McAuliffe won the Virginia Governor’s race. Thank goodness. The fact that he won by only 2% of the vote is terrifying to me. What are the women of the Commonwealth thinking?
So Cuccinelli is out, and he gave up his Attorney General seat for this race; so we’re shut of him, at least until he tries to run for the US House.
The bad news: Obenshain may have won the Attorney General’s seat. It a less than 1% lead, so we probably won’t know until morning.
about a minute ago
Great news on McAuliffe’s victory! My condolences on having Terry McAuliffe as your governor.
Start drinking, Virginia!
That they wanted McAuliffe to be governor? He won the vote among women by something like 50%-44%.
I think he’s blaming Obenshain on the women.
Herring is winning the atty gen by 300 votes. I anticipate a recount.
Will this be enough to wake the Republicans up? McAuliffe is a pretty unlikeable guy and not even a mediocre candidate. One would think that would tell the GOP that Teabaggers are an electoral carcinogen. Had they run someone with any degree of moderation, they could probably have kept the governor’s seat.
Indeed. Bolling (who probably would have won a primary) would have curb-stomped McAuliffe.
So far I think I’m five-for-five with “no.” I’m going to let it ride.
There really are a bunch of ways to look at this election and I’ll be interested to see what serous analysts come up with in the next few days or weeks. Why did the result diverge from the latest polls? Did some of the people who said they’d vote for McAuliffe decide they couldn’t stomach a Democrat after all? Was it because the ACA rollout story came to predominate while older stories like the shutdown faded? Did the Republicans do better (or Democrats worse) at turning out their voters? Was the sampling off in some other way? I’m extremely doubtful that a last-minute Obama appearance swung the polls by a huge amount.
You can quibble around the margins but the bottom line here is that Democrats broke a longstanding historical trend and picked up a governorship in an important swing state. They already held hold both Senate seats in that state and we’ll see if they win the AG election. And that’s in an off-year, which generally hurts Democrats because it means lower turnout. Their awful candidate just barely beat the Republicans’ awful candidate; perhaps if they hadn’t nominated Cuccinelli behind closed doors they’d have found someone who could have picked up a few more votes in the middle.
I’m wondering if a lot of people discovered they’d been booted from the rolls and were given provisional ballots. Perhaps if Ken’s last minute shenanigans hadn’t happened, the race wouldn’t have been so close.
It is truly amazing to see the television pundits spin a clear Democratic victory in Virginia as some kind of defeat for Obamacare.
The AG race looks like it will come down to provisional ballots. Given the pattern of Ken’s shenanigans, those are likely to be heavily Democratic, pointing to a clean sweep of the statewide races after the smoke clears.
Does anyone know how and when Virginia counts absentee ballots? Here in Arlington at least, it’s very easy to early-vote by absentee- all you have to do is show that you work out of the county (like in DC). So I wonder if my vote and the votes of other early-voters-by-absentee have been counted yet.
Am I the only one who doesn’t understand what the McAuliffe hate is all about?
What are you referring to? A Democratic governor is nothing new in Virginia.
This is the first time since 1977 that Virginia has elected a governor from the same party as the president. In the last eight elections they always went with a candidate from the opposition party.
I think it’s due to demeanor and attitude, exemplified by that anecdote from his book (that he proudly relates) in which, during a trip home from the hospital after his wife gave birth, he made them wait in the car for an hour while he went to a Democratic fundraiser. I just see him as the pure, distilled essence of politics.
I still thought it was an easy choice between him and Cooch, but I wish we had had a better candidate.
And various business and ethics scandals. If he weren’t connected to the Clintons I don’t think anybody would see him as a guy who should be governor.
Ah, got it.
Interestingly, HuffPo reports that Cuccinelli won by nine points among married women, while single women broke heavily for McAuliffe to provide the margin overall. Fascinating that marital status makes such a difference.
I’m disappointed McAuliffe won.
On the other hand, I’m thrilled Cuccinelli lost.