1. The White House has trouble melding its approach to
governing, and standards of transparency and brand of being above
politics, with a strong-arming White House political operation willing and capable
of leading the Democratic party to victory.
2. Barack Obama's political coalition is not invincible and it is not perpetual.
The Obama election didn't changed the fundamental political dynamics of
off-year elections.
3. The White House's time horizons are longer than and different than the time horizons of House, Senate and gubernatorial candidates. It was more important for, say, Creigh Deeds, to get a health care bill passed by August than it was for President Obama. Obama's building a strong re-election coalition in 2012, but it's going to be frustrating for Democrats in the short term. Obama's approval rating in New Jersey was 57%.
4. The traditional, nonthreatening Republican economic message -- lower taxes, less spending, more disciplined government -- resonates better with independents than the Democratic message -- we need to spend our way out of the recession.
5. Deep recessions are deadly for governors, who must balance their budgets by cutting spending deeply or raising taxes.
6. It's very hard for Democrats to simultaneously turn out the Obama Coalition (younger, more liberal, more minority voters) and suburban independents (particularly older, particularly men).
7. Jon Corzine had record low approval ratings and very high disapproval ratings.
8. Chris Christie's anti-corruption reputation and property tax pledges worked.
9. Creigh Deeds happened to be a Democrat in a state that bordered the
District of Columbia. In July and August, when residents of the DC
media market were saturated with an unflattering view of disputatious
partisan Democratic infighting, with reports of bailouts and trillion
dollar deficits, Deeds's numbers among independents in this area -- and
pretty much only this area -- tanked. He never recovered.
10. Since 1985, Virginia and New Jersey have always voted against the
party in power in Washington in their sequential off-year elections.
11. Virginia's mid-summer budget crisis hurt Democrats.
1 and 9 make no sense. You're defining the 2 gubernatorial races as being wholly about either the White House or the Congress, and the 2 House races as being solely local and reflecting no feelings about the White House and Congress. Come on, if there's any race which takes the makeup and popularity of Congress into account, it's a House race.
This did more to underline that all politics is local. (Seriously, what could the White House do to "strong arm" the states into electing certain governors?) If voters only cared about the president, whom more than 50% of them approved of, then NJ and VA would have been Dem wins. Apparently they care about property taxes and corruption in NJ and inept campaigning in VA.
Simple may sell. But it doesn't get the job done.
If all politics is local, as you put it, why did the President make multiple appearances in NJ to stump for Corzine?
You can't read anything from special elections, but if you could, I would take away the following points:
1) A national, netroots, and media-based revolt from the right against a GOP primary nominee failed on all levels, while only succeeding in adding another "D" to the House rolls.
2) No amount of polling, campaign strategy, or White House pleading can surmount the discontent of the voters with an unpopular incumbent (Corzine). Additionally, the entire "He's like George W. Bush" campaign strategy used by the Dems effectively over the past 4 years may be loosing its cache as Bush memories fade.
3) The media spends way too much time covering elections, and speculating about the Presidency. There are hundreds of layers of government that affect citizens in this country, and only one of them is the CEO. Stop obsessing over it.
I thunk slaghas it right:Simple may sell.t it doesn't get the job done.
The election shows clearly that the status quo is alive and well, which is not as clearly a good thing.
12) Don't knock Rasmussen Polls. You may not like what they have to say, but their predictions, consistently more conservative due to their correction for "likely voters", made them the only pollster who predicted Christie's victory in NJ.
13) Conversely, ignore PPP, who got NY-23 very badly wrong.
14) Also ignore Intrade. No idea why, but Corzine was up past 80% when they started counting votes, and Hoffman was way up in the 70s.
15) As Megan McArdle pointed out, this may not be a referendum on Obama, but who cares. It probably is something of a referendum on the 2010 elections, and that means it will impact the health reform bill as well. If the best hope of Blue Dog Democrats is infighting among the energized conservatives...
For what it's worth, I knew Corzine was toast when poll numbers indicated the 3rd and 4th highest priority concerns in NJ (behind, but not very far behind) the economy were: property taxes and corruption.
Christie was a Roman Cathoplic not an Evangelical. His accent was pure NJ not Dixie or Texas. A large part of the GOP problem in the BOSWASH corridor is the combination of Evangelical religious expression and saying it in a Dixie accent. Christie didn't push those buttons and run on those issues. He ran on the traditional Rockefeller/RINO platform of clean government with a secondary issue of lower taxes [a fantasy given the economy and party composition of the legislature]. He was thus able to rise beyond the trashed GOP brand.
I can't really understand why people get so excited about particular election outcomes. Did people really expect that the Democrats would never lose another election. American politics is extremely stable--if you want to say status quo, so be it. Neither party stays up or down for very long. After Watergate, it was supposed to be the demise of the GOP; then,during the 80s, it was the Democrats that were doomed. Their fortunes depend on the vicissitudes of the economy and real world events, many of which are out of their control, much more than ideologies or even particular politicians. In fact, Americans have no ideology for the most part other than, "how are things going at the moment?" How the Democrats do in 2010 will largely on how the economy goes.
It is also, I think, rather naive to think that people voted for fundamental liberal change when they voted for Obama, any more than they voted for a conservatism when they elected Reagan. In my view, things were bad and people were looking, not for change, but for things to go back to the way things were before things got bad. I think it's a mistake for either party or any politician to interpret his or her election as some sort of mandate for any particular policy.