Why Creigh Deeds Lost Virginia

With enough precincts reporting to make it official, Virginia Democratic candidate Creigh Deeds was handed a defeat Tuesday night, having lost his bid for governor by double digits. Of all the closely watched races of the day, it’s fair to say that the one in Virginia would have the most obvious outcome. Deeds trailed GOP opponent Bob McDonnell by an average of 10 points across several polls more than a week ago. Even after President Obama campaigned for him two weeks ago, the Democrat still couldn’t recover.

Pundits have tried for weeks to tie the Deeds-McDonnell race to a larger national significance, specifically a coast-to-coast referendum on President Obama’s first year since his election. And understandably so—editors and TV producers like it when you can turn local news into national headlines. But that’s nothing compared to how much the Republican Party, which won two other state offices in Virginia on Tuesday, wanted to frame McDonnell’s win as a public, national rebuke of Obama.

It might be good for ad sales and partisan politics, but it’s not the most accurate way to interpret McDonnell’s win.

The proof is in Virginia's turnout. Exactly a year ago, an impressively high two thirds of all eligible Virginians voted, a slim majority of whom (52 percent) swung for Obama. The number dropped by double digits this week, which by itself cripples comparisons between the two races. But where the numbers really skew are in the demographics. A year ago, young voters, who usually vote Democratic, were 20 percent of the electorate; today the number was barely half. Among people over 60, who tend to lean conservative, the number doubled from 11 to 21 percent from last year. So really, it’s not exactly the case that the same voters from last year changed their mind after taking Obama for a test drive.

In trying to figure out where Deeds went wrong, it’s a mistake not to look at Deeds himself. Even in a state lightly tinted blue and with several photo ops with a still-popular president, Deeds slipped in recent weeks. For one, he overplayed his hand on a misogynistic-sounding master’s thesis that McDonnell wrote almost 30 years ago, making it one of the central messages of his campaign, and a fairly hollow one at that. He also had several public slips, including a flip-flop on a question about taxes and an embarrassing performance at one of his big debates with McDonnell in Fairfax, Virginia. As Election Day drew closer, he waffled on how much help he wanted from Obama, wary of associating with a president who he figured undecided voters might be turning off to. When he realized he needed the help, his change of heart looked desperate, and by then the White House wasn’t exactly tripping over itself to help.

The postspin will be endless and, as always, inconclusive. But the race might have been out of Deeds’s hands from the get-go. There’s a rather mysterious historical trend in Virginia—a state that always elects its governors the year following presidential elections—that the executive mansion goes to the party that just lost the White House. Republicans won after both of Bill Clinton’s victories in the '90s and Democrats won after Bush 43’s wins in 2000 and 2004. All of which goes to show that the only certain thing that Deeds did win is a spot in a long line of candidates (he’s the ninth) unlucky enough to be playing for the wrong team.