Democrats and Republicans Grapple With the Voters’ Message

Were last week's Republican wins in the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races a rebuke to the Obama administration at the one-year mark? Depends on whom you ask.

"I don't think you can read a lot nationally into what happened in two states," says Cornell Belcher, President Obama's pollster in the 2008 presidential contest. "The issues in those states were not the issues we fought on last year."

Many top Republicans disagree. "There's been a lot more government intervention in healthcare and in the federal takeover of certain companies since last year," says David Winston, the pollster for the Republican congressional leadership. "Voters rejected that and went with Republicans."

There may be truth to both interpretations. For Democrats and left-leaning independents, the races, which saw governor's mansions in the Garden State and Old Dominion slip from Democratic hands, were largely local affairs. It's one reason so many who'd turned out for Obama last year stayed home on Election Day, while Republicans and conservative-minded independents stormed the polls. Both trends contain warnings for Obama and the Democrats ahead of next year's midterm elections, while the success of a Democrat in a New York State special election last week provided a cautionary tale for the GOP. With the parties drawing different lessons from the results, the biggest near-term effect may be more partisan gridlock in Washington.

Overwhelming majorities of voters in Virginia, where Bob McDonnell won the open seat, and in New Jersey, where Chris Christie defeated incumbent Jon Corzine, said Obama wasn't a factor. According to exit polls, half of Virginia voters approved of Obama's job performance, despite McDonnell's 20-point margin over Creigh Deeds. In New Jersey, even more voters expressed approval of Obama. "It's important to realize that this was about state issues," says Mike DuHaime, Christie's chief political adviser.

Corzine's approval rating in the days leading up to the election was 37 percent, reflecting a battered state economy, high property taxes, and a federal corruption probe that snared dozens of Democratic New Jersey politicians earlier in the year. In Virginia, Deeds was widely seen as an ineffectual candidate against the polished McDonnell. And both states have for decades consistently elected governors who represent the party opposite the president's.

And yet the warning signs for Democrats are undeniable. Independents in New Jersey and Virginia broke for the Republican gubernatorial candidates by a 2-to-1 ratio, a big shift from last year. "If that happens in 2010, it will be an awesome year for Republicans," says Winston. But political analysts stress that independents who voted last week were more conservative than those who turned out last year. "There was some overlap, but these are two different groups," says Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia.

A bigger problem for Obama and the Democrats is that so much of their base stayed home last week. Turnout in Virginia was down by nearly half compared with last year, when Obama became the first Democrat to win the state in a presidential election since 1964. Key segments of the Obama coalition, including young people and African-Americans, were scarce. Voters under 30 accounted for 10 percent of Virginia voters, down from 21 percent in 2008. Conservatives, meanwhile, surged from a third of the Virginia electorate last year to 40 percent.

The White House sought to blame the Virginia loss on Deeds, a state lawmaker, as part of its larger argument that the outcome had little to do with Obama. "The surge voters who helped turn red states blue were Obama voters, not necessarily Democratic voters," says Belcher. "We have to spend a lot of time cultivating them into conventional Democrats. When we don't, we're missing an opportunity."

But for Democrats to avoid a replay in next year's midterms, they need to figure out how to reactivate their base. In deep-blue New Jersey, three trips by President Obama weren't enough. "Corzine actually lost votes in the areas where the Democratic registration surge [of 2008] was biggest," compared with his 2005 race, says Peter Woolley, director of Fairleigh Dickinson University's Public Mind poll.