| Well, yesterday certainly was an interesting day, wasn’t it? Things generally looked good for conservatives and Republicans – even in the small set of races that we didn’t win. I’ll explain why this is the case below. First, to recap the results of the important votes: In Virginia, the Republicans swept the “Big Three” races – Governor, LtGov, and Attorney General. And when I say “swept”, I mean just that. McDonnell, Bolling, and Cuccinelli thrashed their Democrat rivals in what really was a bellwether referendum on Obama and the Democrats in Congress. Remember, Virginia is now supposed to be the quintessential “purple” state, with blue cores in the urban areas, surrounded by a reddish exterior. By all accounts, the blue areas were not so blue last night, and Obama was handed a huge personal rejection. There was some definite buyer’s remorse in VA last night, as Obama’s appearances with Creigh Deeds leading up to the election seem to have done absolutely nothing for the Democrat – and quite possibly helped to drive more voters to McDonnell.
The big news, however, was in New Jersey, where Chris Christie, the (conservative enough) Republican defeated über-liberal Obamanista Jon Corzine by a margin wide enough to make Democrat vote fraud efforts ineffective. Again, this race was a “win one for the Gipper” type race for the Democrats, where Obama’s personal and political popularity was on the line. And New Jersey just isn’t that into him anymore.
Unfortunately, Doug Hoffman in NY-23 wasn’t quite able to pull it off – this time around, at least. Still, you have to admit that a come-from-behind push by an insurgent third party conservative who came within three points of defeating the Democrat – and that with a lousy “Republican” acting as a spoiler – is impressive. While I’m sure the Dems and other lefties will be spinning it today as some sort of crushing defeat for insurgent, “Tea Party” conservatism, this is simply not the case, though it does send a few messages that the more hard-core third party supporters may not like to hear (more below).
Granted, there are roughly 11,000 absentee ballots left to count, and the electronic voting machines in Fulton County (which went for McCain fairly strongly last year) broke last week and were impounded, which means those votes have to be tallied by hand, so are yet to be counted. Still, I doubt these will be enough to pull it out for Hoffman, especially as most of the absentee ballots were cast before Hoffman really started to surge, and when Scozzafava was still viewed as a viable candidate.
In the CA-10 race, unsurprisingly, John Garamendi staved off a strong challenge from conservative Republican David Harmer to win the race by ten points. This district does lean pretty heavily Democratic, and Harmer got basically no support from the national GOP apparatus at all (yet another failure on the part of the GOP “leadership”). Who knows what could have happened had the NRCC and RNC not wasted a million big ones on Dede Scozzafava in NY-23, and focused their monies on helping a REAL Republican instead?
All the same, the result in CA-10 ought to be a bit unsettling for Obama and his minions. Garamendi won 53% of the vote. Obama carried this district with 60+%, and Tauscher (the Dem who previously held the seat) routinely won it with around 65% of the vote. The fact that a big name statewide Democrat like Garamendi (who was previously California’s LtGov) only took 53% in a Democrat gimme-district shows that the “Obama effect” was in play even in CA-10. The only problem is that the district starts out so much further left that even this wasn’t enough (yet) to push it into the Republican column.
Some other results from last night? In Pennsylvania, the state Supreme Court is now in Republican hands, with the victory of conservative Republican Joan Orie Melvin over her leftist Democrat opponent, Jack Panella. The court now sits 4-3 for the GOP. Also, in bright Blue Maine – a state that Obama carried 57.7% – 40.4% – gay marriage was handed a crushing defeat, as 53% of state voters chose to reject it. Once again, we see that even neon blue states, when given the opportunity, reject the radical social initiatives of the Left.
So, now for some analysis. What can we take away from these results?
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