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Contrarian Virginia does it again

November 5, 2009 —

The Commonwealth of Virginia has a habit of going against the grain.  When the nation picks a president, the state selects a governor from the opposite party the next year, or so the evidence seems to indicate.

Four years ago, Virginia voters picked Democrat Tim Kaine over state Attorney General Jerry Kilgore, merely a year after Republican George W. Bush won reelection.  In 2001, Democrat businessman Mark Warner was the winner, a year after the contentious 2000 election that produced a Bush victory.

In the 1990s, while Democrat Bill Clinton was winning presidential elections, Republicans were dominating the statehouse in Virginia.  Just as the GOP's Congressman George Allen Jr. won his 1993 gubernatorial election after Clinton won his first term, so too did Republican state Attorney General Jim Gilmore a year after President Clinton's reelection in 1996, beating Lt. Governor Don Beyer.

Remember when African-American L. Douglas Wilder made history by upending Republican J. Marshall Coleman?  That occurred in 1989, a year after the elder George H. W. Bush kept the presidency in Republican hands.  And while Republican Ronald Reagan was winning his races by wide margins in the 1980s, Democrats scored victories in Virginia governor races.  First it was Democrat Chuck Robb, President Lyndon Baines Johnson's son-in-law, who won in 1981.  Then in 1985, it was Gerald L. Baliles who kept the Virginia Governor in the Democratic Party column.  And a year after Democrat Jimmy Carter was swept into the White House, Republican John N. Dalton was marching into Richmond's State Capitol.

By now, you're probably beginning to wonder if there's something funny in the Tidewater.  But there have been a few exceptions.  During Republican Richard M. Nixon's two successful elections, Republicans won both governor races (thanks to A. Linwood Holton Jr. and Mills E. Godwin), though it should be noted that one of them (Godwin) was a former Democratic Party governor.

During the Democratic Party dominance of the 1960s, Democrats also owned Virginia.  But they also did so in the 1950s, bucking the national trend that put Dwight D. Eisenhower in the White House in Washington, D.C.  That's a stunning record of defying the national trend for more than half the century.

So why does this matter?  Four years ago, Kaine's victory over Kilgore was seen as the harbinger of a Democratic Party comeback.  If a liberal Catholic could win in a Southern "red" state, anything was possible.  Sure enough, Democrats went on to dominate the mid-term elections in 2006 and the presidential election of 2008.  Whereas Republicans ran the White House, the Senate, the House of Representatives, and a majority of governor's mansions in 2004, Democrats now control all four.  Not only was he chosen to deliver the Democratic Party rebuttal to Bush's State of the Union address in 2006, but Obama also nearly picked Kaine as his running mate last year, according to CNN.

 Sure, the Democratic Party plan was to reap Obama's coattails from last year.  But as a story on realclearpolitic.com makes clear, he wasn't the only chief executive to enter the race. Democrat Creigh Deeds ran against two candidates: Republican Bob McDonnell and the unpopular former President George W. Bush.

In a speech at George Mason University, Deeds linked his opponent to the policies of George W. Bush, a Republican president who left office with historically low approval ratings.

"Just recently he said he believes President Bush did a good job and he created -- and I'm quoting here -- an economic revival in America," Deeds said.  But McDonnell adopted the axiom of former Democratic Party House Speaker Thomas "Tip" O'Neill, who once claimed "All politics is local."  While Deeds made the case for Obama vs. Bush, McDonnell made the case for solving traffic congestion and sprawl.

Clearly, the Democrats tried to make the Virginia race reflect the national trend, given the success of Obama in 2008 nationally and in the state, the weakness of the Republican Party throughout the country, and the low regard most voters have for the former President, a Republican.  But that backfired for the Democrats.  Not only did McDonnell prevail in 2009, but the race could help rehabilitate the GOP the way a Democratic Party victory in 2005 paved the way for the Democratic Party resurgence.