How does the GOP candidate for governor in Virginia, Bob McDonnell, stack up against last night’s Democratic primary winner, Creigh Deeds?
At first glance, terrific. McDonnell has led every poll taken in 2009 that puts him in a head-to-head matchup with Deeds. McDonnell’s favorable rating has been called “Obama-esque.” He begins the general election way ahead in fundraising, and has a nearly 10-to-1 advantage in cash on hand. Deeds has a net unfavorable rating among independents (30 percent favorable, 36 percent unfavorable), voters between ages 45 and 59 (35 percent favorable, 37 percent unfavorable), voters above age 60 (28 percent favorable, 42 percent unfavorable), and . . . oh yes, Virginians as a whole (35 percent favorable, 36 percent unfavorable).
But with Deeds roaring into the general election after a striking win on primary night, the race looks a little different.
Helped along by miserable weather in his rivals’ strongest regions, Deeds won around 50 percent in the three-way race. Despite occasional nasty moments in the primary fight, most Democrats will fall in line behind the nominee. (This might not have been the case if Terry McAuliffe had won; the self-described “hustler” had so few connections to the state’s Democrats, and such a grating style, that many conservative and rural Democrats had put out feelers about joining “Democrats for McDonnell.”)
Republicans probably would have felt even better about their chances against D.C. suburbanites McAuliffe (one Republican joked, “His ads might as well be for the other guys”) or Brian Moran (“Mayor Quimby,” one campaign-watcher joked, noting Moran’s mimicry of John F. Kennedy). But Virginia remains a purple state where Democrats have been on a hot streak in recent years.
Sources close to McDonnell assess Deeds as, ultimately, an increasingly liberal Democrat who does not come from a population center — “a man without a country.” The rural roots certainly helped Deeds differentiate himself from Alexandria’s Moran and McLean’s McAuliffe, and in theory make him more competitive outside the Northern Virginia suburbs. But they also constitute an offsetting weakness, as his native Bath County advertises itself as having “no interstate highways, no traffic jams — not even a stoplight!”: in short, a minuscule base for a statewide campaign. In 2006, the Census Bureau estimated the population of the entire county at 4,814. By way of contrast, McDonnell’s roots are in Fairfax County, home to more than a million people.
Deeds’s impressive win was on the primary’s small playing field. Last night, Deeds won about 150,000 votes; when Tim Kaine won the governor’s mansion in 2005, he won 1,025,942 votes.
McDonnell’s backers say they know how to beat Deeds in key counties from the two men’s 2005 showdown in the attorney general’s race, where McDonnell ran well ahead of the Republican gubernatorial candidate, Jerry Kilgore.
Beyond that, sources close to McDonnell note that Deeds is not the same candidate as when he ran that 2005 race, having shifted considerably on some key issues that differentiate a “centrist” or “conservative” Democrat from more liberal ones. In 2006, Virginia considered an amendment to the state constitution that defined marriage as solely between one man and one woman and banned recognition of any legal status “approximat[ing] the design, qualities, significance, or effects of marriage.” The amendment was ratified by 57 percent of the voters, and Deeds supported it. As a gubernatorial candidate in a Democratic primary, Deeds now says that vote was “a mistake.”
As a legislator, Creigh Deeds received an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association; in fact, in 2005, the NRA endorsed Deeds over McDonnell in their race for state attorney general. Now Deeds is pledging to close “the gun show loophole,” saying the Virginia Tech shootings changed his mind — a fallacious justification, since the Virginia Tech shooter did not purchase his firearms at a gun show and, had the proposed restriction been in effect, it would not have prevented the massacre. (It is worth noting that NRA support was key to the centrist credibility of Mark Warner, and Tim Kaine considered the gun issue important enough to try to make it appear that Charlton Heston had endorsed him.)
As a state legislator, Deeds voted for a partial-birth-abortion ban earlier in his career; he now opposes it. Former Democratic governor Doug Wilder said during the primary that he was disappointed with Deeds’s reversals, and none-too-subtly asked: “What Creigh is saying now is, ‘I’ve changed my philosophy.’ Suppose we had elected you before — would you have changed?”
Some state Republicans watching the race closely think that McDonnell has good momentum going – and that, as tempting as the “flip-flopper” message is, it’s not worth getting off his core message. A Richmond Republican leadership source — supremely disappointed with GOP performance in the state in 2006 and 2008 — is urging McDonnell to keep his focus on the issues highest on Virginia voters’ minds: right now, jobs and transportation. “As long as he’s able to do that, he’s well positioned. . . . The temptation will be to shift to other issues if we get to September and he spent August having $15 million in negative ads dumped on him, pummeling him for opposition to the stimulus or something, and suddenly he finds himself on defense. If they can keep their discipline, they should be all right.” (This Richmond Republican doesn’t think McDonnell’s positions on guns, abortion, and gay marriage are wrong, but simply that voters are primarily focused on jobs and traffic this year — and that a key Democratic strategy will be to get McDonnell away from those issues.)
The McDonnell campaign chuckles about the lack of impact from $3 million spent on negative ads by the Democratic Governors Association. Tucker Martin, McDonnell’s director of communications, says, “National and state Democrats have waged a vicious, negative air war against Bob McDonnell. And voters have tuned it out. There is clearly growing frustration among Democrats that their old box doesn’t fit Bob McDonnell.”
But it’s early; the abysmal turnout numbers suggest that after an exhausting 2008 campaign, Virginians have largely tuned out partisan politics. The DGA’s ads may be a message that Virginia voters just won’t buy, or it may be a message they aren’t yet willing to hear. Time, and effort, will determine what comes next.
—Jim Geraghty writes the Campaign Spot blog for NRO.
