U.S. Rep. Gerry Connolly is on the Washington area airwaves with a commercial that touts the Northern Virginia congressman as a “tax-cutting Democrat.”
This is noteworthy because Connolly is deftly carving out a targeted political niche that his campaign thinks will help him hang on with his constituents. By taking up the mantle of a “tax-cutting Democrat,” Connolly is at once running away from his party’s national image on fiscal issues, while embracing his Democratic partisan label. (Also curious is that Connolly is comfortable with citing the source of that column: National Review Online, the web presence of the journal founded by William F. Buckley, Jr. as the organ of movement conservatism.)
A couple of decades ago, Connolly’s Fairfax-based district was reliably Republican. Now, it’s heavily Democratic. (VA 11 tilted strongly to Obama, though George W. Bush carried it in 2000.) The district’s highly educated, high earning electorate remains relatively moderate at large.
On the party base level, Democrats exercised some caution in 2008 in choosing the former Fairfax County Board Chairman over hard-charging partisan Leslie Byrne, a defeated congresswoman. That doesn’t please a purist like the Not Larry Sabato blog, who reached out to Byrne to gripe about the incumbent. (Bizarrely, the former Member of Congress herself tracked down an obscure analysis of her race I posted and took this blogger to task in the comments section.)
Republicans have been a little more indulgent, opting for Tea Party favorite Keith Fimian over an elected Fairfax County Supervisor in a battle that the Washington Examiner dubbed “unusually brutal.”
Being a Democrat is not a liability here, and President Obama remains reasonably popular, but that doesn’t mean all voters buy into the extreme extent of national Democrats’ economically activist agenda. Its a sort of “reverse Byrd Machine,” where rural Virginia Democrats were once undyingly loyal to their state party, but defiant on matters of civil rights and social issues. Now, suburban Northern Virginia Democrats remain loyal to the brand – considered more respectable than Republicanism – but chafing under the extent of national Democrats’ economic agenda.
That Connolly is mentioning Fimian by name on the air is evidence that this race has become unexpectedly competitive. Fimian’s more ideological strain of Republicans may turn off just enough voters in Northern Virginia who rely, albeit mostly indirectly, on the federal government for their paychecks.
As an Examiner headline recently put it: “Anti-government push could be tough sell in No. Va.” So, Fimian may still come up short in a good GOP cycle. Connolly may not be afraid to remind voters he is a Democrat, but he is trying to get the message out that he’s on their side, not always with his national party. It looks like it might help him hang on.
