The off-year elections were, in two big races, an unmistakable rebuke of Democrats. Dems, incumbents get wake-up call

RICHMOND, Va. — Eager to drain the 2009 elections of drama and import, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs claimed Tuesday night that President Barack Obama was “not watching returns.”

You can be sure that he is studying them closely now: The off-year elections were, in two big races, an unmistakable rebuke of Democrats, reshuffling Obama’s political circumstances in ways likely to have severe near-term consequences for his policy agenda and larger governing strategy.


Independents took flight from Democrats. They suffered humiliating gubernatorial losses in traditionally Democratic New Jersey, where Obama lent his prestige in a pair of eleventh-hour campaign rallies Sunday, and in Virginia, which had been trending leftward and just last year was held up as an example of how Obama was redrawing the political map in his favor.

Tuesday night’s trends were emphatically not in Obama’s favor. Among those paying closest attention are dozens of Democrats who won formerly Republican congressional districts in 2006 and 2008 and are up for reelection in 2010. Many of these pickups that powered the Democrats’ recapture of Congress came in Southern and border states, or in the Ohio River Valley, where political conditions are similar to those in Virginia.

Obama now faces a much tougher challenge persuading these mostly moderate Democrats to put themselves further at risk by backing such liberal priorities as expanding government’s role in heath care or limiting greenhouse gases.

It was a consolation prize — cherished by national Democrats urgently looking for some good news — that Democrat Bill Owens won a special election for the 23rd Congressional District in upstate New York.

What’s more, there is an argument that these off-year elections may not have produced an ideological or partisan verdict so much as revealed a deeply aggrieved electorate — ready to rough up incumbents of all varieties.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who previously had been perceived as a highly popular independent, barely fended off a listless and badly outspent Democratic challenge from City Comptroller William Thompson Jr.

The results in the New York House race — in a remote, historically Republican bastion — came after a bitter intramural fight among Republicans in which Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman and his backers effectively ran GOP establishment pick Dede Scozzafava out of the race.

“I think all incumbents need to be on full alert,” Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the leader of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told POLITICO in a telephone interview.

The election campaigns were followed swiftly by post-game campaigns to shape perceptions of the results. The Democratic line, from the White House on down, is to plunge into nuance — making the case that the big 2009 contests were effectively local races waged by two weak candidates in incumbent Jon Corzine in New Jersey, beaten by Republican Chris Christie, and state Sen. Creigh Deeds in Virginia, who was clubbed like a harp seal in his 17-percentage-point loss to GOP nominee Bob McDonnell.

It is true enough that both Democratic candidates had severe limitations — Deeds was a notably unprepossessing candidate compared with the polished McDonnell, and Corzine was deeply unpopular and at the helm of a state suffering through difficult economic times. Neither race should be viewed as strictly a referendum on Obama. But if there is a danger in overinterpreting off-year elections, it is also a mistake to underinterpret.

Particularly in Virginia, the rout of three Democrats running for three separate statewide offices, as well as the loss of several legislative seats, sent an unambiguous message. The independent voters who helped Obama in 2008 become the first Democratic presidential candidate in 44 years to carry the Old Dominion have swung wildly in a different direction. The swing from Obama's win last year to McDonnell's Tuesday: 23 points.

Exit polls showed Republican McDonnell won 63 percent of independent voters. Likewise in Democratic-trending Northern Virginia, the Republican carried the three largest suburban counties of Fairfax, Loudoun and Prince William — all counties Obama won handily last year.

In New Jersey, likewise, Christie won 58 percent of independents.

“This is a shot across the bow to the moderates and Blue Dog Democrats as they decide votes on health care” and other issues, said Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), the House minority whip.

Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine — who as current Virginia governor had previously won plaudits for making his state more competitive for his party — saw his reputation scuffed. But he cautioned against drawing national trends, saying opinion polls show Obama still winning majority support among independents nationally.

"These two races each had their own spin," Kaine told POLITICO.

Notably, one of Virginia’s most prominent Democrats, former Gov. L. Douglas Wilder — the nation’s first elected African-American governor — sided more with Cantor.

“It’s a wake-up call for Democrats across the country,” said Wilder, who did not endorse Deeds.

He said independents are worried about what they see as careless spending by Obama and his Democratic allies in Washington, and he advised Obama to reorganize his White House to rely less on campaign operatives and focus more on governing.

Mississippi Gov. and Republican Governors Association Chairman Haley Barbour compared Tuesday’s results with 1993, when Republicans also won Virginia and New Jersey, saying the party’s success would spur more GOP candidates to run next year.

“It served as a springboard for the 1994 elections,” Barbour told POLITICO, alluding to the precursor to the GOP’s capture of the congressional majority. “We elected 73 Republican freshmen in the House of Representatives. More than half of them made the decision to run for Congress after the November 1993 election.”

Further, Barbour said, the wins Tuesday would boost the spirits of a party that has been deeply demoralized since not long after Bush’s 2004 reelection.

“It energizes and excites our volunteers, our organization people and our donors,” he said.

Christie ran in heavily Democratic New Jersey, faced an engaged and popular president, was badly outspent by the self-funding Corzine — who ran a barrage of negative ads, some suggesting the former prosecutor was too fat to lead — and also fended off a former Republican running as a third-party candidate who gave anti-Corzine voters an alternative to the GOP nominee.

Yet Christie still defeated Corzine by 4 percentage points — the largest victory by a New Jersey Republican in nearly a quarter-century.

Christie’s margin marked a 20-point swing from Obama’s performance.

The New Jersey race was especially painful for the White House, which, sensing a loss in Virginia, sought to prop up Corzine in the campaign's final weeks.

The president came to the state for get-out-the-vote rallies on the Sunday before the election, where he called Corzine his “partner” in an effort to fire up the Democratic base.

“We will not lose this election if all of you are as committed as you were last year,” Obama told a heavily black crowd in Newark.

Obama also appeared in an ad for Corzine aimed at Hispanic voters and recorded robocalls for the governor.

But if Democrats were disappointed in New Jersey, Republicans were elated by Virginia.

The landslide of McDonnell, a former state attorney general, appears to offer the GOP a model for victory in swing states. A graduate of Pat Robertson’s Regent University who made his name in the state Legislature as a social conservative, McDonnell downplayed social issues in the campaign and focused intently on winning back the Virginia suburbs that fueled the Democratic resurgence in recent years.

"He focused heavily on the issues that are on voter’s minds: jobs, transportation, taxes and spending,” said Barbour.

Democrats took solace in the Owens victory in New York’s North Country, where they picked up a GOP seat previously held by John McHugh, now the Army secretary. Republicans seemed to lock up the seat on Saturday when their struggling nominee, Scozzafava, dropped out, giving the Conservative Party nominee, Hoffman, a one-on-one race in a historically Republican district.

But Scozzafava endorsed Owens on Sunday, and some of her moderate supporters from her state Assembly district appear to have followed suit and delivered their votes to the Democrat.

Van Hollen held up their success in New York as indicative of what could happen in the future when the conservative and moderate wings of the GOP clash.

“The Republican Party spent close to a million dollars to lose a seat they had held since the Civil War, and in the process launched a civil war of their own,” he said.

Former Republican Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia, an outspoken moderate who is often frustrated by his party’s rightward tilt, said the message of the Christie and McDonnell wins — and the Hoffman loss — is that his party should own the center on economic issues.

But he said the lesson for Democrats is even more urgent.

“Any Democrat from a border or Southern or even a rural district has got to take a deep breath and look for some ways to get some distance from from Obama,” Davis said.

Jonathan Martin reported from East Brunswick, N.J.