![Ken Cuccinelli fell short last night in his bid to become Governor of Virginia. Is the GOP mature enough to accept defeat and find a new way forward? [Credit: Huffington Post]](https://i0.wp.com/www.dougsbriefcase.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Credit-Huff-Post.jpg)
Ken Cuccinelli fell short last night in his bid to become Governor of Virginia. Is the GOP mature enough to accept defeat and find a new way forward? [Credit: Huffington Post]
To understand just how unimpressive McAuliffe’s election was, consider two things: the polls and the cash. McAuliffe outspent his GOP opponent, Ken Cuccinelli, $34 million to $18 million. That’s an enormous advantage that McAuliffe deployed to run non-stop ads beginning last summer that accused Cuccinelli of advancing a bill to ban birth control, a charge rejected by the Washington Post’s fact-checker, despite that publication’s endorsement of McAuliffe. Distorted but highly effective: McAuliffe bested Cuccinelli among women, 51–42.
Then there were the polls. Virtually every voter survey taken prior to the election had McAuliffe winning in a rout. The Washington Post had McAuliffe ahead, 51–39. The Real Clear Politics average of the seven most recent polls had McAuliffe up by 6.7 points. Pollsters badly misread this race. McAuliffe pulled less than 48% of the vote. He won by just over 2 points in an election where a third-party libertarian candidate attracted a 6.5 percent share.
McAuliffe had every advantage through the middle of last month – money, a misleading message calculated to terrify and enrage women voters, and a government shutdown that affected the hundreds of thousands of federal workers and contractors who live in Northern Virginia. Calling McAuliffe’s narrow win “the surprise election of the night,” Politico this morning asked, “How the heck did that happen?”
The number one reason: Obamacare.
Don’t take Politico’s word for it. Ask the President and his handlers. In a campaign swing for McAuliffe two days before the election, the President avoided mentioning his signature domestic policy achievement, preferring instead to talk about the recent government shutdown, which had long since vanished from the news cycle, having been supplanted by an endless succession of Obamacare failings.
Exit polls confirm the wisdom of that decision. Only a small plurality of voters (48%-45%) said that Congressional Republicans were more to blame than President Obama for the shutdown. But 88% of those who faulted the GOP backed McAuliffe. The health care law was quite another matter. Voters opposed that, 53–46. McAuliffe captured only 11 percent of Obamacare opponents, with Cuccinelli and Robert Sarvis, the Libertarian candidate, sharing the remaining 89 percent.
How should the GOP respond? First, Republicans should admit that this was a defeat. Beating the spread may be profitable in Las Vegas, but elections are black and white. Despite underperforming, Terry McAuliffe is Virginia’s new Governor. Second, they should admit that it was a devastating defeat. Virginia once was a reliably Republican state. No longer. The party’s brief revival after the 2009 elections has ended. Democrats now hold both US Senate seats and two of the three top offices in the Commonwealth. They may well prevail in the Attorney General race as well, once all the ballots have been counted and, probably, recounted. McAuliffe ran, in part, to help deliver the state Hillary in 2016, and that must now be considered the most likely outcome. Without Virginia, the road to the White House would be steeper, more treacherous and, perhaps, impassable for the 2016 GOP standard-bearer.
Third, they should not blame each other. Cuccinelli backers are faulting the GOP establishment for not pouring more money into Virginia. National Republicans were as oblivious as professional pollsters to McAuliffe’s crumbling advantage. Perhaps if they had provided Cuccinelli with more resources, he wouldn’t have been carpet-bombed by negative ads. But by the time the corrosive effects of Obamacare started to register, virtually all the airtime had already been purchased. There was little opportunity for a late ad blitz.
Fourth, they should recognize that in politics, no defeat – and no victory – is final. The most important election is the next one, not the one that just occurred. And it is here that their advantage lies.
To this point, Republicans have proven remarkably incapable of channeling popular disapproval of the health care law into successful legislative strategy. They have wasted the past 3–1/2 years on proposals ranging from the symbolic to the bizarre – a succession of meaningless House votes on repealing the law, which the Senate could safely ignore, followed by the disastrous decision to shut the government down, which the Senate was only too happy to accommodate. That last decision was especially damaging to Cuccinelli. One wonders how yesterday’s election might have turned out had voters in Alexandria, Arlington, and Fairfax counties not just had their paychecks delayed by a couple of weeks.
But for all the GOP missteps, Obamacare has never been more unpopular and Democrats have never been more squeamish about it. While their political flaks today are attacking Chris Christie and touting their victory in Virginia as decisive and historic, Democrats who face election in 2014 are more worried than before about Obamacare – and potentially more willing to vote with Republicans to change it.
Democrats concerned about their electoral prospects aren’t buying happy talk from the Administration about fixing the website. Nor are they satisfied with the President’s line that cancelling coverage for millions of people was an act of wisdom and compassion on behalf of the “underinsured.” The law’s most fervent Congressional supporters, like Barbara Mikulski (D‑MD), are warning of a “crisis of confidence” and worry aloud about the exchanges collapsing under the weight of older and sicker enrollees. Others who are less attached to the law voice support for repealing the tax penalty on people who choose not to enroll
But while some Democrats are prepared to change critical provisions of the health care law, they would not vote to repeal it. Instead of giving these nervous Democrats a pass by offering up nonviable proposals, Republicans should try something that might make a difference – work privately with Congressional Democrats to fashion legislation that might stand a chance of becoming law. Such a package would, among other things, delay or repeal the individual mandate, reinstate coverage that the government has required insurers to cancel, repeal the assessment on group health plans and the $10 billion it provides to insurers that sell through the exchanges, unravel other corporate welfare provisions that help those insurers maximize profits and shield them against losses, and protect people with pre-existing medical conditions who currently are enrolled in high-risk pools from suffering lapses in coverage as a result of Obamacare’s bungled implementation.
Small numbers of Democrats already have announced support for some of those provisions and some have introduced bills to that end. After McAuliffe’s near-death experience, their ranks will grow. Republicans should embrace them, not repulse them with proposals that stand no chance of passage. Should bipartisan support for more targeted and politically palatable proposals emerge, Democratic leaders will be put in a difficult position – allow those bills to move forward or stand with the President in quashing them. The former will do political damage to a President who does not have to face voters; the latter will damage vulnerable Members who do. Republicans can’t make that choice for Harry Reid (D‑NV), but they can make the choice a difficult one.
The Cuccinelli era is over. It was an era characterized by grand gestures, dramatic confrontations, quixotic quests and, invariably, failure. Congressional Republicans, at Cuccinelli’s urging, held off on sensible proposals like repealing the individual mandate that might have kept insurers from offering coverage through the exchanges, arguing that such a bill would hurt his chances before the Supreme Court. He lost anyway. Cuccinelli enthusiasts backed the idea of forcing a government shutdown that helped sink his candidacy and render a once triumphant Virginia Republican party defeated, divided and demoralized.
Cuccinelli is a good man and a dreadful strategist. The GOP should take this opportunity to turn away from ruinous schemes and shake off its recent habit of dismissing effective strategies as ideologically impure. Ideology shapes opinion; strategy gets results.
It is not too late to achieve results. Yet.