Democrats threw Republicans a curveball in Virginia last month when they nominated state Sen. Creigh Deeds for governor. A folksy conservative from the state's rural reaches, Deeds upset expectations and forced GOP strategists to draft a new strategy for this fall's campaign.
For Republicans, it could be a blessing in disguise.
There are about two dozen House Democrats and four Senate Democrats who hold GOP-friendly seats in areas with a disproportionate number of rural voters. As they devise a plan for 2010, national GOP strategists are watching Virginia closely to figure out how to beat these rural, conservative Dems.
"I'm always telling Republicans not to overblow this sense of doom and gloom. A lot of what happened in 2008 was just a reaction to Bush." -- Tom Davis
Campaigning for Bob McDonnell in Richmond recently, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, the new Republican Governors Association chair, framed the race as a possible repeat of the state's 1993 contest, when Republican George Allen's victory foreshadowed the "Republican Revolution" one year later. "The left has got a huge stake in this election," he said. "But I believe we can win here just like we did when George Allen got elected."
By far the most effective way for Republicans to return to power is to regain the upper hand in the suburbs -- in Virginia and across the country -- a risky strategy that could alienate their rural base. McDonnell, whose base includes Virginia's two biggest suburbs (Fairfax County and Virginia Beach), needs to establish himself as the favored candidate of those vote-rich regions while he paints Deeds as an outsider.
"Deeds, like many of these rural Democrats, is not particularly good on TV. These guys are rural for a reason. They grew up in rural areas. They have rural twangs and mannerisms," the University of Virginia's Larry Sabato said recently. "The vast majority of voters, in Virginia and elsewhere, are in suburbs, and they don't always identify with rural interests."
Democrats have regained power, in Washington and across the country, by cobbling together a coalition of young voters, Hispanics and other ethnic minorities, and highly educated whites in growing metropolitan areas. Meanwhile, the coalition that previously helped Republicans gain and hold on to power is poised to shrink over time: older, working-class and rural white voters, increasingly concentrated in the Deep South, the Great Plains and Appalachia, where John McCain actually performed better in 2008 than George W. Bush had four years earlier. Most notably, Democrats over the past four years have made huge gains in the suburbs and among the moderate, college-educated voters who live there. Barack Obama won 50 percent of suburban voters, 3 points higher than John Kerry in 2004 and the most by a Democrat since exit polling began in 1972.
Obama's performance in the suburbs helped him secure victories in battleground states like Ohio, Florida, Indiana, North Carolina and Virginia. As recently as 2004, Republicans dominated those states largely by running up big wins in suburban areas.
To carry the suburbs again, GOP insiders say, Republicans need to appeal to a wide swath of demographic groups -- on a variety of issues. Tom Davis, a former GOP congressman from Northern Virginia who ran the National Republican Campaign Committee from 1998 to 2002, said Republicans should follow McDonnell's model of trying to run against Deeds from different sides of the ideological spectrum. "Republicans make a mistake by trying to run to the right of moderate-to-conservative Democrats," Davis said. "We've got to run to the right and the left of these people. Republicans can outflank them on issues that are important to suburban voters."
But Davis draws another important parallel between the Virginia and national political landscapes. For most of the past 20 years, both Virginia and the country occupied a center-right position on the political spectrum -- up until the past four years, when both swung to the left. But, Davis said, that swing was largely in response to voters' opposition to Bush. With Bush no longer in the White House, he added, Republicans are better positioned than they realize to make gains.
"I'm always telling Republicans not to overblow this sense of doom and gloom," he said. "A lot of what happened in 2008 was just a reaction to Bush."
Still, regardless of how McDonnell performs this fall, don't read too much into it. According to Sabato, "In the eleven sets of New Jersey-Virginia contests from 1965 to 2005, there has been a clear, compelling connection between the off-off year outcome and the following year's midterm election pattern exactly twice. In 1993 GOP victories in the Garden State and the Old Dominion heralded the Republican landslide of 1994, and in 2005 twin Democratic triumphs augured the waning of the Bush era and the Democrats' capture of Congress in 2006."
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