McDonnell v. Deeds: Virginia Reveals Whether it is a Blue, Red, or Purple State

"McDonnell is not only going to win, he's going to win by a landslide," predicted University of Virginia political science professor Larry J. Sabato. "He's going to pull his entire ticket to victory. It's a big Republican year in Virginia."

Deeds and McDonnell both pitched camp in Richmond this morning with McDonnell setting up his party at a plush downtown hotel while Deeds was bivouacking on Richmond's outskirts, symbolism that Real Clear Politics correspondent Kyle Trygstad found impossible to resist.

If that imagery turns out to be foreshadowing, Republicans nationwide will be looking to the McDonnell campaign for clues on how to revive, in the new buzzword in politics, the GOP "brand." They will note that the nominee is a good-looking and charismatic candidate who never seemed to make even the slightest verbal gaffe. They will notice that McDonnell offset this semantic caution with enough concrete proposals to improve the state's fiscal outlook -- but without raising taxes -- that made it hard to dismiss him as an empty suit. (Sample idea: privatize the state's liquor stores).

Republicans will chew on the fact that McDonnell kept his distance from Sarah Palin, ran advertisements in Democratic counties that mentioned his bipartisanship, but not his political party, and that he actively courted the state's growing Asian community while successfully wooing high-profile African American supporters.

McDonnell also withstood a barrage of withering and quite personal attacks from Deeds, most of them centering on two themes: his political proximity to Pat Robertson and a master's thesis McDonnell wrote while attending a Robertson-founded college two decades ago in which the future attorney general expressed archaic notions of sexuality and seemed to question the utility to society of women in the workplace.

McDonnell's lead in the polls initially declined in the face of this onslaught, but he righted his campaign by simultaneously answering Deeds' attacks without letting his message be completely hijacked.

His answer was, essentially, that 20 years is a long time and that he wouldn't use the same kind of language today, and that his daughter was a military officer who oversaw two dozen (male) soldiers in Iraq, which made him quite proud.

On policy, McDonnell faithfully adhered to Republican orthodoxy on taxes, while stressing his record of working with Democrats in Richmond. All in all, it was a potent formula – maintaining control of the message while rebuffing attacks is the sweet spot in politics. Those who have pulled it off include Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama.

For his part, Deeds entered the last days of the campaign trying to recreate the Democrats' 2008 magic – specifically hoping for a jump-start in the form of President Obama, who campaigned for him and who was the featured star of the last-minute Deeds ads.

A state senator from a central Virginia district stretching from the college town of Charlottesville to the Virginia border, Deeds won the gubernatorial nomination in a primary that included spirited challenges from Brian Moran, a former state legislator from Northern Virginia, and Terry McAuliffe, a prominent Clinton fundraiser and former Democratic National Committee chairman.

Deeds was endorsed strongly by The Washington Post and earned a surprisingly easy victory in the primary on the strength of a tactical decision by liberal Democrats and party activists attracted less by Deeds' low-key personality or his centrist legislative record than by their conviction that he was the strongest general election candidate against McDonnell.

When the general election campaign began, Deeds campaigned as though he believed he had a strong wind at this back. A popular president was in the White House and he faced an opponent he'd run against four years earlier in a race that ended in a virtual dead heat. In addition, Gov. Tim Kaine was running the Democratic National Committee, and Deeds' state has recently been trending toward his party after years of being reliably Republican.

All those perceived advantages proved illusionary.

First of all, Virginia's "presidential jinx" makes it tough for the gubernatorial candidate of the president's party, no matter how popular the president is with the American people – or even Virginians, for that matter. A governor from the president's party hasn't won since 1977.

Second, yes it is true that Deeds had run against McDonnell four years ago, and come within 323 votes out of 2 million cast. But it was also true that McDonnell was the victor, and the job he won in that razor-thin contest was attorney general, a traditional stepping stone in Virginia politics, while Deeds headed back to the relative anonymity of the state Senate.

Third, the presence of Kaine at the DNC may have been a handicap, not an advantage. Yes, Kaine steered money Deeds' way, but any party chief would have done the same. And though no coherent explanation has emerged for why this was the case, Kaine and Deeds seem from the outside to have been commandeered by the DNC instead of the other way around. Deeds not only ran a relentlessly negative campaign, but in Northern Virginia it was also a traditionally liberal one that would have made more sense in California or New York than in Virginia. The Northern Virginia suburbs are more liberal than the rest of the state, true, but it's hard to compartmentalize a campaign in that fashion these days.

Finally, an honest evaluation of Virginia's recent statewide elections simply does not lead to the conclusion that the state is Democratic. John Warner won by assiduously courting moderates; Jim Webb won with heavy support in college towns after his opponent directed a seeming ethnic slur at a University of Virginia student. Kaine won on Warner's coattails; Obama won a historic, heavy-turnout election that galvanized young people and African-Americans, liberals, and even many independents. It was a coalition that was always going to be hard to replicate.