Liberal Wedge

Quite a good ad from Creigh Deeds in the Virginia Governor's race, exploiting a gender gap with his opponent Bob McDonnell.



McDonnell is slipping in the polls after the revelation - provided by him in an answer to a reporter - of his college thesis calling essentially for dominionism. You can hold the GOP line on taxes and health care and some other policy issues and be fine, but advocating for women to stay in the home, or against birth control, and suddenly you're on the losing side of 90-10 issues with the public, especially with women. And the Deeds campaign is capitalizing on this perfectly. Here's another one of their ads.



They are exploiting a wedge issue by painting McDonnell as completely out of the mainstream - and they're winning with it.

VA-Gov: McDonnell's "Lie To The Voters" Strategy

This Bob McDonnell fellow is in quite a bit of trouble. His worldview has been exposed and it's not pretty. It's way far out on the extreme fringes of society, anti-woman, anti-contraception (!), holding the Garden of Eden above the US Constitution, and more. What's more, he actually acknowledges that his own views are unpopular.

It is also becoming clear in modern culture that the voting American mainstream is not willing to accept a true pro-family ideologue...Leadership, however, does not require giving voters what they want, for whimsical and capricious government would result. Republican legislators must exercise independent professional judgment as statesmen, to make decisions that are objectively right, and proved effective. (pg. 61)

That's an amazing statement, as Markos notes. He's saying that the ideal state for a Republican is to lie to voters during the campaign and governing as an extremist afterwards.

McDonnell spent 80 minutes on a conference call with reporters doing damage control yesterday. That's how serious they are taking this. But none of it should mean a thing, thanks to that paragraph above. McDonnell is not to be trusted - he told you that himself. And once a candidate loses trust, he doesn't have much left.

Creigh Deeds, who won late in the Democratic primary, was inching back into the race even before this revelation. I'd imagine things have tightened even more now. McDonnell is flat-out scary to a large portion of the electorate.

P.S. I am surprised that the Christie-Corzine race hasn't tightened up in some of the bigger polls. That's the other big gubernatorial race in November. The polls appear to be all over the place, and the impact of Christie's bad month may have not hit voters yet. I still believe Corzine can turn things around.

The Problem With The Republican Revolution Redux: It's The Crazy, Stupid

I keep seeing these expert handicappers arguing that Democrats will take significant losses in 2010. And I think they could be right, especially if the President doesn't take control of the debate on a number of issues and deliver the policies Democratic partisans thought they voted for last November.

But in the back of my mind, I have this nagging feeling that Republicans are simply too completely crazy to compete seriously with any halfway decent political party for the votes of independents. People have short memories, but not that short, and they well remember the disaster of the Bush years. And the Republican bench is filled with avowedly insane or unspeakably corrupt people.

Take the Virginia Governor's race, for example. GOP candidate Bob McDonnell, who until now had been atop the polls, is a Regent University type (Monica Goodling's alma mater) whose worldview in his mid-30s was completely out of the mainstream of American life (but right at home in the Republican Party):

At age 34, two years before his first election and two decades before he would run for governor of Virginia, Robert F. McDonnell submitted a master's thesis to the evangelical school he was attending in Virginia Beach in which he described working women and feminists as "detrimental" to the family. He said government policy should favor married couples over "cohabitators, homosexuals or fornicators." He described as "illogical" a 1972 Supreme Court decision legalizing the use of contraception by unmarried couples.

The 93-page document, which is publicly available at the Regent University library, culminates with a 15-point action plan that McDonnell said the Republican Party should follow to protect American families -- a vision that he started to put into action soon after he was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates.

During his 14 years in the General Assembly, McDonnell pursued at least 10 of the policy goals he laid out in that research paper, including abortion restrictions, covenant marriage, school vouchers and tax policies to favor his view of the traditional family. In 2001, he voted against a resolution in support of ending wage discrimination between men and women.

The campaign for Creigh Deeds, the Democrat in the race, is all over this document and for good reason. It wasn't a youthful indiscretion, but a blueprint for radical theocratic governance, upon which McDonnell acted in the House of Delegates.

Another example: New Jersey GOP candidate Chris Christie, a Rove protege who used his US Attorneys office in New Jersey for partisan ends and held himself to a different standard of ethics than those he prosecuted:



My point is this: Republicans can't hide their crazy. In fact, they have to let little bits of it out to win their primaries. And yet these ethical lapses and statements of radical views massively turn off independent voters. In the abstract, on the generic ballot, Republicans might look good to those swamped by the anti-Obama lies of the noise machine. Up close, Republicans still have major problems with the electorate. So I'm not convinced that the losses next year will even hit double digits in the House, especially if Democrats get their act together and do something tangible for the American people.

...That said, I do think the Democrats will lose seats next year, mainly because most Presidents lose seats.

VA-Gov: Crazy Squiggly Lines

I haven't been all that plugged in to either of the two gubernatorial races this year, in New Jersey or Virginia, but the primary for the latter is on Tuesday, and the poll numbers have really bounced around on the Democratic side. You basically have the 3 candidates, former state Sen. Creigh Deeds, former DNC Chair Terry McAuliffe, and House of Delegates member Brian Moran all within the margin of error and basically tied. McAuliffe surged about a month ago but has dropped like a stone, and Deeds was nowhere a month ago, started running a bunch of ads and now leads in some polls. Moran's always been right there and reportedly has the best ground game.

As Nate Silver says, the dynamic does resemble Iowa 2004:

This was the polling situation in the run-up to the 2004 Iowa Democratic Caucus, with the last data point representing the actual results. As you can see, while it was clear from the polling that Howard Dean was losing momentum and John Kerry and John Edwards were gaining it, the polling far underestimated the magnitude of the momentum, and Dean wound up losing to Kerry by 19 points.

These kind of dramatic late swings happen more often in primaries than in general elections, and more often in multi-candidate fields than in two-candidate ones. I don't want to say they're always dispositive, because I haven't studied the issue systematically enough. Of note is that at least one hot-off-the-presses poll (from SurveyUSA) still has McAuliffe ahead by 6 points. But overall, and particularly in consideration of the fact that is Terry McAluiffe, who started out with the biggest warchest and the most name recognition, it's hard to see what he's going to do to halt his slide [...]

My armchair assessment is that the probabilities here are something like Deeds 60-70%, McAuliffe 20-30%, and Moran 10-20%. Like Dean, McAuliffe wears his emotions on his sleeve, and if he were to lose, the concession speech should be something to watch.

Maybe he'll talk about running for Governor in other states and end with a YEEARGHHH!

Whoever wins, it will be difficult to beat the Republican, Attorney General Bob McDonell, simply because he has not been bruised by a primary and Virginia has had two Democrats in the Governor's mansion in a row. If the winner of this primary gathers enough momentum to win in November, then you really can color Virginia blue.