Post-Election Commentary Before Election Day … It’s the Saturday before Election Day. It looks like the fall weather will be perfect, as it was last weekend when I was door-knocking in Braddock District. You can bet there will be hundreds of volunteers on the streets of Fairfax County. (Alas, I won’t be there Sunday as I’m in NYC running “the marathon after Sandy”). There have been the usual last-second flurry of polls, with associated commentary. (“Cooch is closing!” “No, he’s not!”) There have been reams of news stories. There have been large national stories — the Federal government shutdown, the Obamacare start-up — which have grabbed headline news. On Tuesday, voters will ignore all that and, as always, make their own choices. (For what it’s worth, I think turnout will be about 40% which is consistent with 2009. No, I don’t think the results will be the same). When the commentators look back after the Election, they will wonder how the Democrats, on balance, were able to win this race in the face of the standard backlash AGAINST the the party of the Presidential winner, especially when Obama’s approval numbers are falling like leaves. I’ll harken back to just two years ago. It was the “high tide” of conservatism in Virginia. Having swept all three statewide offices in 2009, the Republicans had knocked off THREE Democratic incumbents in the 2010 Congressional elections and come within a few votes of making it four. In the 2011 legislative elections, the GOP crushed the Democrats in the House of Delegates down to 32 seats, an almost impossible number in a state which had voted for Obama in 2008. They also pushed out two longtime Democratic incumbents in the Senate — Edd Houck and Roscoe Reynolds — and reached 20-20, despite a Democratic-engineered redistricting plan supposed to “guaranty” at least 21 seats. The Republicans had a popular Governor and were poised to enjoy several years of majority rule. But they blew it. Instead, they badly overplayed their hand. In the Senate, the R’s changed the Rules regarding proportionality, with the vote of their still-loyal Lt. Governor, and then took over EVERY COMMITTEE. By not “power sharing” with the Democrats, who held half the Senate seats, the R’s effectively removed their own emergency brake on dumb ideas and bad legislation. And boy was it coming … The 2012 session brought us the “ultrasound” and “personhood” bills, which pretty much destroyed the R’s future electoral chances amongst half the state’s population. Without a Democratic Senate to kill those bills, they roared through committee — and right onto the headlines. The ensuing public outrage was easily the most visceral I have seen in about 20 years in state politics. In a more moderate world with power sharing, those inflammatory bills would have been directed to a Health Care Committee with a Democratic majority — and then would go away. But that didn’t happen. And that blunder cost the R’s dearly. Anyway, we’ll see what happens on Tuesday. Just let me be the first person to write my post-election explanation before it even happens.
Posted on: Sat, 02 Nov 2013 13:13:30 +0000