Below The Beltway

Virginia Governor-Elect Bob McDonnell is facing calls to repudiate Pat Robertson in the wake of his comments last week comparing Islam to Nazism and Communism:
Fresh off his landslide victory in the race for Virginia governor, Robert F. McDonnell is already being forced to confront how he plans to handle his friendship with minister Pat Robertson, [...]

A week after the Virginia Gubernatorial Election, one pollster has looked at the data and found that President Obama hurt Creigh Deeds in the Old Dominion:
Democrats and the press are on a self-delusional kick that Barack Obama had nothing to do with the results in Virginia and New Jersey.  That’s fine by me.  The more [...]

They may have won an historic victory on Tuesday, but it doesn’t look like Virginia Republicans are letting it get to their head:
RICHMOND — Despite winning the governor’s race by a 17-percentage point blowout, Virginia Republicans insisted Wednesday that they had gained no broad mandate and would make their top priority the pragmatic platform that [...]

An interesting pair of contrasting post-mortem articles in The Washington Post today make it pretty clear why Bob McDonnell rolled to an historic victory on Tuesday.
One article explains pretty clearly why Deeds lost.
The other, why McDonnell won.
In short, McDonnell was a better campaigner, more prepared to address the issues the voters cared about, and much [...]

My post-election column on the Virginia election is up at Pajama’s Media.
Go check it out.

Bob McDonnell led the Republican Party of Virginia out of the wilderness tonight:
Virginians elected Republican Robert F. McDonnell the commonwealth’s 71st governor Tuesday, sweeping the GOP to power and emphatically halting a decade of Democratic advances in the critical swing state.
The former state attorney general handily defeated Democratic state Sen. R. Creigh Deeds throughout the [...]

And, it looks like landslides for all three:
More later, including a lookg at what happened in Northern Virginia and the House of Delegates.

So, here we go, my predictions for tonight.
First, Virginia:

This one has been over for weeks. McDonnell, Bolling, and Cuccinelli, will win by double digits. And I’m making a slightly wild-assed guess that Republicans will pick up a net 7 seats in the House of Delegates, which sounds small but is a big deal. [...]

If Republicans sweep all three of the high-profile elections today, Virginia Governor, New Jersey Governor, and NY-23, we’ll no doubt hear much speculation on what that means for the Obama Administration. However, I don’t think that you can look at all three races as if they were one referendum on the Obama Presidency. Each one [...]

One final poll of the Virginia races:
Three months ago, when SurveyUSA began polling on the Virginia Governor race, Republican Bob McDonnell led Democrat Creigh Deeds by 15 points. Today, 3 months and 7 polls later, McDonnell leads by 18 points, essentially unchanged over the last three SurveyUSA releases, and essentially unchanged since late July.
Today, it’s [...]