The Times They Are A-Changin’? Final Thoughts on the 2009 VA Elections
“You better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone…”
Just over a year ago many pundits believed that Virginia had completed its transformation. Gone were the days of Republican control. George Allen, John Warner, and Jim Gilmore were but distant memories of an old way of doing things that held on for too long, some thought. And what better symbol for the transformation of the commonwealth than the election of the first African American President.
The NOVA (D.C. suburb) explosion was supposed to have been the culprit. The electoral map of Virginia was thrown upside down as Fairfax and Arlington counties (among others) voted for Democrats in big numbers in 2008. Could the Republicans be losing their hold on Virginia?
As we saw on last Tuesday, 2008 was nothing but an aberration – the exception and not the rule. Is Virginia more “in play” than it was twenty years ago? Yes. But that could be said about many places.
Days after the election, Charles Krauthammer may have put it best in his artcile “The Myth of ’08, Demolished”
“This was all ridiculous from the beginning. 2008 was a historical anomaly. A uniquely charismatic candidate was running at a time of deep war-weariness, with an intensely unpopular Republican president, against a politically incompetent opponent, amid the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression. And still he won by only 7 points…November ’08 was one-shot, one-time, never to be replicated. Nor was November ’09 a realignment. It was a return to the norm — and definitive confirmation that 2008 was one of the great flukes in American political history.”
The media won’t tell you that though. They still view Virginia to be a state slowly slipping away from the GOP. Lee Hockstader of the Democratic, err, Washington Post wrote on November 5 that the Republican Party is not “ascendant” in Northern Virginia.
Here’s the rough back-of-the-envelope calculations for how NOVA went last week:
Governor
McDonnell: 259,000
Deeds: 255,000Lt. Governor
Bolling: 245,000
Wagner: 269,000Attorney General
Cuccinelli: 243,000
Shannon: 267,000“Moral of the story: The GOP swept the state thanks to a mix of factors. But they didn’t close the deal in the one region that sustains all the others…”
Lee looks at those numbers and sees trouble; I look at them and see promise.
Perhaps Bob Dylan was right when he wrote:
Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who
That it’s namin’.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’.
If conservative Republicans—by focusing on “bread and budget” issues like taxes and the economy—can keep it as close in NOVA as Cuccinelli (and Bolling) did, while maintaining strong showings throughout what some call “Real Virginia,” well then the Republican Party of Virginia doesn’t have much to worry about.
Tags: Attorney General, charles krauthammer, Ken Cuccinelli, Obama, Virginia
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