Tuesday’s election results should be a warning to progressives. In Virginia and New Jersey, Republicans Bob McDonnell and Chris Christie won the governorship, proving that there’s still life in the GOP’s bones. In NY-23, where conservative darling Doug Hoffman lost to Democrat Bill Owens — making Owens the first Dem to be elected to that seat since the 19th century — the upshot might be less favorable than you think.
Never mind that McDonnell won by hiding the fact that he was a Republican. (Dems were guilty of obscuring their affiliations, too.) As the Washington Post‘s Dan Balz writes, “McDonnell pitched his campaign toward the center of the electorate, offering Republicans a model for how to reach independents.” The lesson: some Republicans still know how to play this game, and the Palinization of the party is, in fact, not yet complete.
In New Jersey, Jon Corzine’s tremendous unpopularity for the last 18 months — New Jerseyans really don’t like him — probably had as much to do with his defeat as his opponent’s efforts. The lesson: even in a Democratic state (registered Dems outnumber Republicans by 700,000), voters will oust a Democratic leader if they think he’s done a poor job.
Meanwhile, in New York, the Owens win is certainly a pleasant surprise for Democrats. But it could also be a wake-up call to the Republican establishment that the Beck-Palin faction can make a lot of noise but still fail to deliver the goods, even in a predominantly conservative district. If the Republican Party draws that moral from this race, then the McDonnell model becomes likelier for next year’s round of elections. The lesson: progressives can’t rely on an accelerated conservative crack-up and the GOP’s self-destructive tendencies to help them out in the midterms.
That all said, last night’s elections are hardly indicative of any larger trends in our national politics. Indeed, if exit polls are anything to go by, we know for sure what these elections weren’t about: Barack Obama. Exit polls showed that voters in Virginia and New Jersey did not consider the president a factor in their vote, and gave him OK-to-good approval ratings to boot (48 percent in VA, 57 percent in NJ). The polls also showed that the economy and jobs were at the top of the voters’ minds when they stepped into the booth. Which brings us to the last and oldest lesson of all: it’s still the economy, stupid.
