Republicans attempt to build momentum off of beating Democratic C team

[blackflame2180]

Something that's been on my mind: ok, Tuesday there were elections in which the two governorships transferred to the Republicans. Yesterday and today there's been a lot of articles attempting to somehow project this into some kind of Republican resurgence

Comments

[blackflame2180]

Re: Deeds

Deeds did as well as he did in 2005 by riding the coat tails of Tim Kaine, who was an effective candidate in the Commonwealth. Democrats in general did better in Virginia under the headline of Kaine's campaign-- because Tim Kaine was an effective candidate for office who could and did mobilize a significant percentage of the Democratic base in NVA. If anything 2005 is more evidence that Deeds /is/ the moron of the political class in VA, as most other Democrats were able to ride Kaine's coat-tails to office. Deeds' poor performance as the head of the Virginia Democratic ticket in 2009 explains a lot of how other Democrats in the commonwealth did poorly.

Again, the strongest evidence of this is that exit polling in VA shows that the electorate that went to the polls last week voted for McCain by 8 points-- in a state that went for Obama by a 6.3% margin, making a difference of 14.3 percent. That means that Deeds failed to get 1 out of 4 Obama voters to even go to the polls and vote. That is serious underperformance in his own party, and most clearly explained by Deed's distancing of himself from the national party and specifically Obama. That the Deeds campaign tried to reach out to the Obama administration at the last moment was a failed strategy that was a transparently desperate hail mary pass at the last moment, one which Obama supporters clearly saw through.

More evidence that the Republican success in Virginia owed more to Deed's failure than any real Republican resurgence is the behavior of the Republican candidates themselves. None of them felt comfortable enough in their party identification to so much as include it in their websites, espeacially not McDonnell, whose website was scrubbed clean of all references to the GOP. If his success was in fact built on the return of Republicanism, then clearly marketing himself as a Republican should have been a hallmark of his campaign. Instead, the Republican Party of Virginia had a coordinated effort to hide their political affiliations in the campaign-- that speaks to the fact that even the Republicans knew that the party remains unpopular, which is again more evidence that it was Deed's campaign to lose, not McDonnell's to win.

[weasel2000]

Kaine was still head of the VA Dems as well as the National Party and HE still couldn't energize the masses. If Obama had spent major time in the state...if he spent as much time in VA as he did in NJ...Deeds still would have lost. You all still lost the Independents that made VA swing red. VA is still a harsh bellweather for Democrats in the south (those that remain) and the Mid-West. Dems have overreached and turned off Independents, that will only worsen as the year goes on. To hear dems spin this as much as they have is amusing...

[blackflame2180]

Deeds specifically distanced himself from Kaine, in the debate no less. He avoided appearances with Warner, and with Jim Webb. He avoided rallies in NVA, fearing that they would alienate southern Virginians. He avoided campaign rallies in the first place because his campaign feared his stuttering disability would lead to YouTube clips that would sink the campaign George Allen style-- as it was the McDonnell campaign was able to successfully use his inability to speak clearly at the post-debate press conference in a multitude of campaign ads.

VA is no doubt a harsh land for Democrats-- which is exactly why it's no surprise that a candidate who couldn't organize an effective campaign, refused affiliation with popular national party figures from the State (Kaine, Webb, and Warner all have high positive job approval in the State, another indication that the Democratic national agenda isn't what sunk the Deeds campaign), mounted no get-out-the-vote in counties in which he had strong advantage, and in general was unable to articulate a response to outdated lines of attack did poorly. There's no evidence in any of that that the loss had much if anything to do with a shift in party affiliation, and much more evidence that supporters of the popular Democratic figures of the state just weren't motivated to support a candidate that didn't want their support in the first place.

Re: Independents

http://www.pollster.com/polls/us/party-id.php

On election day last year, about 30% of voting-age adults identified as Republicans. Today that number is 22%, meaning that 1 out of 4 people who identified as Republican on election day last year identified as Independent this year. And that's averaging with the far more rosey Rasmussen numbers-- the Wall Street Journal (that storied bastion of Liberals) puts the number at 17%, which would be a loss of over 40%. Over that same period, Independent identification has gone from 32% to 38%-- making it reasonably clear that most Republicans who have left the party now identify as Independent.

It's not that Democrats have lost the independents with whom they built the victories of 2006 and 2008, it's that over the past year the Republican Party has bled so much support that recently-former Republicans make up a significantly large chunk of the independent electorate, a big enough chunk to swing independent numbers more conservative. If you look at polls in which voters are asked who they voted for in 2008, the numbers are virtually unchanged from a year ago.

What you're falling for is the statistics trick where all independent support is accounted to whichever side has the majority of independent support. About 35% of the country identifies as Democratic, and as noted before 22% of the country as Republican. That's a 13 point gap-- in order for the maxim that the majority of this country leans conservative, independents would have to lean conservative by over that 13 points.

That simply is not the case-- the numbers show that to be clearly false.