'You can’t win with a hard-right candidacy,' one Republican donor said. Virginia blame game begins

National Republicans agree on this much about the 2013 campaign in Virginia: It wasn’t supposed to go like this.

Well before the last votes are cast in the state’s off-year governor’s race, GOP leaders are already engaged in a spirited debate over why, exactly, a fight against a Democrat as flawed as Terry McAuliffe has turned into such a painful slog of a campaign. Even Republicans who haven’t yet counted out their nominee, state Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, view the governor’s race as a profile in frustration for the GOP – an election that should have leaned toward the Republicans, but where Democrats have held a persistent lead in polling, money and tactical prowess.


The GOP’s internal discussion about the race mirrors much of the broader national tug of war within the conservative coalition, between officials and strategists who want the party to trim back some of its most confrontational tactics and hard-edged rhetoric, and activists bent on drawing the starkest possible lines of contrast with the Democratic party of President Barack Obama.

( PHOTOS: Ken Cuccinelli’s career)

The clearest battle lines will emerge after Tuesday; but the Washington community has groused for months about Cuccinelli’s history of incendiary, ultra-ideological stances, while rank-and-file activists have watched with horror as well-tailored GOP donors have defected to McAuliffe. Everyone in the party – establishment and tea party alike – has fumed over the ongoing ethics controversies that have rocked outgoing Gov. Bob McDonnell’s administration and undercut Cuccinelli’s anticipated advantage over McAuliffe on personal integrity.

A Cuccinelli defeat, in other words, would have a thousand fathers. But this much is already clear: the GOP’s accumulated problems in Virginia have brought the party to the edge of a historic defeat in a nationally pivotal swing state, potentially producing a Republican shutout of all five statewide offices (governor, attorney general, lieutenant governor and two U.S. senators) for the first time since the Nixon administration.

Republican Governors Association executive director Phil Cox, whose group has spent nearly $8 million boosting Cuccinelli, firmly rejected the idea that the Virginia race reflected any limitations of conservative ideas. But he allowed that there may be lessons to learn about how you go about delivering a conservative message.

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“It’s not about nominating less conservative candidates, moderating our messaging or changing our principles. It’s about effectively connecting with voters on issues they care about,” Cox said.

Cox, who managed McDonnell’s landslide 2009 victory, added that the Virginia GOP’s decision to select its nominees in a convention this year meant that candidates were courting rank-and-file activists well into the spring, rather than focusing on donors and voters statewide.

“I prefer primaries over conventions because I think they force candidates and campaigns to be more oriented toward a general election audience earlier, to go out and solicit support from the business community and raise money, rather than spending all your time talking to a very small sub-set of your party’s base,” Cox said. “It’s not that we have to nominate more moderate candidates – the fact is, the more conservative candidate tends to win in a primary as well.”

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One Republican donor who has watched the Virginia race closely said the conclusion was even simpler: “You can’t win with a hard-right candidacy.”

“There’s just a lot of people that don’t like [Cuccinelli’s] harsh tone and don’t want to give him money,” the donor said. “He doesn’t do a great job with donors and he doesn’t have a great organization and a lot of people were turned off from the get-go.”

To GOP elites, the likely outcomes in Tuesday’s two gubernatorial elections looks like an instructive contrast: in Virginia, where the party nominated an uncompromising ideologue, Republicans face seemingly likely defeat; in New Jersey, where they have maverick Gov. Chris Christie at the top of the ticket, the GOP will hold the governorship easily.

Virginia strikes party elites as a particularly clear example of the base getting its way: the state GOP picked Cuccinelli and firebrand lieutenant governor nominee E.W. Jackson in a convention dominated by grassroots conservatives, paying little heed to questions of electability, and look where they are now.

Conservatives in Virginia and nationally recoil from the idea that the problem with Cuccinelli’s race is ideology – that Republicans might have been better off nominating a more moderate candidate, or one who could more convincingly argue that he had spent his career focused on broad-spectrum issues like jobs.

The right is bracing for those arguments. RedState blogger Erick Erickson warned as early as August: “[S]hould McAuliffe win … the media and liberal Republicans will claim conservatives cannot get elected.”

Among conservatives, all that establishment grief overlooks the role that GOP elites have played in hampering Cuccinelli. National party leaders chastise the right for focusing on purity over big-tent pragmatism – but a collection of prominent GOP finance types have closed their own tent to Cuccinelli, complaining about his social views on the record or even cutting checks to McAuliffe instead.

Those GOP defections “are proving Cuccinelli’s undoing,” Richmond Times-Dispatch columnist Jeff Schapiro wrote.

Cuccinelli has labored hard to convince voters that he would be the stronger governor on economic development, thanks to his deep understanding of state government and penchant for cutting taxes. Voters don’t seem to be buying it: polls show that a majority of voters have an unfavorable view of the former Fairfax state legislator, presumably as a result of the millions of dollars McAuliffe’s campaign and Democratic groups have spent attacking his record on issues like contraception and transit funding.

Some on the right argue that the GOP would be better off if Cuccinelli had delivered an assertive message on his social views, defining them clearly before Democrats could tar him with an opposition research file. Anti-abortion activist Marjorie Dannenfelser, who leads the Susan B. Anthony List, said Cuccinelli has been hamstrung by an establishment-mandated “jobs, economy, that’s all that matters script.”

“That script didn’t work in the presidential with [Mitt] Romney, who is not viewed as conservative as Ken is, and it has been problematic in this gubernatorial race,” said Dannenfelser, whose group has spent nearly a million dollars backing Cuccinelli. “Sometimes, when it gets to social policy, everyone gets in the fetal position on the Republican side.”

One conservative group, American Principles In Action, released a report in advance of the election making the case that Cuccinelli had erred by signing onto a “truce strategy” on social issues – not repudiating his own views, but not defending them in detail or seeking to put McAuliffe on the defensive for his social views.

Senior Virginia Republicans react with the equivalent of a deep sigh to conservative claims that Cuccinelli wasn’t proud enough of his own record as an ideological warrior – a tough sell for those who knew him in the state Senate – or that it was a fickle donor class that made the difference in the race. Cuccinelli has had many chances this year to moderate his social views; when challenged, he has reliably stood by his long-stated principles.

Republican Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling, a frequent Cuccinelli critic who abandoned his own campaign for governor late last year, said the attorney general had failed to rebut an entirely predictable negative campaign against him.

“Anyone who knows anything about politics knew what the Democrats’ attacks on Mr. Cuccinelli were going to be,” Bolling said. “I think the Cuccinelli people, in truth, understood that. Their approach appears, on the basis of the campaign so far – rather than refute, they have launched attacks of their own.”

McDonnell himself, appearing on WTOP's “Ask the Governor” radio program, expressed concern about Cuccinelli’s underperformance on “the kitchen table issues, about jobs, about security, about good schools and good roads, and so forth.”

“I can’t explain why that is so big – 24 points, I think, was the margin I saw between McAuliffe and Cuccinelli on that,” the governor said. “I would say some of the problems oftentimes in campaigns just are a matter of tone and style and method of communication.”

Emily Schultheis contributed to this report.