The optimism is a sign of a campaign in the closing hours before impending doom. Cuccinelli fights stench of doom

SPOTSYLVANIA, Va. — In politics, it is generally not a good omen when a candidate’s supporters argue that he still has a chance of victory — if the opponent’s supporters neglect to vote.

But this was Virginia Republican Party Chairman Pat Mullins’s version of the power of positive thinking in an interview this weekend. The path for star-crossed GOP gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli, Mullins said, looks like this: “If turnout is in the 30s, the low 30s, we’re gonna win. If it gets higher up in Fairfax [in Democratic-leaning Northern Virginia], say like 40, it’s likely we won’t. I don’t think it’s going to hit 40 anywhere. I’m looking at 32.”


For context, 72 percent of eligible voters cast ballots in last year’s presidential election and 40 percent voted in the most recent governor’s race.

( Also on POLITICO: Obama ties Cuccinelli to GOP obstructionists)

This valiant effort at optimism is the kind of thing a campaign does in the closing hours when it becomes enveloped with an unmistakable stench of impending doom.

Almost anyone who has been around politics for long in either party knows the feeling. The heart demands a cheerful, resilient sprint to the finish. The brain, which has internalized the polls and analyzed the crowds, knows there is virtually no rational reason for cheer.

Listen to the talking points from the Cuccinelli campaign and its surrogates, and watch their decisions over time and money, and all the signatures of a classic political death march are on bright display.

( QUIZ: How well do you know Ken Cuccinelli?)

* The only poll that counts is the one on Election Day. True.

* This election belongs to the people, not the pollsters and pundits. True.

* Politics, like the rest of life, is full of surprises. Supremely true.

But the reality — as the political veterans voicing these talking points know better than anyone — is that surprises like the one Cuccinelli needs are rare indeed. The last top-flight poll that had him ahead came out six months ago, although three outliers in the past week showed the race within the margin of error.

And the same depressing polls Cuccinelli publicly dismisses have driven the candidate’s decisions. His strategy for the past couple of weeks has been the equivalent of hospice care for a very sick patient. Real efforts at getting well — such as trying to persuade swing voters in the vote-rich Northern Virginia suburbs — have been all but abandoned. The alternative is palliative care, trying to ease the pain and wait for a miracle by focusing the candidate’s time and message on stimulating turnout among the conservative base that is already with him.

( QUIZ: How well do you know Terry McAuliffe?)

“We don’t need to convince one more Virginian, not one,” Cuccinelli told 150 supporters at a weekend rally here. “We just have got to get the ones who already agree with us about ‘first principles’ to the polls on Tuesday. That’s all we’ve got to do to win.”

This mentality is why he’s wrapping up Monday night with Ron Paul, the former Texas congressman who ran three quixotic bids for president, at a rally in Richmond.

As campaigns always do in these circumstances, they grasp desperately at those polls that show the race tightening — even if one of them was conducted by a club of college students in Massachusetts.

And Cuccinelli’s surrogates have added the local twist that Virginia conservatives have treasured for decades: don’t let the liberal Washington Post try to tell us what to do.

( PHOTOS: Ken Cuccinelli’s career)

“He can be a great governor, but to win we’ve got to defy the odds,” said Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who flew in for two rallies Saturday. “If you listen to The Washington Post, they want you to just sit down and give it up.”

Walker then assured the crowd that the race is tightening.

“The reason it’s getting close is because the voters are looking beyond … what The Washington Post and what the Washington elites say about this state and about this country,” he said.

The candidate himself has tried to keep the mood light with self-deprecating humor. Democrat Terry McAuliffe and his allied outside groups crushed Cuccinelli and his backers by a factor of 25-to-1 in the air war last week.

( PHOTOS: Terry McAuliffe’s career)

“If you own a television, you know that,” Cuccinelli joked to supporters. “If you don’t, my opponent will buy you one if you’ll vote for him.”

“I shaved my horns just for you all,” he deadpanned at another stop later.

While Cuccinelli tries to keep his campaign on life support, many people who were never enthusiastic about nominating a zealous social conservative in an increasingly moderate state have been working for weeks on their unflattering obituaries.

“By all rights Cuccinelli should be walking away with this thing,” said Tom Davis, a former congressman who represented Northern Virginia in the House. “And what’s happened is we’re getting skunked … it’s just very sad.”

Cuccinelli believes an upset is possible because his supporters are more loyal than McAuliffe’s. The final Post poll put the Democrat up 12 percent, 51 percent to 39 percent, but two-thirds of his supporters said their vote is primarily a vote against Cuccinelli. The Republican’s team questions whether dislike for him will really be enough to drive people to the ballot box in an off-year election.

If he can make Tuesday a true referendum on the botched rollout of Obamacare, Cuccinelli thinks he can fire up not just conservatives but also some disenchanted independents. He has acknowledged that the government shutdown hurt his campaign the first two weeks of the month, but he thinks all the website problems and Obama’s trip to Virginia on Sunday nationalize the contest — and this works to his advantage.

He also envisions a secret army of true believers deploying Tuesday.

“Below the radar, very quietly, we’ve been pushing very hard and those contacts have been made,” Cuccinelli said. “Is it enough? We’ll find out Tuesday night.”

For most close observers of Virginia politics, this all calls to mind Jim Carrey’s line from “Dumb and Dumber” when his love interest — played by Lauren Holly — says there is a “one in a million” possibility she would ever be interested in him romantically: “So you’re telling me there’s a chance!?”

For now, Cuccinelli is soldiering on, in ways that — even if they don’t produce a miracle — at least offer a case study of the psychology and tactics of a campaign that is now depending much more on some external twist of fate than any factor within its own control.

*There’s anger and defensiveness:

Cuccinelli’s complaints that Democrats are knowingly “lying through their teeth” about him have become louder over the past few weeks.

He urged supporters this weekend to go to “the truth about Ken” section on his website and email fact sheets to those who might be concerned about his record. He tells his fans to cut and paste the text into emails on the assumption people are lazy and won’t click on the link.

He devotes precious minutes of his stump speech to explaining himself on everything from gun control to birth control.

*There’s disbelief and denial:

Cuccinelli genuinely thinks McAuliffe is a sleazy snake oil salesman who doesn’t care about the state and cannot believe he’s probably going to lose to him.

After noting that Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson were two of Virginia’s first governors, for example, he added: “I’m not sure my opponent knows that.”

*Much like backers of Mitt Romney in 2012, Cuccinelli boosters seize on helpful polls to argue victory is within reach:

“I don’t believe the polls,” said Assunta Dixon, 68 of Dumfries, as she headed out to another shift knocking on doors this weekend. “I feel like they’re biased.”

On Friday, the campaign blasted out a survey that was conducted by a student polling club at Emerson College in Massachusetts, showing Cuccinelli trailing by only 2 percentage points. They sent two other releases about a Quinnipiac Poll last Wednesday that showed Cuccinelli down just 4 points.

The Gun Owners of America, a group that prides itself on being to the right of the National Rifle Association, wrote in a fundraising solicitation, “Well, didn’t we tell you that the crooked pollsters will show a conservative, pro-gun candidate to be miles behind, but then issue polls that ‘close up the gap’ within the last week?”

“It’s happening again,” wrote GOA’s Tim Macy.

When a local TV reporter told Cuccinelli on Saturday afternoon that people she talks to are less energetic than in previous years, he argued — three days before the election — that voters don’t start paying attention until much later in off-year races.

“Polls that come out at this point are almost useless because they’re all lagging indicators,” Cuccinelli said.

And, of course, the last stage of grief is acceptance. Cuccinelli’s not there yet, but he might be moving in that direction.

He choked up at a rally near his house last week as he talked about getting Thomas Haynesworth, a man who spent 27 years behind bars for rapes he did not commit, out of jail in 2011. “That alone,” he explained after, “is worth 10 years of candidate work.”

For now, though, he has more immediate concerns. He made five stops Sunday and plans six on Monday.

“On Tuesday night, we’re not going to have a party — we’re going to have a victory party,” Cuccinelli says, trying to reassure himself as much as the crowd.

Just after the rally in the Spotsylvania town square ended, as the candidate smiled for photos, an irate man in a suit approached a young advance staffer to demand the crowd immediately disperse from the gazebo.

“I’m voting for him on Tuesday,” he yelled, “but my son is getting married here in less than 40 minutes.”

Emily Schultheis contributed to this report.