It always is, isn’t it? 
Regards,
Shodan
At my last look, Potts carried only 2% of the vote, which wouldn’t have been enough to let Kilgore carry the day even if he had taken every single of Potts’ voters.
What’s more interesting to me is the inroads the Democrats have made in traditionally strong Republican locales. In the last election, Mark Earley ® carried Chesterfield County (a suburb of Richmond) by 14,000 votes. At last look, Kilgore only carried it by 8,000. Additionally, Kaine carried Lynchburg (home of Jerry Falwell and Liberty University), Danville, and Martinsville - all Republican-leaning cities and all in the backyard of Kilgore’s home district.
So, while some of the results may have been a repudiation of the President (who has seen his poll numbers drop here in VA and who can’t help but notice that the election was much closer before his appearance than the Kaine’s margin of victory), the results were also a show of support for Mark Warner’s policies. Unfortunately, the Democrats will need to get a better standard-bearer for the policies - Warner is an awfully uncharismatic guy and a terrible public speaker.
Still, my beloved Dems did pretty well for themselves and I’m happy (and slightly hungover).
Well, Kaine did well for himself. Have you heard anything about the Attorney General race yet?
Corzine was ahead about 2 weeks ago and the Forrester Campaign got extremely nasty, quotes from the Ex-Wife and desperately trying to tie Corzine to the previous corrupt Governor.
The backlash caused a lead to become a blow out.
I heard reports that minorities and women voters especially came out in favor of Corzine.
Kean & Wittmann are very much moderate Republicans. Not about social issues, but about reduced spending and friendly to business. Not Dick Cheney friendly, just work with the businesses so you don’t drive them out.
I wish more of the National Party would go back to this style. I love that Bloomberg won by a landslide in the ultra democratic NY. Every borough but Staten Island is consistently Dem, and moderate republicans have won 4 straight elections. Maybe he can leverage himself into a 2008 candidate.
Jim
The Attorney General’s race was 50-50, with McDonnell having a lead in the vote count last time I looked.
The Democrats also picked up at one seat in the House of Delegates. Another seat formerly occupied by a Republican may have been won by an Independent (the margin was around 150 votes and a recount will no doubt be called).
He’s really not a moderate Republican - he was a Democrat until 2001 and changed parties because there was less competition in the Republican primary. He’s pro-choice and pro-gay marriage. I mean, so am I, and I might well have voted for him if I lived in the City; certainly most of the Democrats who lived there saw no reason to vote against him based on the last four years. But I think that pretty well rules him out as a moderate Republican or a 2008 candidate.
I forgot to add, in my earlier post about the rejection by voters of Republican ideals, a reminder about the Colorado voters having overturned TABOR. Certainly if there was a single item that reflected conservative principles, it was Grover Norquist’s very conservative budget policy regulation that Colorado had tried out. Turns out that it sucks, and they had enough.
I know all that, I can still dream, can’t I? 
I worked on the Kaine campaign here in Virginia, and therefore had a lot of voter contact through phone banking and canvassing. A lot of people refused to vote because they were under the impression that both candidates were doing negative ads (it was pretty much Kilgore), and I also got a lot of people who told me that they were voting for Kaine because we needed more democrats in office.
That being said, I think the management of Kilgore’s campaign made a few major errors. First of all, the negative ads were not a good idea. They really served to disgust voters. Also, they were practically harassing voters. We started making Kaine phonecalls back during the summer, so everyone got a phone call every once in awhile. The Kilgore folks started making theirs really recently, which means that some of their voters were getting up to three calls a day, which really pissed those voters off.
My impression from the Washington Post is that Kilgore’s “Kaine is a liberal” strategy also proved to be a big mistake.
I dunno about the gun stuff, but his stance on the death penalty (personally liberal, but would uphold the (conservative) law) and on abortion (personally conservative, but would uphold the (liberal) law) were of a piece, and pretty much canceled out.
Well, of course not, but Virginia’s nobody’s idea of a state where liberalism is gonna score big during my lifetime.
But I’m tired of hearing this “the Dems need to moderate their positions” crapola. They’ve been moderating their positions over and over and over again over the past few decades, and a lot of good it’s done them.
The real question isn’t moderate v. liberal; it’s clarity v. blurriness. If you’re a Democrat who’s running on “I’m mostly like a Republican, except for a coupla little doodads,” then people are going to vote for the real Republican, rather than the faux one. Even a centrist Dem should be able to point to some pretty fundamental areas where s/he differs from the GOP’s philosophy, given the gap between the parties, and should be proud of and able to defend those differences. If they can’t do that, then they’re in the wrong line of work - but this is my problem with a lot of centrist Joes (i.e. Biden and Lieberman): they can’t seem to do this.
And the reason for this isn’t that they’re red-state Dems who have conservative stands on guns or abortion; they’re not. It’s that they’re corporate whores who are selling out their own constituents on widely unpopular measures in order to keep businesses like MBNA on their side.
It’s not being moderate or even conservative on guns or abortion or the death penalty that makes it unclear what the Dems stand for; it’s the corporate whoring. Supporting the bankruptcy bill or the class-action deform legislation isn’t ‘moving to the center’; it’s abandoning the interests of people in favor of the interests of money. And it’s hard to imagine anything less (capital-D) Democratic than that.
It seems to have been. Kaine isn’t really all that liberal- he’s more of a moderate who emphasizes the importance of bipartisanship.
Also, a good portion of Kilgore’s campaign seemed to be “I went to UVA!” which he got ridiculed for, since he went to the offshoot, UVA at Wise, before it was even affiliated with UVA.
As of 12:37pm today, the count looked like this:
Office: Attorney General
Precincts Reporting: 2423 of 2426 (99.88%)
Registered Voters: 4,451,442
Total Voting: 1,937,981
Voter Turnout: 43.54 %
Candidates . . . Party . . . Vote Totals … Percentage
R F McDonnell . Republican … 969,174 . . 50.01%
R C Deeds … . . Democratic . 967,161 . . 49.91%
Write Ins … . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1,646 . . . 0.08%
Total: … . . . . . . . . . . . . 1,937,981
The Democrats also picked up at one seat in the House of Delegates. Another seat formerly occupied by a Republican may have been won by an Independent (the margin was around 150 votes and a recount will no doubt be called).
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Funny you mentioned this! I got home on Monday to 8 voice mails on my home machine. One from GW asking to voter for Kilgore, another 6 random senators and such all urging me to vote Republican, and one live call from a Kaine staffer just reminding me that tomorrow was election day and that my voting place was the elementary school around the corner.
If I hadn’t already been planning to vote for Kaine, the constant freakin calls from Republican sources would have made me do it! Good call to the Kaine campaign on not being to pushy with the calling.
Technically, Biden can, so long as Bobby Kennedy said something about it first.
Depending on where you are in VA, that Kaine one may have been me. I made a lot of those (and memorized the script!) We don’t want to bug people, but at the same time, people didn’t know where to vote, when to vote, who each candidate was (aka: “I’m not voting for Kaine! I’m voting for the Democrat!”), so we kind of had to a bit. I think Kilgore’s folks went overboard, though.
All too true.
I got more Kaine calls than Kilgore calls, but I live in Arlington, which went nearly 75% for Kaine, so it was obviously “base motivating” type calls.
It’s interesting to hear what people say before and after election night. Before election night, predictions of big Kilgore wins amongst conservatives were all over the place. Their 72-hr plan was touted as unbeatable. Every move by the Kilgore campaign was described as “game over!” to Kaine. And the Dem ticket was touted as the most liberal in all of Virginia’s history: the Lt Dem candidate was declared DOA from the day she won the primary. But now, the calculus seems… different.
The problem with this state is that there were only a tiny handful of competative races to begin with TO win. And, interestingly enough, the Dems that won crushed their opponents handily in races that everyone thought leaned Republican. The 1 Republican that won a pickup won in a much closer race. And Dems that weren’t expected to be competative against their candidates ended up pulling out very close wins. All in all, I’d say there is some pretty good evidence of a serious Dem victory, not just based on this or that candidate.
Your alternate scenario of not much happening for Dems just doesn’t hold water. Sure, there was only moderate turnover. But after the redistricting, virtually EVERY delegate’s district is overwhelmingly partisan one way or another. And yet the districts the Dems won and defended (like Caputo/Craddock, Miller/Ball) all leaned traditionally Republican. But they didn’t vote that way. You can’t get off trying to ignore that.
The Democratic Lt candidate supported GAY MARRIAGE and ABORTION ON DEMAND. She was a proudly self-described liberal. And a woman. She was outspent tremendously. The fact that she even made the race that close is utterly astounding. The Dem AG candidate was expected to do better, but coming within a few hundred votes of winning? When his opponent was virtually the annointed one and immesely popular in the cities? When he had virtually no name recognition whatsoever (my grqandmother had no idea that McDonnell even had an opponent?
Let’s not try to spin this too hard, but this was a major Democratic upset night. Cities that had never been won by a statewide Dem in recent history, even when Warner won, went for Kaine. The Republican 72hr plan fizzled despite millions and millions spent and thousands upon thousands of immigrant campaign bodies on election day. Trying to downplay this is natural, but come on. For the last 4 years, the story has been that Warner ONLY won because he had no record of liberalism , because he was immensely rich, and because he ran a folksy, rural centered campaign that played him as a populist centrist. He pledged not to raise taxes. Now, Kaine, attacked as the most liberal guy every to run for Governor (with a record), wins on a platform of defending a tax increase, increasing education spending. And it means… nothing?
Warner and Kaine passed the biggest tax increase in Virginia’s history. They were attacked for it again and again. Kaine faced a negative campaign that played on all the themes that worked so well against Kerry: that you can’t trust him, that he has no solid beliefs, that he flip-flops etc. And it failed this time. The Dems were ready. They slaughtered Kilgore and by far outperformed expectations everywhere else (don’t ask me for a cite: just look through any conservative Virginian blog’s predictions, and their last year of coverage). Kilgore started 10 points up. Republicans were describing this as a walk in the park: Kaine was a dead duck out of the gate. But now it’s all blase? Come on. This win has to say something about Dems reclaiming the sensible middle in Virginia in a big big way.
And it puts Warner in 08’ directly into the crosshairs of the Hillary machine. She now has a formidable opponent with a heck of a lot of coatail cred and the ability to bring one of the most expensive electoral states in the country .
I live in the city and voted for Bloomberg. He ran on the Republican and the Liberal ticket, contrary to his Democratic challenger.