I’m in the camp that says Tuesday’s election results don’t tell us much about what to expect next November. A Republican revival? Conservative comeback? That’s not exactly what NY-23 suggests; there Democrat Bill Owens beat Conservative (and virtual Republican) Doug Hoffman by sticking to the common-sense, district-specific playbook that served the Democrats well in 2006 and 2008. (Obviously, it helped the Dems that they had Bush to campaign against back then, too, but to win Republican-leaning districts like NY-23 they needed candidates who were a reasonably good fit for the community, and they found them.) Hoffman was not a strong candidate for the district; Republican nominee Scozzafava was not a good fit for the party’s ideological base. If the Republicans had been well enough organized to nominate a more locally credible candidate than Hoffman and a more conservative candidate than Scozzafava, they might have won. But that “if” contains the crux of the congressional GOP’s problem: it hasn’t been able to unify its activist base, its leadership, and political reality.

Those things did line up in the Virginia elections. It’s hard to say whether the Old Dominion is a barometer of change or not, though. The commonwealth has been perfectly counter-cyclical since the Carter years, electing Republican governors every time a Democrat is in the White House and Democratic governors every time a Republican is president. There’s a mundane explanation for that, at least going back as far as the Clinton years: Virginia is a divided state where the intensity of either side counts for a great deal. The side that occupies the White House is typically less intense — it’s playing defense — while the anger and energy is on the side of the out party. We saw that in the McDonnell-Deeds gubernatorial contest, and we saw it four years earlier when Democrat Tim Kaine prevailed. The country as a whole, like Virginia, is divided, and the activist energy is very much to the Republicans’ advantage right now. Unfortunately for the GOP, the 2010 elections will be fought district by district and state by state, where local conditions are not always close to those in Virginia or the nation as a whole. Hoffman benefited from the nationwide counter-Obama activist energy, hence the Conservative Party candidate’s great showing for out-of-state fundraising. But local realities trumped that.

The tilt of the playing field in 2010 will favor Republicans, but they still have to play a good enough game to take advantage of it. I do expect them to make gains, but not the huge gains that the base is expecting — not enough to take back either chamber, at least as things stand now. (What happens to the economy over the next year will naturally make a tremendous difference either way.)

New Jersey defied my guess that Corzine would pull through. My prediction was down to the heavily Democratic lean of the state and the tendency of Republican senate and gubernatorial candidates time and again to start strong but ultimately fall short. New Jersey has elected and re-elected plenty of crooked, creepy Democrats before. But Corzine’s luck ran out. I tend to think that the Garden State is less reflective of the direction of the country than Virginia is, however. Certainly Democrats have pulled through in unfavorable conditions there before. The real contest in New Jersey is usually not between conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats, but between Democrats and their own corruption. The moderate Republican Christie was the “not Corzine” choice.

Filed under: Elections, Politics