 63% of the vote in a special election in Tennessee last month, and also picking up a formerly Democrat held state house seat in Oklahoma.
Even in the safest of Democratic bastions, the Democrats underperformed. In a special state house election in Missouri, for example, Democrats held a safe Democratic seat with 61 percent of the vote. Sounds impressive, but in 2008, in what was also an open seat race, the Democrat carried the district with 69 percent of the vote . This year’s showing, in fact, was the worst for the Democrats in the district since at least 1994. Meanwhile, Republicans romped to victories in safe Republican state legislative seats in South Carolina, and two races in Georgia.
Democrats held most of their big city mayors, but Republicans did to as incumbent mayors did well throughout the country, in what were mostly non-partisan races. But a few offices changed party control, however, usually away from the Democrats, and many in the battleground Midwest and in the northeast, where the GOP is supposed to be dead.
Toledo elected independent Mike Bell, ending 20 years of Democratic control. An independent also defeated an incumbent Democrat in Dayton. Republicans picked up the Mayor’s office in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. In an open seat race in Manchester, New Hampshire, Republican Ted Gatsas kept the Mayor’s office in GOP hands with the best showing by a Republican in the city in more than a decade. In another open seat Mayor’s race, in Norwich, Connecticut, Republican Peter Nystrom easily won election to an office previously held by a Democrat. Republicans also won the Mayor’s office in Stamford for the first time since 1993, winning 55 percent of the vote in a city with a 2-1 Democratic edge in voter registration. A Republican ousted the Democrats from the Mayor’s office in Stratford, Connecticut, and the GOP picked up council seats throughout the state. You have to wonder if Chris Dodd was watching.
Republicans picked up Mayor’s offices out west, too. In a non-partisan race in Washington’s 4th largest city, Republican Tim Leavitt defeated labor-backed, 14 year incumbent Royce Pollard, saying, “My opponent seems to think government creates jobs. Creating jobs is done by the business community. Where government can help out is by getting out of the way.”
The Democrats did pick up one mayor’s office of note, in Charlotte, North Carolina, but Republicans returned the favor by taking the Mayor’s slot away from the Democrats in Greensboro. Democrats were left to find solace in such holding actions, such as not losing as many state assembly seats in New Jersey as they had thought they might.
Republicans ought not, and probably cannot, sit around and hope they can ride into office in 2010 merely on a bad economy and Democratic ineptitude. For one thing, the economy is resilient enough, and the Democrats and the Fed have thrown enough money into it, that the economy and the unemployment numbers should be improved and improving a year from now. We need to press forward with common sense solutions to everyday concerns, and be explaining now why the President’s economic policies are retarding, rather than helping, the economy to recover. And we should keep emphasizing the value of freedom. But we can’t just expect 2010 to fall into our laps. That said, Tuesday was a very good night for Republicans, and the more one looks at it, the harder it is for Democrats to claim otherwise.
Freewheeling young voters scare both parties
Nov 8th
AP Photo
By: MICHAEL BARONE
Senior Political Analyst
November 8, 2009
In November 2008, 658,000 Americans under 30 voted in New Jersey and 782,000 did so in Virginia. In November 2009, 212,000 Americans under 30 voted in New Jersey and 198,000 did so in Virginia. In other words, young voter turnout this year was down two-thirds in New Jersey and three-quarters in Virginia.
These numbers are extrapolations from exit poll results and should be regarded as approximate and not precise. But they tell a vivid story, and one with scary implications for both Democratic and Republican political strategists.
The scary story for Republicans was plain a year ago. Young voters went 66 to 32 percent for Barack Obama, while voters over 30 went for Obama by only 50 to 49 percent. Some analysts projected an enduringly Democratic Millennial Generation that would send the Republican Party the way of the Whigs.
But that future obviously didn’t arrive last week and it doesn’t seem likely to arrive in November 2010. Young voters cast 441,000 votes for Obama in New Jersey but only 121,000 for Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine, who brought Obama into the state five times and featured him in his TV ads.
Young voters cast 469,000 votes for Obama in Virginia and provided him with 70 percent of his statewide plurality, but they only cast 87,000 votes for the hapless Democratic nominee Creigh Deeds. Republican Bob McDonnell actually carried the young vote 54 to 44 percent.
A drop-off in young turnout is normal in off-year elections. But this drop-off was enormous. Evidently the aura of candidate Obama was a lot more attractive to young Americans than the policies of President Obama and the roughly similar policies of the Democratic candidates in New Jersey and Virginia.
This is a generation accustomed to making its own choices and shaping its own world. They listen to their own iPod playlists, not someone else’s Top Forty; they construct their own Facebook pages rather than enlisting in the official Elvis Fan Club.
Democrats’ policies are not in sync with this mentality. They seek a government-run health care regimen, in which young Americans will be forced to sign up for expensive insurance to subsidize older people with more health problems. They seek to jam employees into labor unions, who will insist on 5,000 pages of work rules and rigid seniority systems.
They have a raft of policies — higher taxes on high earners and those not enrolled in favored health insurance plans, cap-and-trade legislation that taxes everyone who use electricity — that discourage job creation and stifle innovation. Freezing things in place may sound good to those who already occupy a comfortable niche, but it does little for the many young people who are currently looking for a job.
Especially when they’re seeking a job in which they can use their talents creatively and imaginatively to serve society as well as themselves. The full employment economy that prevailed for a quarter of a century until 2008 enabled new workers to find such opportunities. An economy that promises 10 percent unemployment as far as the eye can see — which is where the Democrats’ job-killing policies seem likely to produce — forces young people to take whatever job they can get, however unappealing, as young people did in the 1930s.
Against this background, the Democrats’ relatively liberal policies on cultural issues don’t seem to have much appeal, as was plain in Virginia. Certainly not enough to bring many young voters to the polls. Obama posters and T-shirts are no longer selling well and chants of “hope and change” now seem dated.
That’s likely to be a problem for Democrats in 2010, as it was in 2009. But there’s a problem for Republicans too, when the Millennials do turn out again in large numbers, in 2012 or whenever. The challenge for them is to come up with policies that they can argue will enable young Americans to choose their future, policies that will again produce the bounteous economic growth that provides opportunities for work that can be productive, creative and satisfying.
The House Republicans’ alternative to Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s chaotically cobbled together health care bill is a start. So are Gov.-elect McDonnell’s detailed proposals in Virginia and Gov.-elect Chris Christie’s somewhat vaguer proposals in New Jersey.
This year the Democrats’ proposals proved unappealing enough to keep young voters from the polls. But Republicans will need better ideas when they finally do show up.
Michael Barone, The Examiner’s senior political analyst, can be contacted at mbarone@washingtonexaminer.com. His columns appear Wednesday and Sunday, and his stories and blog posts appear on www.ExaminerPolitics.com ExaminerPolitics.com.
The Myth of ‘08, Demolished
Nov 6th
The Myth of ‘08, Demolished
WASHINGTON — Sure, Election Day 2009 will scare moderate Democrats and make passage of Obamacare more difficult. Sure, it makes it easier for resurgent Republicans to raise money and recruit candidates for 2010. But the most important effect of Tuesday’s elections is historical. It demolishes the great realignment myth of 2008.
In the aftermath of last year’s Obama sweep, we heard endlessly about its fundamental, revolutionary, transformational nature. How it was ushering in an FDR-like realignment for the 21st century in which new demographics — most prominently, rising minorities and the young — would bury the GOP far into the future. One book proclaimed “The Death of Conservatism,” while the more modest merely predicted the terminal decline of the Republican Party into a regional party of the Deep South or a rump party of marginalized angry white men.
This was all ridiculous from the beginning. 2008 was a historical anomaly. A uniquely charismatic candidate was running at a time of deep war weariness, with an intensely unpopular Republican president, against a politically incompetent opponent, amid the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression. And still he won by only seven points.
Exactly a year later comes the empirical validation of that skepticism. Virginia — presumed harbinger of the new realignment, having gone Democratic in ‘08 for the first time in 44 years — went red again. With a vengeance. Barack Obama had carried it by six points. The Republican gubernatorial candidate won by 17 — a 23-point swing. New Jersey went from plus 15 Democratic in 2008 to minus 4 in 2009. A 19-point swing.
What happened? The vaunted Obama realignment vanished. In 2009 in Virginia, the black vote was down by 20 percent; the under-30 vote by 50 percent. And as for independents, the ultimate prize of any realignment, they bolted. In both Virginia and New Jersey they’d gone narrowly for Obama in ‘08. This year they went Republican by a staggering 33 points in Virginia and by an equally shocking 30 points in New Jersey.
White House apologists will say the Virginia Democrat was weak. If the difference between Bob McDonnell and Creigh Deeds was so great, how come when the same two men ran against each other statewide for attorney general four years ago the race was a virtual dead heat? Which made the ‘09 McDonnell-Deeds rematch the closest you get in politics to a laboratory experiment for measuring the change in external conditions. Run them against each other again when it’s Obamaism in action and see what happens. What happened was a Republican landslide.
The Obama coattails of 2008 are gone. The expansion of the electorate, the excitement of the young, came in uniquely propitious Democratic circumstances and amid unparalleled enthusiasm for electing the first African-American president.
November ‘08 was one-shot, one-time, never to be replicated. Nor was November ‘09 a realignment. It was a return to the norm — and definitive confirmation that 2008 was one of the great flukes in American political history.
The irony of 2009 is that the anti-Democratic tide overshot the norm — deeply blue New Jersey, for example, elected a Republican governor for the first time in 12 years — because Democrats so thoroughly misread 2008 and the mandate they assumed it bestowed. Obama saw himself as anointed by a watershed victory to remake American life. Not letting the cup pass from his lips, he declared to Congress only five weeks after his swearing-in his “New Foundation” for America — from remaking the one-sixth of the American economy that is health care to massive government regulation of the economic lifeblood that is energy.
Moreover, the same conventional wisdom that proclaimed the dawning of a new age last November dismissed the inevitable popular reaction to Obama’s hubristic expansion of government, taxation, spending and debt — the tea party demonstrators, the town hall protesters — as a raging rabble of resentful reactionaries, AstroTurf-phony and Fox News-deranged.
Some rump. Just last month Gallup found that conservatives outnumber liberals by 2 to 1 (40 percent to 20 percent) and even outnumber moderates (at 36 percent). So on Tuesday, the “rump” rebelled. It’s the natural reaction of a center-right country to a governing party seeking to rush through a left-wing agenda using temporary majorities created by the one-shot election of 2008. The misreading of that election — and of the mandate it allegedly bestowed — is the fundamental cause of the Democratic debacle of 2009.
Conservative Society For Action Halloween Rally – All Politics Are Local
Nov 2nd
Our friends at Conservative Society For Action (CSA), the main force behind the tea party movement in Long Island, New York had their get out the vote rally on Halloween afternoon on 10/31/09. Director Steve Flanagan gave a motivating speech that highlights the problems with national and local politics. He stressed that there are no such thing as an off year election, and by ignoring local elections, our country has got to where we are today, Remember to vote this election day in your town. From the guy who paves your roads, to local judges, to state representatives, to governor make sure you get out there and vote. Time to take our country back!! Go Hoffmaan-23
Direction of GOP at Center of N.Y. Congressional Race
Oct 31st
Doug Hoffman, Conservative Party candidate in upstate New York. Photo AP Press
WASHINGTON — What began as a little-noticed congressional campaign in upstate New York has become a high-profile battle for the direction of the Republican Party, and it could play a big role in the GOP’s approach to the 2010 elections and beyond.
With Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman mounting a serious challenge to moderate Republican Dede Scozzafava and Democrat Bill Owens, prominent Republicans are splitting support between Mr. Hoffman and Ms. Scozzafava, providing an unusually raw display of the party’s divisions.
Supporters of Mr. Hoffman, including former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, say the GOP needs to return to its conservative roots. Backers of Ms. Scozzafava, such as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, say the party must embrace centrists who can capture swing districts.
View Full Image
Associated Press
Doug Hoffman, Conservative Party candidate in upstate New York.
There have been few neutral surveys in recent weeks, but polls backed by both liberal and conservative groups suggest this has become a two-person race between Messrs. Owens and Hoffman. Democrats, clearly viewing it that way, have been aiming their fire at Mr. Hoffman.
The vacancy occurred when President Barack Obama chose the district’s eight-term congressman, Rep. John McHugh, to serve as secretary of the Army.
The district has been in GOP hands for nearly 120 years. There are about 46,000 more registered Republicans than Democrats, though Mr. Obama won 52% of the vote there in 2008. Like the rest of the Northeast, New York state has trended Democratic; only two of its 29 House members are Republicans, down from nine in 2004.
The latest surprise came Thursday, when former New York Gov. George Pataki, a moderate Republican, endorsed Mr. Hoffman. The move may signal that some Republicans have given up on Ms. Scozzafava.
Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele said in an interview that the tumultuous race reflects a healthy ferment within the party. “The fight is, are you going to adhere to principles or are you going to be a Democrat-light?” he said. Asked if that meant Ms. Scozzafava represented “Democrat-light,” Mr. Steele said that was up to voters.
The intra-GOP battle has intensified as polls suggest support for Mr. Obama is slipping. Some Republicans believe the path to victory lies in tapping the energy of conservative activists. Others want to replicate Democrats’ success in appealing to independents.
Republicans would likely cite a Hoffman win as a vindication of conservative principles. If Mr. Owens wins, Democrats will say it prove that splits in the GOP are hobbling the party.
The race also may determine what kind of candidates the GOP recruits for 2010. A Hoffman win could persuade them to tack to the right, while a Democratic victory could boost centrists’ prospects.
—Jonathan Weisman contributed to this article.
Write to Naftali Bendavid at naftali.bendavid@wsj.com
The Outlook for the 2009 Elections
Oct 31st
By Stuart Rothenberg
We are still a few days away from Election Day, but party strategists, operatives and local activists are already blaming their own nominees for their defeats.
The clearest evidence that the Virginia gubernatorial race is over – apart from a blizzard of surveys showing Republican Bob McDonnell well over the 50 percent mark in the ballot test and leading Democrat Creigh Deeds by double digits in many surveys – is that White House insiders have already passed the word that it is Deeds who blew the race.
The assertion by Obama loyalists that Deeds would have done better by embracing President Barack Obama, as they say New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine (D) has, ignores the fact that Corzine comes from a more Democratic state and that because Corzine is in a multicandidate race, he may need only 44 percent of the vote to win. If Deeds gets 44 percent of the vote in Virginia, he will be soundly defeated.
If George W. Bush were still in the White House, Deeds almost certainly would be elected governor of Virginia, so it’s a little difficult to swallow the argument that national politics has nothing to do with the Virginia results. But it’s also important to note that Virginia Republicans united behind their nominee and that McDonnell has kept his focus on jobs, taxes and transportation, rather than stressing social issues.
The ability of McDonnell to roll up big margins outside Northern Virginia, against a Democratic nominee from rural Bath County, can’t be ignored, especially considering all of the growth in Northern Virginia and the hype about the region’s political importance in state races. The red parts of Virginia are acting red again, even against a Democratic nominee who was expected to have considerable appeal in those parts of the state.
In New Jersey, the battle between Corzine and Chris Christie (R) is too close to call. Late polling in the race is all over the place, from Corzine having a mid-single-digits lead to Christie having a slightly smaller advantage.
Recent polls show Independent Chris Daggett getting anywhere from 7 percent to 20 percent, a mind-boggling range. Republican attacks on Daggett in paid media seem to have driven up his negatives, which could help Christie peel off some of the Independent’s supporters.
While Christie should outperform the polls, his own numbers have eroded dramatically. Daggett is proving to be a considerable factor, and he could be Corzine’s salvation. The stronger Daggett’s showing, the more likely that Corzine earns a narrow win. Three months ago, that seemed impossible, which shows how successful the governor’s campaign has been in making Christie the issue.
It’s a widely accepted rule of politics that incumbents “get what you see” on the ballot test, winning little or none of the undecided vote. It’s also generally true, as I wrote recently, that support for Independent and third-party nominees tends to slip in the final days of the campaign, unless of course the Independent or third-party candidate has a chance to win (see New York’s 23rd district, below). Both of those factors work to Christie’s advantage in the campaign’s final days.
In any case and no matter the result, the result in the Garden State will say little or nothing about Obama.
In New York’s 23rd district, another three-way race, Republican nominee Dede Scozzafava now seems like an afterthought.
Baseball statistician-turned-political-statistics guru Nate Silver, who seems to question the integrity and veracity of every Republican or conservative poll that he doesn’t like, has raised questions about the newest Club for Growth survey, which shows Conservative Party nominee Doug Hoffman holding a slight lead of 32 percent to 28 percent over Democrat Bill Owens.
In fact, more than one poll (public and private) shows that the liberal Republican has slid into third place and that the race is statistically even between Hoffman and Owens. (For the record, Club for Growth pollster Jon Lerner is among the least likely pollsters to fudge numbers or manipulate data.)
The fact that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is attacking Hoffman – and that a new Club for Growth ad being aired in the district’s three major media markets attacks Owens, contrasts him with Hoffman and ignores Scozzafava – is further proof that the special election has become a two-way race between the Democratic nominee and the Conservative Party nominee.
Interestingly, the National Republican Congressional Committee’s independent expenditure campaign in the race has run three TV spots – all of which have attacked Owens but ignored Hoffman.
That strategy either assumes that Hoffman is irrelevant – a conclusion clearly not warranted by any of the recent polling or accepted by GOP operatives – or is intended to help Hoffman in the event that he emerges as the stronger opponent against the Democrat in the final days of the three-way contest. It isn’t hard to figure out what Republican strategists are doing.
Owens deserves to be favored in the race, if only because of the presence of a credible Republican and a credible Conservative Party nominee.
Democrats could win two out of the three races, but only because multicandidate contests might allow Corzine and Owens to sneak through with a minority of the vote. A win is a win, but even if that happens, it’s not great news for Democrats for 2010.
In fact, Democrats might be better off were Hoffman to win the special election in New York. Yes, that outcome would prevent Democrats from expanding their House majority, but a Hoffman win might embolden the Club for Growth and encourage conservatives to take on other Republicans who aren’t entirely pure. And encouraging a bigger GOP civil war is something that could help Democrats win more than a single additional seat in the House.
Stuart Rothenberg is the editor of the The Rothenberg Political Report, and a regular columnist for Roll Call Newspaper.
Original Article: The Outlook for the 2009 Elections.