There are some idiosyncrasies in the Virginia gubernatorial race that will complicate analysts’ ability to draw conclusions from the results and the exit polling. For starters, only 5% of Virginia Democrats think that Terry McAuliffe is too liberal, but fully 20% of Virginia Republicans think that Ken Cuccinelli is too conservative. Those are important numbers that do more than anything else to explain the likely result of the election. But, what would the numbers be in a race between Hillary Clinton and Chris Christie? I think they would be a lot different. You can throw any combination of prospective candidates into the mix (Biden vs. Jeb Bush, O’Malley vs. Rand Paul, Cuomo vs. Ted Cruz) and you’ll get different perceptions about how respectively liberal or conservative the candidate are. Candidates, and more importantly, perceptions of candidates, matter a lot. Chris Christie is a very socially conservative politician, but he isn’t trying to ban blow jobs in New Jersey. Many Republican consultants and strategists think that Christie is the perfect mix of social conservative and perceptual moderate. I agree that he’s pulled off that trick in New Jersey for now, but I think people need to take into account that New Jerseyans are not like other people.
In New Jersey, it’s a plus if you are confrontational and get up in people’s faces. It’s a plus if you won’t suffer idiots. And don’t discount that some of Christie’s most well-known tantrums have been thrown at Washington Republicans. Democrats in New Jersey give credit to Christie for throwing his arms around the president after SuperStorm Sandy, but they give him more credit for blasting John Boehner for delaying federal aid. Democrats might cringe a little when Christie berates a school teacher in public, but when he basically calls Rand Paul an idiot, he gets a lot of credit.
A lot of progressive analysts who aren’t from New Jersey think that Christie is popular with conservatives because he’s always on the attack. But that doesn’t explain why he’s popular with so many Jersey Democrats. Jersey Democrats are a lot like conservatives nationally, who like a combative style of politics.
Now, if you want to talk about how well Christie will sell in some place like Iowa, that’s an interesting question. Rudy Giuliani didn’t sell well in Iowa, and I don’t know if it was his chaotic personal life, his socially-moderate positions on the issues, his foreign New York affectation, or his combative style that presented the biggest problem for him. In general, Iowans are a polite and pacifistic people, but they also keep sending Rep. Steve King to Congress, and Sen. Chuck Grassley seems to grow more ornery with each passing year. So, there is certainly an appetite for combativeness in at least a wing of the Republican Party in Iowa. On the other hand, the Iowa GOP has been taken over by devotees of Ron and Rand Paul.
What I do know, because I’m from New Jersey and have lived in the Midwest and on the West Coast, is that the typical Jersey personality-type, which Chris Christie represents quite well, comes off as arrogant and impolite in other parts of the country. It would be a very tough sell in the Midwest in a general election, although it might not hurt him too badly in closed Republican primaries and caucuses.
If the polls are correct, tomorrow people will start trying to coronate Chris Christie as the 2016 GOP nominee for president. That will be premature. They’ll also contrast his victory with Cuccinelli’s defeat and argue that the Tea Party lost out to the Establishment. That will be closer to the truth, but it will be misleading. It will be misleading because Chris Christie is a very socially conservative guy.
The narrative will also create some problems for Christie, because the more the Establishment wraps its arms around him, the more suspect Christie will become with the conservative base. And we know how respectful and tactful Christie is to his critics…
As to Virginia, what we want to look at is how the different regions of the state vote, and then we can try to extrapolate from that how the results would translate in a full-turnout presidential election. That’s the important information because, as I’ve said, for Republicans, if you lose Virginia, you lose the presidency.
If Chris Christie is indeed running, those people will be Christie operatives.
With a candidate like McAuliffe, that will be more of an indication of institutional Democratic presence by county than public sentiment for McAuliffe. Can the party establishment get their folks out to vote in sufficient numbers in those counties to make a difference. Or will McAuliffe win based on a small group of large population geographical and demographic categories. The more widespread the presence, the better the prospects for any Democratic candidate in 2016 because you will have rebuilt the Democratic reach to make Virginia a functioning two-party state intead of a flip-flopping one-party state.
Well, with all caveats applied, we can ignore turnout a little bit, at least for one purpose. We want to know the country numbers irrespective of turnout. And then we can use those numbers and plug in a more typical presidential turnout, and see what the results would look like.
Here’s what I’ll be looking for.
We know that the numbers would extrapolate to Democratic win, because McAuliffe is going to win even with low turnout.
What I want to see is how ridiculous the victory would be. Is the state even going to be in play?
It’s not a straightforward analysis and it isn’t the only important metric. As Chris Cillizza points out in the linked piece, the Cooch may be underperforming in coal country because of a controversy with him taking the side of the coal companies against the people down there. And it’s also important to look at differential turnout to get a grip on how well the parties were able to get out their vote in different areas of the state.
But, with those caveats in place, we could still see numbers out of the North and the Tidewater that indicate that the Democrats have built a firewall in Virginia similar to what they’ve done in Pennsylvania.
I’m more interested in what the pattern might mean for Congressional races than a Presidential turnout. If it’s not Hillary, a known quantity relative to the demographics and geography (adjust for population change), it depends very much at this point on who the Democratic candidate is.
Given the shutdown, one wonders to what degree that will begin to shift the PVI just through change in sentiment. Or change the outcome just through better/worse Democratic organization locally, which depends on shifts in the sentiment of lots of personal networks.
“In New Jersey, it’s a plus if you are confrontational and get up in people’s faces. “
Does this work for New Jersey Democrats? Corey Booker seems quite the opposite. If Grayson were from New Jersey, people would still tut-tut and consider him too impolite, no?
Grayson would do just fine in New Jersey, except that he’s always blasting New Jerseyans without realizing that he’s doing it. But his style would work.
Way to puncture the old pundit balloon, Steggies!!!
Thank you.
What “works” in NJ…and pretty much everywhere else in the U.S. that has any meaning in national elections and national politics…is subservience to real power. Subservience to the corporate power that owns the UniParty. That is what Christie and Booker really share. Mao Zhe Dung once famously stated that “Power comes from the barrel of a gun.” He was of course correct in his time and place, but in the totally technologized InfoWorld in which most of the citizens of relatively affluent countries now live it is no longer true. Now power comes out of the media. Through the media in the form of what we laughingly like to refer to as “information.” Celebritocracy is the new power. Like successful cooks, crooks and show business celebrity clones of any and all types, successful politicians are now nothing more than media-created caricatures of the real thing. Image is all, and the old showbiz lick “Call me anything but spell my name right” is in effect up and down the system. Get a great press agent and repeatedly prove your allegiance to the shifting winds of PermaGov policy and you are in like Flynn.
Bet on it.
What do these two people share?
Mario Batali and Guy Fieri?
They are both professional food celebrities, which means that they both have serious money behind their publicity machines.
Batali is a transcendently good chef, a serious, lifelong student of the deepest kinds of Southern European cooking styles who has synthesized them into a high art.
Fieri is a glorified fry cook.
If one Googles the two names, Fieri get 32 million hits to Batali’s 12 million. In an election, Fieri would win almost 3 to 1. Ain’t about “cooking,” it’s just about image.
Ditto here.
Bet on it.
Station WTFU signing off. Once again.
Sigh.
Later…
AG
AG
I think that Booman has already stated his position that “Joisey doesn’t travel well”.
Now, here’s a link to an old Inky article, describing how a GOP a’ole from Ind made a very effective TV ad using that idea. Seen it, years ago, and it was VERY effective.
Couldn’t find the ad on Youtube, but someone should, because it would be sweet to hit Christy with the product of a GOP smear campaign. Just a little voiceover, overlay some text, and you’re ready to roll.
… the typical Jersey personality-type, which Chris Christie represents quite well, comes off as arrogant and impolite in other parts of the country. It would be a very tough sell in the Midwest in a general election, although it might not hurt him too badly in closed Republican primaries and caucuses.
Well, are any Democrats going to try to elicit/draw attention to boorishness from him? Or are they just going to continue what they did through this gubernatorial campaign, which is just to let him build and build and build the myth that he’s a harmless fuzzball who only yells once in a while because he has such a big heart?
When Mitt Romney thinks your personal finances and those of your family are too sketchy, then I think you know what the Democrats will do to Chris Christie once he stops being so useful to them.
Well, are any Democrats going to try to elicit/draw attention to boorishness from him?
Why would they? If they cared, they would have tried harder to defeat him today.
NOVA born here, grew up in the area, came back to it.
Another left out is what sort of jobs the well off blue/purple areas have. The Pentagon and the CIA are here! So everyone works for the federal government (mostly the defense and intelligence sectors) or some contractor/big firm that caters to the DOD. Even if you just run say a burger joint or a clothing store, you’re customers are all DOD.
So when they started down the road with the sequester, when they shutdown the government, when the Tea Party decided it was OK to let the defense cuts hit… they essentially laid off Northern Virginia and the Tidewater/Hampton area.
It wasn’t just “no blow jobs” it was “and no jobs at all either” from the Tea Party.
Democrats can fuck this up. We have three of the five richest counties in the entire US here, including spots one and two. Fairfax, Loudon, and Arlington. Those are the blue and purple areas. But we aren’t progressive at all on several things. We like low taxes and low regulation, and we love us some defense spending.
The Tea Party has trashed the Republican brand here because of government spending issues. Their only hope is that the Democrats are stupid enough to try and fix domestic spending at the cost of defense spending, or just dumb enough to cut defense at all and spend it on something else. At that point blow jobs and birth control be damned, people here will scream of Democratic blood and vote blood red over and over. Shit, slash social security before you cut defense.
For people that aren’t from here you can’t understand the impact government shutdowns have here, it’s a massive fuck up. The only bigger fuck up would be the Democrats cutting defense to get money for domestic spending, at that point pass the tricorner hats and show me a hippie to punch.
you keep saying that as if:
Shit, slash social security before you cut defense.
Why should the Democratic Party exist in that case? Do you realize how bloated the Defense budget is? Thank you, Marie Antoinette!!
Social issues. And the more Republicans that join up the more pro business the party will become. Social issues are our litmus test. Obama and Clinton both wanted to reform entitlements and were elected, twice.
Moving socially to the left and economically to the right is a proven Democratic formula. We are the party of NYC, DC, LA, SanFran. You know, big tech, big media, big finance, big defense.
The defense budget being bloated or not does not change that the blue areas of Virginia depend on it. Cutting defense equates to firing well educated and socially liberal democrats. That’s not a wise electoral formula.
Times have changed, this is no longer your fathers New Deal party. This is the New Democratic party. Populism is as dirty a word among our leadership as racism and sexism. The economic power centers and sources of inequality are reliably blue and give us our electoral power.
America already has a party for the 1%. Your New Democratic party that’s OK with gay marriage but continues transferring all the country’s wealth to the richest is not a party I want anything to do with and it will have ceased being significantly less evil than the Republicans.
I think you should check out the Swing State analysis of Virginia’s electorate over time.
Seems like racial diversity and education are more determinative than candidates or issues.
Again, anyone who would vote for the GOP despite the fact that they are evil incarnate, just because the Dems want to spend less on defense, is not a true Democrat. Anyone who is willing to sacrifice civil rights, the environment, world peace, etc, in exchange for money is not a true Democrat. Seriously, what kind of selfish bastards live in your neighborhood? I can guarantee you that San Francisco would not go to the GOP over money, and I’m going to assume that most of Virginia won’t either.
They won’t; I live here, too, and my version of NOVA is completely different than his. Maybe it’s because my income is half of his, who knows. I’m actually doing fairly well, especially for my age and compared with my peers of high school and college. Yet everyone I interact with up here is like, “Soak the rich, and then drown them.”
Searching for some meaning in this ongoing comedy!!!???
I got yer “meaning”, right here!!!
Chris Christie/Terry McAuliffe, “socially conservative”/”socially liberal”, RatPublican/DemocRat, etc., etc., etc.
Christie and McAuliffe are both PermaGovRats, and thus they both have received a huge amount of money and…much more important…a huge amount of media coverage whereas their “opponents” have not. Ergo…they win.
ZZZZzzzz…
That “Tomato, tomahto” thing was written by George + Ira Gershwin for a film called Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off. “I Won’t Dance” was another song in that film.
Well, I won’t dance this whole farcical electoral PermaDance anymore and y’all shouldn’t either. Let’s call the whole thing off before we fall off the stage and get hurt.
Please.
AG
So they’re playing Good Cop/Bad Cop. So what? We’re stuck in a room with those two cops and one is offering us donuts while the other threatens us with a baseball bat. Until we figure out how to get out of that room, we damn well better make a choice.
Plus Cooch got plenty of coverage. Just like Ron Paul. It’s just not the coverage they expected because most people find their true views detestable.
Speaking of Ron Paul, why isn’t he campaigning for the libertarian in this race? Not that I like him or anything, but he’s not polling too poorly. Poor theocrat, Ron. Cooch is his true soulmate.
No.
In that room, neither is to be trusted. To be precise, the baseball bat guy…although offering more immediate pain…is at least being honest. The donut guy? He’s just softening you up. Both plan to dominate you. Bet on it. You should neither trust nor submit within to either of them. Bet on it.
Wake the fuck up?
Stand the fuck up!!!
Please.
AG
Yeah, that sounds nice. But it doesn’t matter if you TRUST them. If you don’t make a choice, you get beaten, and that can only happen a certain number of times before you die. So, do you have any idea how to get out of that room? Do you have any idea how to break the hold that the two party system has on our country? Because until that happens, no amount of whining about it is going to help.
Not different from what has been seen in the past few election cycles at the state level.
In “purple” or even slightly red states, a neo-liberal (even a sleazebag one like McAwful)Democrat beats a right-wing Republican that wages war on sex, sexual orientation, and women’s reproductive health. (Or have we already forgotten the Senate races in MO, IN, and DE?)
In “blue” states, an underfunded and decent Democratic challenger or opponent has no chance against a well-funded, right-wing bully (who can also easily shift to good-natured and even charming in selective public venues) and that keeps his/her trap shut wrt to personally private sex and health issues.
The potential game changer is NYC.
While it’s probably true that de Balsio drew a dreadful opponent in Lhota, this is difficult to dismiss:
Democrats have been losing since like forever among men, whites, and the old. Lhota appears to be slightly winning among one demographic group: white Catholics.
And de Blasio is doing it by ignoring the general election injunction of both parties – “run to the center.”
Imagine that — voters in “blue” regions like honest, liberal democratic candidates. (Of course Sherrod Brown has twice demonstrated that in “purple” Ohio. An inconvenient fact that the Democratic Party head honchos do their best to hide.)
Being right does not give you a license to be an asshole.
It’s that simple for those of us who live somewhere besides Jersey and surrounding areas.