Kidd: The fundamentals in Virginia politics haven’t changed
At first glance, Virginia has flipped, big time. The Old Dominion was blue in 2008, and has been bright red since, with Republicans sweeping the 2009 state races and taking three of the six seats held by incumbent Democrats in the 2010 congressional midterms.
Not so fast, says Quentin Kidd, a political-science professor at Christopher Newport University and regular contributor to AugustaFreePress.com.
Kidd hesitated after ’08 to call Virginia blue, and he’s not jumping the gun to declare the Democratic Party of Virginia dead after 2010, either.
“The fundamentals of Virginia I don’t think have changed. I think for the last 10 or 15 or 20 years, maybe, VIrginia has been an increasingly competitive state where both parties battled it out over ideas and such. I think the part of the moving part that’s moved back and forth has been that moderate middle,” said Kidd in an interview with AugustaFreePress.com this week.
The moderate middle had been rewarding Democrats like Mark Warner, Tim Kaine and Jim Webb for their centrist, business-oriented approaches up until the 2009 elections, when Republicans, led by Bob McDonnell, seized the center of the political spectrum.
“If you just count seats, it looks like Democrats are where they were 10 years ago. But I think it’s worth noting that Bob McDonnell ran successfully as a Republican gubernatorial candidate as a business-oriented, no-nonsense, I’m-going-to-work-on-the-economy, I’m-not-going-to-deal-with-social-issues kind of candidate. And I think he found himself over there running not as an ideological Republican, but as a business-oriented Republican, in part because of the successes of the Democratic Party,” Kidd said.
Listen to the interview below.
Story by Chris Graham. Chris can be reached at freepress2@ntelos.net.
Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing
Howard Dean, Tim Kaine, Vince Lombardi, and a guy named Phil Bengston
Story by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
When the football team starts losing games, the fan base tends to start getting antsy, and when the losses compound into a losing season, you can start hearing calls for the coach’s head.
Politics isn’t unlike football in that respect, which brings us to the curious case of Tim Kaine, the former Virginia governor who was tapped by Barack Obama in January 2009 to head up the Democratic National Committee, a playoff team at the time, to borrow from the football analogy.
The coach that Kaine was replacing was former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who pulled himself up from having been the frontrunner who couldn’t in the 2004 Democratic Party presidential nomination race to basically being the man responsible for rebuilding the DNC from the ashes of two stinging White House defeats on the wings of his controversial 50-state strategy. In the process Dean established himself as a sort of Vince Lombardi of the Democratic Party, the party’s triumphs in the 2006 midterms and the 2008 Obama win in the presidential race being his back-to-back Super Bowls. Read more
Democrats: Where do you go from here?
Story by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
You talk to one Democrat, and the party definitely, no question, needs to restrategize toward the middle. The blowback from voters in Massachusetts is an obvious clear signal. The nation isn’t comfortable with the direction things had been headed on health care and the stimulus. Time to pull things back in for a while.
Talk to another Democrat, and that first Democrat is either an idiot or worse, a sellout. Exit polls in Massachusetts indicate that a strong majority of voters there like their state-level version of universal health care. The blowback was local, aimed at a poorly-run campaign on the part of the Democratic nominee, Martha Coakley.
Changing the course now will bring about a repeat of 1994, when Democrats threw in the towel on health-care reform and suffered at the polls in a historic GOP takeover of the House that November.
“There’s no profit in moving to the center,” said Robert Borosage, the co-director of the Washington, D.C.,-based Campaign for America’s Future, which bills itself as the “strategy center for the progressive movement.” Read more
Focus | The political calculus on health-care reform for Warner, Webb
Story by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
Virginia’s two United States senators, within hours of each other earlier this week, were headlining efforts in the Senate aimed at impacting the health-care reform whirlwind winding up on Capitol Hill this December.
Mark Warner was first out of the gate on Tuesday with the coalition of moderate Democrats that he cobbled together to back a series of amendments to the health-reform bill pushing work with the public and private sectors on cost containment. Jim Webb upped the ante with the announcement that he had joined a group of 19 senators – a bipartisan group because it includes four Republicans, most notably Arizona Sen. John McCain – backing another amendment that would allow for the importation of lower-priced, Food and Drug Administration-approved drugs from other approved countries. Read more
InDepth | First draft of history: How Bob won, how Creigh lost
This just in to the AFP newsroom – Bob McDonnell can now be projected the winner in the 2009 Virginia governor’s race.
OK, most people still have yet to vote, but the writing is on the wall, clearly, with the Republican leading Democrat Creigh Deeds by at least 10 points in the pre-election polls.
The polls tell more about where Virginia is politically right now than that we’re about to elect a Republican to lead state government for the first time in 12 years. Foremost, they tell us that we’re about to make this move even while President Barack Obama and Gov. Tim Kaine, both Democrats, maintain approval ratings among Virginians over 50 percent, with Kaine near 60 percent in some polls. Read more
AFP InDepth | What about downticket?
Bob McDonnell clearly appears to be pulling away from Creigh Deeds at the top of the ticket in Virginia’s state races. At first glance, Republican Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling and GOP attorney-general candidate Ken Cuccinelli would seem to be on their way to victories on Nov. 3 as well.
A poll conducted by Christopher Newport University puts a different look on the downticket races, and suggests that there’s room for Democratic lieutenant-governor candidate Jody Wagner and ticketmate Steve Shannon in the attorney-general race to pull off upsets on Election Day. Read more
Breaking down the Democratic primary
Christopher Newport University political scientist Quentin Kidd joins us on “The Chris Graham Show” to break down the June 9 Democratic Party gubernatorial primary race with a focus on how candidates Terry McAuliffe, Creigh Deeds and Brian Moran are running in Hampton Roads and thoughts on the expected voter turnout. Length: 10:39. Read more
