Democrat Creigh Deeds and Republican Bob McDonnell are set to meet Thursday in Tysons Corner for perhaps the most high-stakes debate of the Virginia governor’s race, and one of Deeds’ increasingly scarce opportunities to shift the race in his favor.
Deeds, a rural state senator who came from behind to win his party’s nomination in a three-way primary in June, finds himself again trailing badly in most polls with less than two months until the election. The debate at Capital One headquarters, sponsored by the Fairfax County Chamber of Commerce, is a chance for Deeds to speak directly to a Democratic-leaning region that has proved integral to his party’s resurgence.
It’s also a chance for Deeds to reset the direction of his campaign. His recent focus has been to paint his opponent as socially extreme, zeroing in on a 1989 master’s thesis written by McDonnell in which the Republican candidate criticized gays, unmarried couples living together, “fornicators” and working women. But the emergence of that document, which the Deeds campaign calls McDonnell’s blueprint for governing, has done little to move poll numbers.
Though the McDonnell thesis is relevant, voters needs to hear “concrete answers” on how Deeds would run the state, said Toni Travis, an associate professor of government at George Mason University. “And I don’t think Deeds has provided them.”
“I think he’s got to lay out a plan for transportation and some other key policy issues” at the debate, she said. “There’s nothing there, it’s all vague. I think Northern Virginians needs to have some specific details, a plan for where he’s going, where would he take the state.”
Deeds’ campaign has announced numerous policy proposals, but they have been crowded out by attacks on McDonnell’s social record.
McDonnell, meanwhile, is expected to deflect thesis questions and steer the debate toward federal issues — cap and trade, health care reform and card check — in a bid to tether Deeds to Democrats’ national policy agenda.
