The MSM is rushing to say that there's "lessons" to be learned in two Democrats winning House seats (including one who ran in a district that hasn't elected a Democrat since the founding of the United States) and two Republicans winning governorships. It's nonsense. Utter nonsense. All politics is local, and these folks won their respective elections because of local issues. Corzine was booted because of corruption, the two Democratic Congressmen won because their opponents were out-of-district Republican crazies who didn't speak to the concerns of the district, and the Democratic candidate in Virginia lost because he was a rural candidate when the majority of Virginia Democrats are urban so the Democrats voted with their seats -- they stayed home.
Of the races, only the governorship in Virginia was perhaps a statement, and that statement is that white Democrats from rural districts who run on a conservative platform don't turn out the predominantly liberal youth and minority votes needed for Democrats to win. Deeds was a horrible candidate for the governorship -- he was from a part of Virginia that hasn't voted for Democrats in state-wide elections for decades, he was a rural candidate when the majority of Democratic voters are urban, and he ran a race that was basically indistinguishable from his Republican opponent. So Democrats stayed home, independents said "why vote for a fake Republican when we can vote for the real thing?" and of course the Republicans would have voted for a red dog if the red dog had an (R) by his name.
But of course the punditry is going to spin all of this one way or another. The simple fact is that in each state, either the opposing candidate was incredibly weak (yes, Corzine was incredibly weak -- the man was as corrupt as a $3 bill) or the winner had an organizational and money advantage that was hard to overcome. The political party only vaguely entered into it, even in Virginia the urban Democrats stayed home as much from geographical reasons ("why would I bother voting for some inbred hillbilly from western Virginia?") as for party reasons.
-- Badtux the Elections Penguin
If anything, the election results should be a wake-up call to both parties. For the Democrats: Deeds ran such a lousy campaign here, I never once bothered to blog about it. When you run away from your own party when your party controls the White House and Congress, you lose. Plain and simple. Here's to hoping Deeds' kindred spirits in Congress figure that out on their own sometime within the next twelve months.
ReplyDeleteFor the Republicans: Bob McDonnell is a theocrat who ran as a moderate, and won easily. He's going to move back to the right after he's sworn in, but he ran a pretty smooth campaign here. That, and Virginia is a conservative stronghold to begin with -- Obama's victory here last year didn't change that, as is obvious now.
The question I have is whether or not the Republicans will follow McDonnell's lead. What happened in the NY-23 race seems to have gone to some of their heads -- they think they won, when in fact, the district voters elected the Democrat after the GOP threw its own candidate overboard in favor of a far right candidate. You can't make this shit up. What are these people smoking?
I'm reasonably sure the Democrats will take what happened to Creigh Deeds to heart. Not positive about it -- they are, after all, Democrats. But I don't know where the Republicans are gonna go from here at all...
Well, if we didn't have the pundits, erm... excuse me, reporters from the MSM here to explain to us poor, unwashed, stupid masses, we'd never know what is going on.
ReplyDeleteI blogged on this very subject today.
ReplyDeletehttp://jazzbumpa.blogspot.com/2009/11/gop-victories-send-message-to-democrats.html
Just updated it with a link back to you.
Where did you get the skinny on Deeds? I didn't know any of that stuff.
Cheers!
JzB the main stream trombonist
Jazz, if you go to Deeds' Wikipedia page and follow the links, you can see where he lives (a small rural county with 5,000 people) and what district he represents (a rural slice of western Virginia). Check out the district map... other than getting some of the suburbs of Lynchburg (a college town), we're talking about a white, conservative area of Virginia.
ReplyDelete- Badtux the Geography Penguin
Ah. Wikipedia. I would never have imagined.
ReplyDeleteThanx.
JzB the unimaginative trombonist