My official 60 second insta-analysis of the #VAgov and #NJgov elections

****Drumroll — what you’ve all been waiting for (hah!) ****

McAuliffe won Virginia due to two things: The shutdown and “war on women” nonsense. This was race was a lot closer than people thought it would be, and we can thank Obamacare for that as Cooch closed the polling gap in the final weeks of the campaign, in spite of T-Mac’s $$ advantage. Much hay has been made over the fact there was a Libertarian candidate who was funded by Obama bundlers but upon further review I think Cooch still could have won if given another few weeks to hammer Obamacare and minimize the shutdown damage, Libertarian candidate or not.

Christie won again in NJ with big gains on almost all voting blocs not so much because he made significant attempts to win over voters who normally wouldn’t vote GOP but largely because of how well a vast majority believe he’s done in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. NJ citizens want their state back at 100% and Christie is fighting for the resources and federal dollars to continue to make that happen. They want him to finish the job.

Neither race has big 2014 – or 2016 – implications, outside of the potential for Obamacare to hurt Dems next year.

Thoughts?

14 Responses to "My official 60 second insta-analysis of the #VAgov and #NJgov elections"

Xrlq says:

November 6, 2013 at 11:04 am

McAwful certainly harped on the “war on women” nonsense, but in the end it was the truth of Cooch’s own record that made him an unviable candidate from the start, esp. for those of us libertarian-leaning types. I do think there may be some implications for 2014 and 2016, though, in a positive direction for Republicans. Both major candidates were very unpopular, so I’ve long considered it a given that whoever won yesterday would provide free advertising to the other side for the next four years. We’ll see if I was right.
yourmamatoo says:

November 6, 2013 at 12:56 pm

We in VA get what we deserve.
The stay at home conservatives allowed a McAuliffe win.

Do not want to hear any complaining from them now.
Proud of my vote for Cuccinelli.
yourmamatoo says:

November 6, 2013 at 12:57 pm

@ Xrlq
Shame on you!
Phineas says:

November 6, 2013 at 1:23 pm

I largely agree about Cuccinelli, but I also think this is an illustration of “candidates matter.” From what I could see at a long distance, he ran a lackluster campaign and failed to help himself as a fundraiser, leaving the airwaves to that swine, McAuliffe. (People arguing that the RNC didn’t do enough to help Cuccinelli should keep in mind that, when funding decisions were being made, Cucc was behind by double-digits and looked like dead man walking. Few could predict how Obamacare would help him recover.)

It’s a shame; he would have made a good governor, I think. As I said last night, the better man did not win.

PS: I’m betting McAuliffe comes under indictment by summer, 2016.
Yvonne says:

November 6, 2013 at 2:22 pm

My sister lives in VA. A friend of hers commented that Fairfax, Prince William, and Loudon counties are chock-ful of people whose income “trickles down” from the federal government, and would naturally vote for the big-government candidate. She said it was these 3 counties that swung the election last night. In her words, “Poor Virginia — she just lost the Civil War for the second time.” Darn shame.
Great White Rat says:

November 6, 2013 at 3:10 pm

Fairly accurate summary of the vote here in NJ. I’d add a few things:

– For those who think this means an “Establishment GOP” type is the ticket to victory in 2016 (like, you know, McCain and Romney were) because they can win in states like NJ, you’re wrong. We also had a ballot question yesterday on hiking the minimum wage. It passed – by a bigger margin than Christie won.

– Another factor is the special Senate election we had a few weeks ago. Christie deliberately set that for mid-October because he didn’t want to be on the same ballot as Cory Booker, or, for that matter, any big-name Democrat. His opponent this time was a non-entity. If he had set the Senate election for yesterday as well, his margin would have been much smaller, since the Booker voting sheep would have also voted for the Demo candidate for governor. I think he’d lose NJ to a well-known Democrat like the Hildebeest.

– Full disclosure: I passed on voting for the top of the ticket this time. Christie’s been dead to me since he spent last fall cuddling up with Obama, and since there was no danger of the Dems winning, I withheld my vote.
Xrlq says:

November 6, 2013 at 3:31 pm

Yourmamatoo: I voted for the candidate I thought was best, you voted for the candidate you thought best. No shame on either of us for that.
Sefton says:

November 6, 2013 at 8:51 pm

GWR – just reading the spin of the MSM so far, it looks as though they’re trying like hell to make it a Christie-Hillary general in 2016. Like you said though, I see him as another in the McCain/Romney mold. Which then makes sense that this is what the media wants – keep the conservatives home to guarantee a Hillary victory. And they’d be right.
I’m not voting for another “moderate”, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. And I’m starting to think the GOP is actually in cahoots with the “order” on our choices. I think they actually believe that Hillary is “next in line” and there is nothing they can do to stop it. Hope I’m very wrong.
Joseph says:

November 6, 2013 at 10:16 pm

“Much hay has been made over the fact there was a Libertarian candidate who was funded by Obama bundlers but upon further review I think Cooch still could have won if given another few weeks to hammer Obamacare and minimize the shutdown damage, Libertarian candidate or not.”

Considering how close the election was, it’s clear that Cuccinelli would have won without the presence of the Libertarian spoiler, funded by at least one Democrat. Democracy is undermined when the presence of one candidate on the ballot ends up helping another get elected, especially when supporters of one of the two main candidates are behind it.
Callawyn says:

November 7, 2013 at 5:10 am

The shutdown was meaningless. No measurable effect. It just didn’t change anyone’s vote, or motivate anyone to go vote that wouldn’t have anyway.

1) Money: Get outspent 10:1 = Lose. Got outspent because the RNC and RGA absolutely refused to help. Four years ago, RNC alone put 9 million into the R’s campaign. This year? Close to ZERO (they claim 3 million, but that’s been proven bogus).

2) Abortion demagoguery works. Cuccinelli actually won the married women’s vote, by 5 or 6 points. McAwful won the unmarried women by 42!!! points. yeah. Expect to hear a LOT more about Abortion for the foreseeable future. Everywhere. R candidates really need to figure out how to talk about this issue, because they’re going to get hammered on it regardless of their position (even if they don’t care about it). The D’s drive unmarried women to the polls over this.

3) Obamacare *almost* saved it for Cooch. Despite ‘going dark’ the entire last two weeks of the campaign – because he was completely out of money and had zero support from the party – the failure to launch of Obamacare brought him from nearly 20 points down in polls to only 2 pts down on election day. Just the national news of the disaster alone did that.

4) Turns out the Libertarian actually pulled more votes from the D than the R. Go figure. (exit polls, plus comparing the results of the Lt Gov race, where the R lost big despite no 3rd party candidate, by about the same vote gap the exit polls predict the Libertarian hurt McAwful).

5) McAwful did what Obama did to Romney: He was on the air in April, ramped up in June, and stayed on the air all the way until the polls closed. Didn’t hear a peep out of Cucinelli’s campaign until September. By then, he was already 10 points down, the race and the issues had already been defined by McAwful and the partisan press (WAPO most horribly). R’s SUCK at campaigning. Sorry, but there it is. Ground game / volunteers suck too. Worse, actually.

6) The issues Cucinelli *should* have won on were barely mentioned the entire campaign: McAwful’s a gun-grabber, long history of it, sure loser issue in VA. Didn’t hammer him on it outside of the debates. Same with the war on Coal. Lots of juicy quotes of McAwful wanting to obliterate the industry, in a state where the majority of the power is from coal and the SW of the state is a big in coal mining. No mention.
Xrlq says:

November 7, 2013 at 6:56 am

“Considering how close the election was, it’s clear that Cuccinelli would have won without the presence of the Libertarian spoiler, funded by at least one Democrat.”

I think you’d be hard pressed to find a single poll, pre- or post-election, to bear that out. As Callawyn rightly noted, exit polls indicate Sarvis actually pulled more votes from McAuliffe than Cuccinelli, and every pre-election poll I’m aware of had McAuliffe beating Cuccinelli by comparable margins, with or without Sarvis in the race. Had Sarvis not been on the ballot, most of his supporters would have stayed home, McAwful would have gotten an absolute majority rather than a plurality, and the only statewide Republican who *might* have won, AG candidate Mark Obenshain, would have lost decisively.

“Democracy is undermined when the presence of one candidate on the ballot ends up helping another get elected, especially when supporters of one of the two main candidates are behind it.”

Nope, democracy is undermined when a major party claim to “own” anyone else’s votes. It’s further undermined when a major party cancels its own primary to anoint a flawed candidate who couldn’t even have won that, then gets butthurt when that same candidate loses the general to another bad candidate no one even likes. Cuccinelli’s candidacy was, from start to finish, an unforced error. I would not like to see that error repeated in 2017.
Phineas says:

November 7, 2013 at 8:45 am

I’ll agree with Xrlq, at least on the point that Sarvis did not cause Cuccinelli’s loss. Turns out it’s a case of “common wisdom” that isn’t born out by analysis. From Sean Davis:

In the counties that Cuccinelli won, Sarvis received 7 percent of the vote (71,146 votes), while in the counties that McAuliffe won, Sarvis received 6.1 percent of the vote (74,149 votes). Sarvis actually received the majority of his votes from counties that were overwhelmingly won by Terry McAuliffe. The dynamic is the same if we look at the average Sarvis support in each county (as opposed to spreading out all the Sarvis votes across the counties and calculating percentage support that way). Sarvis received an average of 6.9 percent of the vote in each Cuccinelli county and 6.3 percent of the vote in each McAuliffe county.

Remember that the total difference between your average Cuccinelli county (R+25) and your average McAuliffe county (D+22) was a swing of nearly 47 percent, yet the difference in Sarvis support between those two massively different electorates was less than 1 percent.

Those numbers — namely the fact that there is so little difference in Sarvis support in counties with wildly different candidate preferences — strongly suggest that Sarvis was a “none of the above” candidate, not a Cuccinelli siphon or a traditional spoiler in the mold of Ralph Nader.

Whole piece is worth reading.
Xrlq says:

November 7, 2013 at 5:31 pm

More evidence to show Sarvis was not a spoiler in the gubernatorial race, and may have spoiled a Democrat victory down ticket.

http://unlikelyvoter.com/2013/11/07/turnout-and-the-sarvis-factor-in-virginia/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/11/07/robert-sarvis-didnt-cost-ken-cuccinelli-the-virginia-governors-race/
Ryan says:

November 8, 2013 at 5:51 pm

My thoughts: Money.

Or the lack thereof on the Republican side. With some actual support from the GOP, he wins.

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