Republicans Bob McDonnell, Bill Bolling, and Ken Cuccinelli are the winners for the night in the Old Dominion for Governor, Lieutenant Governor, and Attorney General, respectively. Expect the margins to be very wide.
The post-mortem for the top race is fairly straightforward, and I don’t expect that I’ll be the only one to write it. Democrat Creigh Deeds ran an entire race with McDonnell’s 20-year-old master’s thesis as his main and his best issue. He nearly framed himself in his advertising as a one-issue canddiate: Creigh Deeds, Abortion Champion. He apparently believed that there were enough Planned Parenthood employees in the Commonwealth to put him over the top. (If you want a fair comparison, try Republican Jerry Kilgore’s failed 2005 campaign, which flogged the death penalty issue to the point that many Virginia voters would have been happy to administer it to him themselves.)
Deeds ran ads in Northern Virginia suggesting that Bob McDonnell had become unmoored from his Northern Virginia roots — that Fairfax County native McDonnell went to Pat Robertson-Land down South for college and is “not from around here any more.” Unfortunately, the ads were aimed mostly at people who moved to Virginia within the last five years . Most Washingtonians can count all the native Northern Virginians they know on one hand.
(UPDATE: McDonnell has won a majority in Fairfax County, which is a huge deal.)
Add to that Deeds’s failure to produce a serious plan for transportation, the region’s most pressing issue, and his bumbling on taxes. His campaign was just bone-headed and offensive, and he ran far to the left of his state.
Perhaps voters are upset with Obama, but Creigh Deeds earned opprobrium all on his own this year. It’s no surprise that he is being thrashed tonight all across the state.
