Below The Beltway

Virginia is considered a red state. It went for Bush decisively last year, and has gone Republican in every Presidential election since 1968. For the second time in four years, though, Virginia has elected a Democratic Governor as Tim Kaine defeated Jerry Kilgore by a fairly decisively margin. And the main reason for his victory, was substantial success here in Northern Virginia:

Kaine, the former mayor of Richmond, won handily across the inner suburbs of Northern Virginia and in Fairfax County, where the Democratic Party has been gaining strength in recent years. But he also posted big numbers in the conservative strongholds of the region’s outer suburbs.

Kaine won in Loudoun and Prince William counties, where President Bush beat Democrat John F. Kerry by tens of thousands of votes a year ago.

Political observers said the results confirmed a steady westward expansion of such urban concerns as traffic and education.

Northern Virginia has traditionally been more liberal than the rest of Virginia and, with its population continuing to grow, its influence on the rest of the state is growing as well.

In addition to success in Northern Virginia, Kaine was helped by the fact that he did not campaign as the typical Democrat:

Kaine also broke with traditional Democratic tactics and talked regularly about his Catholic faith. His standard stump speech mentioned his work as a missionary, and several of his radio and television ads highlighted his Catholicism.

“The Bible teaches we can accomplish great things when we work together,” Kaine said in an early radio ad.

Kaine promised tougher evaluations for teachers, universal preschool for 4-year-olds and better coordination of land use and transportation planning. He also proposed exempting the first 20 percent of a home’s value from the property tax.

Kilgore, on the other hand, never seemed to have a message of his own other than the fact that he wasn’t Tim Kaine and that Tim Kaine wasn’t who he represented himself to be:

Kilgore’s strategy was always to depict Kaine as a liberal who is out of step with mainstream Virginia values. To win, his advisers decided early, Kilgore had to make voters believe that Kaine was not a Warner clone.

His ads drove home that point. He accused Kaine of wanting to raise taxes and attacked Kaine’s record as mayor of Richmond.

Then, Kilgore made what may have been a huge tactical mistake by trying to nail Kaine on the death penalty.

The climax to Kilgore’s attacks came in early October, when he released two highly charged death penalty ads featuring the relatives of murder victims. In one, a distraught father said Kaine would not support the death penalty even for Adolf Hitler.

(….)

Kaine responded by airing an ad in which he told voters that he opposes capital punishment but would take an oath and enforce the death penalty. In later polls, voters said they believed Kaine’s response and were angered by Kilgore’s negative ads.

In addition to the television ad, Kilgore also sent out at least one direct mail piece that consisted of a letter from the wife of a murdered police officer who spoke out against Kaine’s stance on the death penalty. Even I found the letter to be exploitive and a little offensive, and it appears that many other voters did as well.

The Democrats also picked up several seats in the House of Delegates, mostly in Northern Virginia, but were unable to translate Kaine’s success to the rest of the ticket. Republican Bill Boling defated Leslie Byrne for the Lt. Governor’s race and the Attorney General’s race remains too close to call.

So, the inevitable question arises, what does this mean ? Is red-state Virginia turning blue, or at least purple ? There are several reasons for what happened this year. First of all, the results of the other two statewide races show that Republicans can win statewide in Virginia. The problem is that Jerry Kilgore did not run a good campaign and, in hindsight, may not have been the right candidate to go up against Kaine. Second, in order to win in Virginia, you have to win in Northern Virginia and, as this analysis in the Post discusses, there was an anti-GOP backlash in all of Northern Virginia this year. The Republicans need to figure out what went wrong here in Northern Virginia, and fix it fast or they could face this same problem in 2006, 2008, and beyond. Finally, as this second analysis in the Post points out, yesterday’s results are as much a victory for Mark Warner as they are for Tim Kaine.

“The real asset that Kaine had was this rather astonishing popularity of Warner,” said Merle Black, a professor who studies Southern politics at Emory University.

George Mason University professor Mark J. Rozell agreed. “I think to a large extent [the story] is the Warner influence,” said Rozell, who has closely followed the race. “He created the circumstances for a Democrat to win in a Republican-leaning state in the South.”

Kaine consciously campaigned as being a continuation of the Warner Administration, and it paid off. Warner, meanwhile, has only enhanced his position within his own party and heightened his stature for what everyone assumes will be a run for the WHite House in 2008.

Black said the election could hardly have gone better for Warner as he begins to put together a national campaign. “You can imagine him on the ticket, either as the presidential candidate or the vice president, and Virginia automatically becomes a competitive state,” he said. The commonwealth has not supported a Democrat for president since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964.

Finally, the campaign seems to have come down to a miscalculation on the part of the Kilgore campaign, a bet that Kaine would not do as well in Northern Virginia as Warner had in 2001. In fact, he did better:

Kilgore was swamped in Northern Virginia, where Kaine exceeded Warner’s margins from four years ago, even in the outer suburbs.

The Kilgore campaign never believed that Kaine could do as well in Northern Virginia as Warner, the businessman from Alexandria. But the Democrat got more than 70 percent of the vote in Alexandria, Arlington and Falls Church, and he got more than 60 percent in Fairfax County, home to one in seven Virginia voters. Kilgore had counted on Republicans in the outer suburbs to offset the Democratic advantage inside the Capital Beltway, but Kaine won there, too.

“The old days of places like Prince William and Loudoun being automatically Republican are over,” Sabato said. “Republicans are finding that you need to nominate candidates who can communicate with the suburbs.”

Virginia may still be a red state, but Northern Virginia is becoming blue-er by the day. The possibility of a Democrat winning the state in 2008 is certainly on the table. If the Republicans want to start winning again in Virginia, they’re going to have to solve the Northern Virginia puzzle.

More Analysis of what this means for Virginia and the President is up over at Outside The Beltway and at The QandO Blog where Jon Henke aptly summarizes the lesson this election should teach Republicans and Democrats:

The lesson for Democrats is probably that the way to beat a bloated, struggling Republican Party in thrall to the religious right is to run to the middle.

And the lesson for Virginia Republicans is to stop genuflecting to Pat Roberson.

Update 11/10/05: Is this all George Bush’s fault ?

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