Republican Bob McDonnell

With only a week to go before we vote in Virginia’s odd-year election, the outcome looks good for the Republican statewide slate.  Bob McDonnell holds a healthy lead in the polls concerning the governor’s election, with the candidates for Lt. Governor and Attorney General staying with his pace.  The Democrats, optimistic a month ago, have taken to blaming their candidate, Creigh Deeds, for the loss to come — although Deeds has run exactly the race the national Democrats wanted him to run.

The current Democratic slander holds that Deeds has “run a poor campaign” by depending on a “wedge issue” — the rehash of a McDonnell grad-school thesis from 20 years ago.  Yet wedge issues are the meat and potatoes of current Democratic Party politics. James Carville, Howard Dean, Rahm Emanuel, and the rest of the liberal Democrat lot simply love wedge issues.  They research them, plot them out, talk them up.  Remember the “Rush Limbaugh is the real leader of the Republican Party” scam? Wedge issue, developed and executed by Carville et al.

No, the problem in this instance is not that Deeds ran a poor campaign but that the standard operating procedure of the Democratic left backfired, bigtime. I met Creigh Deeds years ago, when he was just a pup in the Virginia General Assembly, and have followed his career off and on since then.  Deeds is a sincere man, a tireless campaigner, and does well in debates and town halls and person-to-person opportunities.  Too much the politico for my taste these days, but I have to give him credit for running well.

Democrat Creigh Deeds

Deeds’ mistake was taking direction from the liberal Democrats in Washington and their willing accomplice, the Washington Post, which developed a wedge issue out of McDonnell’s old grad school thesis.  The wedge was to be driven between McDonnell and women voters, who are about 51 per cent of the electorate in Virginia. But McDonnell countered the wedge adeptly, pointing to his record, and his Iraq-war-vet daughter’s endorsement effectively killed the issue. The polls now indicate that the Washington Post slam shot had virtually no impact on the race — except to leave Creigh Deeds holding the bag.

As of this date, the Real Clear Politics assessment of Virginia polls has McDonnell up by 11-plus points.  Sure, the Survey USA result putting McDonnell up by 19 is an outlier — but then there is the PPP October 21 poll, omitted from the RCP average because PPP is Democrat-affiliated, which has McDonnell up by 12 points.  There are also the down-ticket polling results, which have the Republican Lieutenant Governor candidate Bill Bolling and Attorney General contestant  Ken Cuccinelli both holding 10-point-plus leads in their races.  With a week to go, the Republicans are bearing down with the prospect of a double-digit sweep in the statewide races.

So now the Democrat Party spin is that Virginia always reverses course after a Presidential election, and the real referendum is taking place in New Jersey.  Right. In solidly blue-state New Jersey, Democratic Gov. Corzine is struggling to win with a plurality, if he wins at all.  Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the current regime.  Virginia, remember, was an Obamacrat triumph, a Democratic victory after a long drought, a new paradigm — recall that the current DNC Chair, Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, declared after that election that “Ol’ Virginny is dead.” Or not, depending on your spin needs du jour.

Fact is, the Virginia election really is a referendum on the current Democratic doings in Washington, DC. The polls show that Republicans support the Republican ticket, Democrats support the Democratic ticket, and independents — the voters who were persuaded by candidate Obama — are supporting the Republican ticket by about 2-to-1.