With poll, after poll, after poll showing him trailing Bob McDonnell and not exactly generating excitement among his fellow Virginia Democrats, Creigh Deeds is exhibiting signs of panic already:
Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate R. Creigh Deeds will launch a campaign this week to portray his opponent’s longtime efforts to restrict abortion as out of the mainstream, a potentially risky strategy for a Democrat in the once solidly conservative state.
Deeds (Bath), a state senator who supports abortion rights, said he will join female supporters in Annandale on Monday for the first of three events across the state where he will argue that Republican Robert F. McDonnell devoted too much of his 17 years in public office working to limit access to abortions. McDonnell has said he is against abortion in every instance, including rape and incest, except when the life of the mother is in danger.
Deeds’s appeal is directed at moderate suburbanites in Northern Virginia and elsewhere who might be turned off by McDonnell’s views. It’s also an attempt to rally support from Democrats who have joined Virginia’s electorate in recent years but who might be ambivalent about Deeds because of his relatively conservative positions on guns and other issues.
The effort is also designed to undercut one of the main themes of McDonnell’s candidacy: that he is a moderate who would concentrate on jobs and the economy if elected.
Deeds’ strategy here is plain. Having failed to excite the voting public in general, and Virginians who’ve voted Democratic over the past four years in particular, on the strength of his economic plans, he’s pulling out the abortion card in the hope that they’ll ignore everything else.
And it’s not without risks.
While it’s likely to win him some support from moderate and independent voters in areas like Northern Virginia, it’s just as likely to excite the passions of socially conservative voters in other parts of the state. For all the talk of Virginia being a “purple” state, its worth noting that our Senators are generally more conservative than some other Democrats and have departed from the party line in the past on issues like gun control. It’s also a state that overwhelmingly passed a Constitutional Amendment banning gay marriage only a few years ago. Virginia, in other words, isn’t California. By even bringing the issue up, Deeds is just as likely to alienate socially conservative Democrats as he is to attract pro-choice independents.
Personally, I think it’s going to backfire on him but I suppose we’ll see.
