The analysis of yesterday’s election results resembles a version of the famous New Yorker cover showing a map of the U.S. divided into a dominant Manhattan dwindling off into insignificant precincts between the Hudson River and the Pacific Ocean, with Virginia occupying Manhattan’s place. Yes, Virginia, Virginia was that important (well, almost).
Below are some observations from my vantage point on the eastern slope of the Blue Ridge just outside Charlottesville, the bluest jurisdiction in the commonwealth. (Actually it is only the second bluest, nosed out of first place by the tiny city of Petersburg, which is just under 80% black and voted 88% for McAuliffe.) There are probably a higher percentage of Republicans in San Francisco than in Charlottesville.
- It could have been better; it could have been worse. The most satisfying result is that the polls were wrong; the governor’s race was much closer than “expected.”
- I believe Bill Bolling, the outgoing Lt. Gov. who was “in line” to be the Republican nominee for governor but was pushed aside by the aggressively ambitious Cuccinelli would have won in a walk. Not so much because he is more “moderate” (he is “moderate” only by the standards of the most diehard Cuccinelli supporters), but because he is less hard-edged in personality as well as policy.
- It looks as though the Democrat-funded “Libertarian,” Sarvis, might well have cost Cuccinelli the election. As of this writing McAuliffe won by about 56,000 votes (out of over 2 million), and Sarvis received 145,000. If a trickle more than 100,000 of Sarvis’s votes had gone to Cuccinelli, he’d have won. Investing in Sarvis sure paid off for the Democrats.
- I think Virginia would have been better off with Cuccinelli, but McAuliffe may not be able to do too much damage. He’ll probably be so occupied with continuing as bag man for the Clintons and looking out for No. 1 (himself) that in all liklihood Virginia will survive him not too much the worse for wear. In fact, if Cuccinelli had won it might have been worse for Republicans nationally in 2014 and beyond, especially if as governor he had pushed the social policies that led so many liberals and others to despise him.
- Nothing in the Virginia results will encourage Democrats elsewhere. In fact, quite the opposite, since it is evident that Cuccinelli was able to close the gap because of the disastrous launch of Obamacare and the growing recognition that its problems are far greater than a defective website.
Finally — and I don’t list this as No. 6 because it is an issue everywhere, not just in Virginia — I think there is an under-appreciated problem of voter eligibility that is far more serious than the one addressed by a stricter ID policy. From a close observation of two precincts in western Albemarle County, Virginia (formerly red but now purple and rapidly trending blue due to spillover from Charlottesville) — one where my wife, Helene, was an election official and the other where I personed a Republican table outside the voting place — it is clear (and has been for the past several cycles) that the Democrats have perfected the process of rounding up and delivering very large numbers of people with various kinds of mental impairments who live in quasi-institutionalized settings. By law, increasingly ignored, voters need to be able to state their name and address when signing in to vote (unless there is a physical speech defect or something analogous), but many of those shepherded voters would have great difficulty identifying the city or even state where they live, much less be able to identify the president or name the two major political parties. In at least some cases I believe they are allowed to be accompanied into the voting booth by their shepherds.
Since qualified voters should not be disenfranchised and reasonable people will disagree over the definition of “qualified,” this is a difficult problem. But I am convinced it is a problem.
Do not misunderstand. I am not claiming that Democrats win because of all the votes they receive from mentally impaired voters (especially because I recognize that at times I also succumb to the belief that all Democratic voters suffer from an inability to see the reality that I see), but I think the numbers of these voters is large enough to constitute a very real problem.
