About yesterday's elections...

by Jay McDonough

Here's the Washington Post's lead paragraph on yesterday's election results:

Off-year
elections can be notoriously unreliable as predictors of the future,
but as a window on how the political landscape may have changed in the
year since President Obama won the White House, Tuesday's Republican
victories in Virginia and New Jersey delivered clear warnings for the
Democrats.

In other words, one really shouldn't read too much into off year election results, but we're going to anyway.

There
will undoubtedly be bunches of Republican operatives on television
today proudly claiming their Party is back from the dead after winning
the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey.  They probably won't want
to talk much about what happened in the 23rd Congressional District of
New York though.  If there's anything very significant that happened
yesterday, it's there.

First, the governor races.  In both cases,
the GOP candidate had been the expected winner.  Creigh Deeds, the
Democratic candidate in Virginia was a terrible, lifeless candidate and
ran a lousy campaign.  The Republican candidate, Bob McDonnell ran a
competent campaign and appealed to moderate voters for support.  The
GOP win in Virginia was almost a foregone conclusion and the Democrats
had written it off weeks ago.

In New Jersey, incumbent Democrat
Jon Corzine nearly pulled off a re-election win after months and months
of 30% approval ratings.  Hardly the rout the Republicans will attempt
to spin today.

There may, however, be some lessons the Democrats
ought to learn from the governor losses.  The so called Obama Coalition
- the young, the black, the activists - were AWOL yesterday.  The
voting patterns reverted back to the pre-2008 demographics; older,
white voters.  In other words, the Republican base.  It may be a great
thing for Democratic candidates to appeal to a big cross-section of
demographics, but it's only valuable if those folks actually come out
to vote for them.

The bigger lesson should come from the
Democrats win in the New York race.  This was all about the so-called
new Republicans (Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, et al) trying to exercise
their self perceived power, putting their weight behind a nutjob
candidate (Doug Hoffman) who didn't live in the district and with a
campaign largely funded by out of state contributions. The result; the
first win by a Democrat in the district in over one hundred years.

These
new Republicans like Palin and Limbaugh aren't known for either their
self reflection or their math skills.  But they ought to be wondering
today whether they actually have the mojo they think they do and how
the hell a candidate with support from only 20% of the electorate can
ever win an election.