Virginia, the commonwealth situated to the west and south of the District of Columbia, has something of a contrarian streak when it comes to electing its governors. The last nine times that Virginia voters selected a new governor, they went against the party in the White House. So during the Clinton years, the Old Dominion elected Republicans George Allen and Jim Gilmore; during the George W. Bush years, they voted for Democrats Mark Warner and Tim Kaine. And four years ago, with Barack Obama living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, they tapped Republican Bob McDonnell.

Barring an unforeseen cataclysm, they will break that streak, and decisively. With less than two weeks before Election Day, polls show Republican nominee Ken Cuccinelli, the commonwealth's attorney general, fading against Democratic nominee Terry McAuliffe. Yes, that Terry McAuliffe – the Beltway hack Clinton fundraiser whose inescapable grinning visage during the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries conjured up memories of Cesar Romero's Joker from the 1960s series, "Batman."

At a time when Virginia has ascended to the ranks of the critical swing states – it went for Obama in 2008 and 2012 after voting for the GOP candidate the 10 previous elections in a row – the problems facing the state's Republican Party mirror those of the national party. "What's happened is a microcosm nationally," says Tom Davis, a Republican former member of Congress who now lobbies for Deloitte. "We took a red state, turned it into a purple state and are turning it into a Democratic rout."

This is a problem with which Davis is intimately familiar and has long foreseen. A moderate Republican – he now heads the centrist Republican Main Street Partnership – with an encyclopedic knowledge of congressional districts and the political landscape both nationally and in Virginia, he has been chastised by the hard right as a "RINO" (that's movement conservative for "Republican In Name Only") as he has warned that the party has become too beholden to its extremes. "I hate to say, the day of reckoning is here," he says. "I hope we use this as a learning moment."

The day of reckoning indeed. The Virginia governor's race is a perfect illustration of what happens when a party's crank wing – in the GOP's case the tea party zealots currently running the show – gets too much power. Start with the candidate: Cuccinelli has earned a reputation as a tea party darling and conservative crusader. He was the first attorney general to file suit against Obamacare and a vocal opponent of a path to citizenship in immigration ("I no longer consider [George W. Bush] the head of my Republican Party," he wrote back in 2007 when that president tried to pass an immigration reform bill). He has supported a "personhood" bill which would declare that life begins at fertilization (making all abortions murder and possibly illegalizing some forms of birth control) and has declared the Environmental Protection Agency an "agency of mass destruction."

And voters have noticed. A Washington Post/Abt-SRBI poll released yesterday found that 54 percent of likely voters believe Kuccinelli is too conservative. Similarly a Quinnipiac University poll released last week found that 51 percent of likely Virginia voters believe Cuccinelli to be "too conservative" to be governor. "Enough Virginians decided that Ken Cuccinelli is an unacceptable choice to be governor, and Terry McAuliffe is just the lucky bloke facing off against him," says Geoffrey Skelley from the University of Virginia's Center for Politics.

As if to drive home Cuccinelli's right wing bona fides, the party – working through a convention instead of a primary process, thus guaranteeing a more conservative slate – nominated a candidate for lieutenant governor who is arguably even further out there. (He's said that Planned Parenthood has been worse for blacks than the Ku Klux Klan and that gays are "very sick people.")

Cuccinelli's uncompromising conservatism included opposing the $1 billion road-and-rail plan signed into law by McDonnell this year on the grounds that it raised taxes. Stances like that cost him business community support says Davis. "He's been outspent because the business community, as has happened nationally, has walked away," he says.

The coup de grâce came when Cuccinelli's ideological brethren in Congress shut down the federal government, a wrenching disruption given that much of the state's northern economy depends on government workers. If you look at RealClearPolitics's average of polls for the race, McAuliffe starts pulling away from Cuccinelli almost the moment the federal government shuts down. McAuliffe has since hammered Cuccinelli as a Cruz clone. The impossibility of the attorney general's situation was laid bare when asked last week whether he would have voted for the deal which reopened the government, he replied: "I don't know whether I would have voted for it." What else could he say? Cruz and the running-amok party base view the shutdown as a worthwhile fight, while swing voters recoil at it: 69 percent of voters surveyed in the Post poll said the shutdown was important while 82 percent of voters disapproved of it; the Quinnipiac poll found that 77 percent of Virginians think the shutdown harmed the commonwealth.

And while the effect of the shutdown is magnified in Virginia, similar results are evident nationally: A Washington Post/ABC News poll released last week found that 80 percent of Americans disapproved of the shutdown, while the percent of the public holding a positive view of the GOP sunk to a new low of 32 percent.

The utter collapse of the Cruz-Cuccinelli conservatives only stands in contrast to this year's other gubernatorial election, in New Jersey, where GOP Gov. Chris Christie is coasting to an easy re-election. "Christie is one direction for the party; Cuccinelli is another," Davis says. The Cruz-Cuccinelli conservatives have chosen a path of ideological purity – and political losses.

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