Well yesterday sucked and today is no better. We lost the governors races in New Jersey and Virginia. We lost on civil rights in Maine. Bloomberg won a third term as New York Mayor. Even NY-23 was not so much a win for Democrats as a case of the Right blowing it. We did win CA-10, too, but the Dems have an 18 point registration edge there.
And cue the boo birds, naysayers and those who hope the president fails.
The reality is that these elections are largely meaningless to the national party. Furthermore, they will only have limited effects in the states and districts. Bob McDonnell may have written a poorly argued thesis. Chris Christie may be an unapologetic conservative. The real question is how they will run their states and solve local problems in the coming years. The House results just mean two more members of an already overwhelming majority.
The Maine results are painful, though.
The White House is "distancing" itself from the results and for good reason. None of these results are reflective of the performance of the chief executive.
But White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters that voters in both states went to the polls to work through "very local issues that didn't involve the president."
The presidential spokesman said that voters were concerned about the economy. He said "I don't think the president needed an election or an exit poll to come to that conclusion."
Now you will read all kinds of hand wringing and blame placing in the coming days about how these few races are some kind of referendum on the job President Obama and the Congressional Democrats are doing. CNN got it right:
While the economy and jobs were the chief concern for voters in both states, 26 percent of New Jersey residents said property taxes was also a major issue, while another 20 percent mentioned corruption, according to CNN exit polling. In a similar CNN survey taken in Virginia, health care was the most important issue for 24 percent of the voters, while 15 percent named taxes and transportation was mentioned by 7 percent.
Further proof that this election was not solely focused on Obama, 56 percent of Virginians said that the president was not a factor when it came down to their vote. In New Jersey, that number increased to 60 percent of the people who went to the polls on Tuesday.
On the other hand, in this story from the Post, Dan Balz is half right for the wrong reason:
Tuesday's elections provided the first tangible evidence that Republicans can win their support with the right kind of candidates and the right messages. That is an ominous development for Democrats if it continues unabated into next year. But Republicans could squander that opportunity if they demand candidates who are too conservative to appeal to the middle.
The last sentence is correct.
Neither New Jersey nor Virginia was an example of the party fielding a particularly good Republican candidate. Those elections were examples of the Democrats fielding very weak candidates. In New Jersey, the very wealthy Corzine -- who has a lot of corrupt friends -- was seen as trying to buy the election. It really did not help when the Corzine campaign called Chris Christie fat (in so many words). In fact, some of the academic research on attack ads show that personal (contrasted with issue) attacks are particularly likely to backfire on Democrats.
Example:
Prior experimental research has found that candidates’ attack ads drive up the negatives of their targets – but also the candidates’ own negatives, and that they especially backfire with Democratic audiences. This dynamic provides healthy incentives for candidates, especially on the Democratic side, to stay positive. But as advertising shifts toward independent groups, those incentives erode, as candidates can take the high ground while allied third parties take the low road.
In Virginia, the situation was not quite as ugly, as long as we are discounting the winner's thesis. Again, this was more about candidate and campaign quality than anything else, though turnout seems to have played a role, too. To be quite frank, the Dems never had a chance with this one. The primary field was weak and produced the best of three poor candidates. The other alternatives were Brian Moran (Rep. Jim Moran's brother) who probably could not have won outside of NoVa and Terry McAuliffe, who is ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag was again seen as trying to buy the election.
Don't believe that assessment of McAuliffe? Just watch the video:
When it got to the campaign, Deeds seemed to run on a single endorsement from the Washington Post. That does not ring very loudly outside of the Beltway. He did not have a plan to deal with the traffic problem. He waffled on tax increases. And good gods, the robocalls. One friend described the Deeds campaign as a bucket of fail. I don't disagree.
We all know what happened in New York 23. The right and the hard right got into a pissing match and found out that the teabagging element cannot win elections by demanding ideological purity over party. Meanwhile, RNC chairman Michael Steele thinks the special election in New York was "cute."
"Now the bottom line is this, the drama of 23 was nice and cute and fun, [and] everybody made fun about how the party's all fractured. The reality is now that we have a chance to get the seat back in about a year, which we likely will."
He may be right. The GOP might take the seat back. However, the Sarah Palin faction needs to decide how much they really ♥ the New York Conservative Party (read: the Ralph Naders of the right).
California 10 was a gimme as discussed above. Losing that would be like losing to the Detroit Lions.
Finally, there is Maine. Voters there repealed a state law allowing same-sex marriage 53-47. There is not much more to say about this other than the fact that a slim majority of voters in Maine actively decided that teh gay is too icky to fully accept. The good news is that we have progressed a long way in the last two decades. The bad news is that we are not at 50 percent plus one. This is going to be a long fight, but we are getting close.
This is a battle that will be fought in the states unless Congress tries to block an effort by the Washington DC City Council to allow gay marriage in the nation's capital. Congress did not get involved when DC began recognizing same sex marriages performed elsewhere. If Congress gets involved this time, the issue will become a national issue and likely be decided by national statute. If not, the legal arguments for any Supreme Court case will be stronger as proponents can point to the city and argue that people in the nation's capital finally have more rights than most other Americans.
If you think it will help, click here to sign a petition urging the president...
to immediately file a brief in the federal court challenge to Prop 8 and ask the court to rule that it is unconstitutional to allow a majority to take away the rights of a minority.
The petition is being circulated by Equality California.
The bottom line is that this election was over hyped outside of Virginia, New Jersey, Maine, and NY-23. This was no litmus test or referendum on the president or congress. That happens next year. We have one year left until the next election. Get to Work!