Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe
With just over three months to go in the 2013 elections (for the uninitiated ... yes, we have elections this year), the bulk of the interested observers and election junkies are casting their eyes to the South.
Sure, Chris Christie is just one bloviation away from making any election competitive, and Democrat Barbara Buono is amassing the resources to take advantage of it when he does. But, in the state of Virginia, a gubernatorial race that has been a polling tossup all year, between two strong personalities, is what is garnering the lion's share of the attention.
Democrat Terry McAuliffe, the one-time head of the Democratic National Committee, is going heads-up with Republican state attorney general Ken Cuccinelli. McAuliffe has been this way once before, having run a surprisingly distant second to Creigh Deeds in the Democratic gubernatorial primary in 2009. Cuccinelli ascended the ladder in a fairly conventional manner, moving up from the state legislature to the position of attorney general by easily defeating Steve Shannon in 2009 (his margin having been larger than any of his prior state legislative victories).
Both candidates are drawing a lot of political heat in this off-year election. So much so that a lot of folks are making assumptions about the race, some of which may be off the mark by a foot or two. Follow me below the fold for four assumptions that it seems like a lot of folks are making that are quite possibly errant.
ASSUMPTION #1: Voters really don't like their choices here.
If there is a single article of faith about this Virginia gubernatorial election, it is the fundamental assumption that this is the "meh" election: a choice between two candidates that, for all intents and purposes, no one particularly loves.
In that regard, it is rather telling that one could practically see partisans from both sides of the ledger salivating when it became clear that McAuliffe and Cuccinelli were the presumptive nominees.
There is some data that would appear to bear this out. According to PPP's latest poll, both candidates had underwater favorability ratings, with Cuccinelli looking markedly worse (32/47) than McAuliffe (34/36). However, those numbers are owed in part to the fact that, even as the bulk of voters are still giving the election minimal attention, both of these candidates are already absolutely reviled by partisans from the other team. McAuliffe, among Republicans, actually does as nearly as bad (9/57) as Cuccinelli does with Democrats (12/66).
However, as it happens, this week we also received some data that is, at a minimum, mildly contradictory to this "a pox on both your candidates" thesis.
The Quinnipiac poll, released on Thursday, had identical margins (and nearly identical toplines) as the PPP poll that was released earlier in the week. Both polls had Democrat Terry McAuliffe staked to a four-point edge over Republican Ken Cuccinelli. The only difference in the head-to-head trial heats was that both candidates scored a few points less on the PPP survey (owed almost certainly to the inclusion of Libertarian candidate Robert Sarvis in PPP's poll, but not the Q poll).
Where the two pollsters diverged, and fairly substantially, was on the favorability ratings for both candidates. Whereas the aforementioned PPP numbers for both McAuliffe and Cuccinelli ranged from mediocre-to-awful, the Quinnipiac poll had both men in net-positive territory on their favorability numbers. The divide between the two candidates was still present, and almost identical: McAuliffe, in terms of net favorability, ran about a dozen points "warmer" than Cuccinelli (in this case, specifically, ten points better, with McAuliffe at a net plus-11, and Cuccinelli at a net plus-1).
Digging into the numbers here doesn't give us many answers. There is no obvious shift among party ID, for example, that explains the discrepancy. The most obvious thing appears to be that there were a considerably larger pool of voters in the Q poll without a strong opinion of the candidates. 70 percent of PPP's respondents either judged McAuliffe favorably or unfavorably, but only 49 percent of Quinnipiac's respondents were willing to do the same.
Which is another reason to be potentially skeptical of the "everyone hates the candidates" thesis. Both candidates (McAuliffe more so than Cuccinelli) are still at least partially undefined. That gives them the potential for "upside" as they spend their campaign coffers trying to define themselves.
Of course, the converse of that is that their opponents can also rush in and define them before they can define themselves. Which means that the "meh" election could very well still be a real thing, potentially.
Which leads us to ...
ASSUMPTION #2: The Libertarian candidate will be a factor in November.
If you buy a lot of stock in the first assumption, then it logically follows that one might believe that the election's outcome could be swung by a 30-something NoVa lawyer by the name of Robert Sarvis.
Sarvis is the nominee of the Libertarian Party, and he polled at 7 percent in the PPP poll released earlier this week. A Roanoke College poll this week, which had the rather sketchy topline of Cuccinelli +5, had Sarvis similarly in the mid-single digits.
What's more: There is at least a little precedent for the scenario of a third-party candidate playing a pivotal role in a statewide race in Virginia. The year was 1994, and the candidate (Marshall Coleman) scored 11 percent of the vote, which allowed Democratic incumbent Sen. Chuck Robb to survive the 1994 GOP onslaught with just 46 percent of the vote (the execrable Oliver North, the GOP nominee that year, came in with 43 percent).
So, in a close election (and nearly everyone presumes it will be close), could Sarvis make the difference?
Perhaps, but it doesn't seem all that likely.
For one thing, while 1994 does tell a story of a third-party candidate being a legitimate player amid two unloved major party candidates, there is a key distinction to be made here: Marshall Coleman was a known quantity, with nearly universal name recognition from the outset. In short, Coleman was a political player long before his independent bid for the Senate. He had famously run for governor on the Republican ticket in 1989 (losing to Democrat Douglas Wilder), and had been the state's attorney general before that. Furthermore, Coleman secured a number of major-league endorsements as a third-party candidate, primarily from mainstream Republicans appalled by their party's selection of North as the nominee.
Sarvis will enjoy none of those things. He has run for elective office before: he ran for the Virginia state Senate in 2011. And he was soundly defeated by veteran Democratic incumbent Dick Saslaw 62-36. He has scant name recognition, and it looks like he will lack the resources to build it (he had raised just $36,237 through May).
And about those slightly respectable poll numbers? Well, there could well be some connective tissue between 1994 and 2013 here, but not in a way that is amenable to the Libertarian candidate. Coleman won 11 percent of the vote, but he polled better than that in virtually every poll conducted during the 1994 cycle.
Veterans of Daily Kos Elections and other electoral junkies in good standing have long known this to be somewhat of an ironclad rule of polling: Third-party candidates rarely run as well as they poll. The "wasted vote" dilemma is a real phenomenon, and it manifests itself in election after election.
So, perhaps if the race comes down to 1-2 percentage points of margin, Robert Sarvis could play a spoiler role. It is unclear, though, for whom he would be spoiler (he drew pretty evenly from both candidates, based on the 2012 presidential preferences among Sarvis voters). So, his value to the election, barring implosion by one or both major-party candidates, seems limited.
ASSUMPTION #3: E.W. Jackson will be a millstone around Ken Cuccinelli's neck
Let's stipulate one thing: Republican E.W. Jackson, the nominee for the office of lieutenant governor, is legitimately batshit. When the irreplaceable Daily Kos writing institution better known as Hunter can do a multiple-installment feature on one candidate, you know that you've hit a goldmine.
As Jackson's ... ahem ... eccentricities became better known, the bulk of the political press covering the 2013 elections chalked off his prospects for election. However, that has not necessarily been borne out in recent data. The PPP poll had Democrat Ralph Northam leading Jackson, but only by seven points. The Roanoke College poll had it even closer, with Northam clinging to a two-point lead.
It's not that Jackson is accepted by Virginia voters, mind you. It is that he is essentially unknown. PPP had his fav/unfav at an ugly 15/28, but that still means the majority of voters do not have a concrete opinion of him. The Quinnipiac poll, mirroring their gubernatorial poll, found a lot more voters on the fence, as a whopping 81 percent of voters did not wish to share an opinion on Jackson.
This might be hard for some of us to understand or accept, but that plays into an often under-discussed phenomenon in American politics: The chasm between the depth of political information consumed by political junkies (like ourselves) and the depth consumed by the average voters, even during an election. In other words, we all know about Jackson and his forehead-slapping antics, but the average voter in Virginia does not. And may never do so, unless either (a) Ralph Northam marshals enough resources in a downballot race to finance a big information campaign or (b) the media takes an outsized interest in a downballot race, even at the expense of offering relatively less coverage of a tossup gubernatorial race. Option (a) is possible, but option (b) is comparably unlikely.
Lots of folks (and not just those on the left end of the spectrum) have long assumed that Cuccinelli will be hamstrung with a ticket-mate that seems to be completely unelectable in any state committed to ... well ... sanity. But for Jackson to be unelectable, there needs to be a universal knowledge among Virginia voters that he is unelectable. That could still happen, of course. But the data shows that it hasn't happened yet. And, it goes without saying: an anonymous E.W. Jackson is the best outcome that Ken Cuccinelli could hope for.