Chris Christie Wins Traditional Blue State New Jersey

One of the most difficult tasks facing the Obama administration's communication team is to explain away the momentous shift in public perception which allowed Republican candidates to sweep two important gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia.

Bob McDonnell's victory against Creigh Deeds in Virginia was signaled weeks before the vote when President Obama abandoned his campaign trips to Virginia in support of Democratic candidate Deeds.
President Obama's political team decided that the New Jersey governor's race was too important to spend more time and money campaigning against a looming likely Deeds defeat in Virginia. That's the kind of political hardball the White House is playing these days with its friends. On the other hand,President Obama made several trips to New Jersey to appear at Corzine campaign rallies in spite of pressing geopolitical and domestic matters in Washington. The President's frequent appearances in New Jersey prompted one wag to joke that some New Jersey voters believed President Obama was on the ballot there.

White House insiders rationalized during the week preceding the vote that they recognized Deeds as a weak candidate and unlikely to attract independents. Virginia has a large number of voters who are registered Independent; that group voted substantially for Obama in Virginia during the presidential elections. An Associated Press after-the-vote survey reported that four of ten Virginia voters "said their view of Obama factored into their choice" in yesterday's elections. It does sound better for the president to put the poll results another way: 60 percent of voters said that Obama was not a factor in their decision.

However one interprets the facts, the task for the Obama communications team must be now to mitigate the potential damage to the 2010 congressional elections. One way of doing this is to enlist the aid of the President's supporters in the media. A CNN analysis by political editor Mark Preston is blunt in the headline: "Elections Not a Referendum on Obama."

The better part of the CNN "analysis" was that the economy, jobs, and taxes were high on the voter's agenda, and corruption factored in significantly too. But one has to think the moon is made of cream cheese to think voters do not, to some extent, associate the state's economies, jobs, taxation, and public corruption with the incumbent Obama administration. Yet, CNN cites these factors as "proof" that the Republican gubernatorial sweeps were not a "referendum on Obama." Apparently, five campaign visits to Corzine in New Jersey and the fact that the former Goldman-Sachs executive outspent winner Christie by 3 to 1 are insignificant but pesky facts which might cloud an otherwise brilliant "analysis."

The New York Times solved the problem of the Republican governor's race victories by a story focused on a special congressional election race in upstate New York. "Conservative Loses Upstate House Race in Blow to Right" somewhat describes what happened when unknown Conservative candidate Douglas Huffman magically appeared on the political scene. Bright but not photogenic or television friendly, virtually unknown candidate Huffman (think hiked up pants and plastic pocket pen holder) still managed to get 46 percent of the vote compared to the winner's 49 percent. Provoking even more hilarity, the Republican candidate withdrew from that race and endorsed the Democrat winner. Yet, the New York Times makes the case that the upstate New York vote (dateline Saranac, NY) was the number one issue in the hearts of Americans across the country. The reason: Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin both helped to introduce the Conservative Huffman into the public spotlight. The New York Times did not single out Fox News as yet another culprit.

In a separate story, the New York Times grudgingly conceded that the loss of the New Jersey and Virginia governor's races was a setback for President Obama. However, that news report cites exit polls by Edison Research in both Virginia and New Jersey which is supposed to show that "voters in both states remained strongly supportive of President Obama." Huh? Doesn't it stand to reason that, if voters were strongly supportive of President Obama, they would have responded to Obama's repeated state visits and entreaties to vote for the White House supported candidates Deeds and Corzine? Not if you subscribe to the new political math of a media which largely supports the President.

However, Democrat supporters of the President's policies have a daunting task in the months ahead when they must take in the possibility of a new paradigm. No doubt Emmanuel, Axelrod, Dunning, and Press Secretary Gibbs will continue to insist that the President's popularity is untarnished. More moderate Democrats are no doubt worried about the 2010 elections. The various versions of the Congressional health care bill have provisions which do not sit well with more moderate constituents, and neither does the unprecedented debt created by the plans create confidence in the dominant party.

Cap and Trade (or Cap and Tax, as Republicans call it), increasing taxes, bailouts, and the general immersion of government into affairs traditionally handled by the private sector have created a general unease even among centrists and moderates of both major parties.

Polls are funny things, and are best viewed as dependent variables. They are dependent mainly on the methodology employed. Polls sample a miniscule section of the population. Have you been polled? I've heard the results of thousands of polls and yet have never been handed a poll questionnaire.

Most polls quoted on this morning of the Republican victories do indeed show the result that the vote was not a repudiation of President Obama and his policies on the national level. But the voting itself is a poll, too, and as many people are fond of saying now, it's "the only poll that counts."

Sources: New York Times Online at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/nyregion/04district.html?hp; CNN online site at http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/11/04/election.analysis/