What’s wrong with Ken Cuccinelli, Virginia’s Republican candidate for governor? He’s losing by nearly 10 percentage points, according to Real Clear Politics, to Terry McAuliffe, the flawed Democrat. The conventional wisdom is that Cuccinelli is too conservative on social issues, and the McAuliffe campaign has run ads painting the Republican as an extremist on abortion, gay rights, and contraception.
But conservative activist Maggie Gallagher has argued the opposite–that Cuccinelli has pursued a “truce strategy” on social issues that has to been to the detriment of his campaign. “The truce strategy demoralizes the GOP base and makes it hard for the grass roots to care about Republican candidates,” Gallagher argued. “Conservative candidates are advised to deflect or retreat when social issues are raised, and their refusal to speak clearly and hold the line allows Democratic candidates to adopt more extreme positions, energizing their own base and unleashing a flood of money at no political cost.”
Meanwhile, Libertiarian party candidate Robert Sarvis is casting himself, at least in part, as a socially liberal alternative to Cuccinelli. Those libertarian-leaning voters who don’t like Cuccinelli’s conservative positions on abortion and gay marriage ought to vote for Sarvis, goes the argument. That could explain why Cuccinelli’s losing a big chunk of his potential voters to Sarvis (up to 10 percent, according to some polls). In an interview last week, Cuccinelli argued that libertarians in Virginia ought to vote for him.
“I’m the most pro-liberty elected official statewide in my lifetime,” he told me. “It isn’t even a close call, so for people who care about protecting liberty, there’s never been, again in my lifetime in Virginia, a statewide elected official who’s been as aggressive and consistent about doing that as I have.”
Furthermore, Tim Carney at the Washington Examiner argues that if elected, Cuccinelli would be the most libertarian governor in the country. Here’s Carney’s convincing case:
Cuccinelli also often chooses government restraint over “law and order.”
When Virginia’s GOP tried to expand the death penalty in 2009, Cuccinelli was the only Republican to vote no — during a competitive GOP primary for attorney general.
Although not ready to support drug legalization like Sarvis, Cuccinelli has criticized the drug war as overzealous, and he said jailing marijuana dealers is a waste of taxpayer money. He told me he’s open to legalizing pot in Virginia if things go well in Colorado and Washington.
Attorney General Cuccinelli crusaded to exonerate Thomas Haynesworth, a black man wrongly convicted and jailed for 27 years. Cuccinelli argued successfully in court to get Haynseworth a rare “writ of actual innocence” — a feat only possible because state Sen. Cuccinelli had championed a law to make such exoneration easier.
And Molly Ball of the Atlantic describes Cuccinelli as the example of the libertarian-tinged Tea Party’s limits in a state like Virginia. She describes the Cuccinelli’s approach as “populist-libertarian Republicanism” just as the Tea Party movement seems to be getting exhausted.
So what is it? Is Cuccinelli a libertarian Tea Partier running a few years too late? A socially conservative extremist out of step with modern Virginia? Too timid on social issues? Not pro-liberty enough?
Or could it be that Cuccinelli, who has never lost an election, just hasn’t run a very good campaign and hasn’t been a very good candidate? The Republican attorney general struggles to find a simple, coherent message for his candidacy, as outlined in this week’s issue:
“He campaigned on a few specific things and was clear about them, and when he got elected, he had a Democrat house and Democrat senate, and he got all three of them—abolition of parole, welfare reform, and education reform—I believe because he campaigned on them,” Cuccinelli says.
What are Cuccinelli’s own three specific things?
“The tax proposal to get job creation going,” he says, slowly. “Our school proposals to reform our standards of learning test and open up opportunities for kids in the worst performing schools. Those would probably be number one and number two.”
He pauses, maybe to think of a third issue. Suddenly, we’re cut off by an aggressive driver in a pickup, who zooms ahead of us just before he runs out of road. We hit the brakes hard.
“That was a confident shot, wasn’t it?” Cuccinelli says, before returning to his answer.
“Those would probably be the top two,” he says, finally.
Cuccinelli, like the current Republican governor Bob McDonnell did in 2009, is running on “jobs” and economic issues, but the unemployment rate in Virginia is 5.8 percent, below the national average and closer to what economists consider “full employment.”
While Cuccinelli’s tried to make the race about jobs, McAuliffe’s made it about Cuccinelli–and the Republican has been all but silent at the onslaught. Ad after ad from the McAuliffe campaign has called Cuccinelli too extreme for Virginia, and Virginians have come to agree. (Cuccinelli’s unfavorability rating in the most recent Quinnipiac poll is 52 percent, worse than McAuliffe’s). There’s much truth to Gallagher’s point that by choosing not to engage on social issues, Cuccinelli has let the Democrats define what’s extreme.
Speaking of McDonnell, the current governor’s ethics problems have muddled Cuccinelli’s chief line of attack against McAuliffe: that the Clinton-connected former DNC chairman is a wheeling-and-dealing hack for whom government is way to repay your friends. It wasn’t just that McDonnell took gifts from a business executive. It was that Cuccinelli had received gifts (of lesser value) from the same executive, and took longer to admit the ethical conflict and send a check to a charity for the values of the gifts.
It’s worth noting that in an NBC poll last month, McDonnell’s job approval rating was 51 percent, 20 points higher than Cuccinelli’s favorability rating among Virginians at 31 percent.
