Virginia election exposes key weakness for GOP, tea party

 

Ken Cuccinelli’s impending loss in the Virginia governor’s race today to a weak Democratic candidate, the affable Terry McAuliffe, has exposed a major problem on the campaign trail for the deeply divided Republicans as we head into 2014.

The GOP has virtually no campaign surrogates, except maybe Paul Ryan, who can go into a state or congressional district and receive applause from the entire audience. The tea party types would love to see Ted Cruz or Rand Paul or Mike Lee campaigning for the Republican candidate in a general election. The establishment Republicans would be happy with Chris Christie or Jeb Bush or even John McCain.

But each of these guys are divisive within the GOP ranks – a magnet for disdain either from the segment on the right or the group closer to the center -- and would hold down the crowd size at any campaign rally. They would dampen enthusiasm for the candidate. They might even draw some boos from a portion of the crowd.

That was a key problem faced by Cuccinelli, a tea party favorite, in his very winnable race.
James Hohmann of Politico points out that McAuliffe has had President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and Hillary and Bill Clinton hit the trail for him.
Cuccinelli’s big-name supporters appearing at campaign events were Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, Bobby Jindal and Ron Paul.

What a mismatch.

“The striking contrast in surrogates in the home stretch of the Virginia governor’s race is another reminder of the GOP’s larger leadership vacuum and the civil war for the soul of a party still reeling from last year’s thrashing,” Hohmann wrote. “Simply put, the party lacks a single unifying figure who appeals to every wing of the party, let alone matches the star power of the Clinton-Obama tandem.”

Of course, it doesn’t help that Cuccinelli, the state’s attorney general, was previously associated with right-wing positions such as mandatory vaginal probes for women contemplating an abortion.

It also doesn’t help that the government shutdown was highly unpopular in Virginia.
Worse yet, Cuccinelli is associated with a party that has, in the space of one year, thoroughly failed in its post-2012 election reassessment which called for courting female and minority voters and expressing more tolerance for gays.
A new poll found that only 23 percent of Republicans said it would be a good thing if Congress had more women (and wasn’t dominated by old, rich white guys). In fact, two-thirds in the GOP said the issue didn’t really matter to them.

And then we have the ENDA debate in Congress on legislation to bar people from being fired from their job because they’re gay or their boss thinks they’re gay. Sounds pretty basic. But not when the tea party and ultraconservatives like Cuccinelli are pulling your party members to the right.

A spokesman for John Boehner said the speaker would oppose the bill because it will "increase frivolous litigation and cost American jobs." Much like the poll cited above, it sounds like Boehner and the GOP want to protect jobs for heterosexuals but he’s not much interested in preserving employment for the LGBT folks.

Instead of choosing a path toward winning elections, the 2013 version of the Republican Party, the right-wing base, dismissed former President George W. Bush as “a squish.”

But that’s the kind of talk that turns off independent and moderate voters. As he goes down in flames, Cuccinelli has made some bold statements about the stakes in the Virginia election that certainly made the national party leaders cringe.
“Virginia once again has an opportunity … to show the country that conservatism isn’t dead,” he has said. He also claimed that today’s vote in the commonwealth is a referendum on Obamacare, with Republicans sending a message by handing him a victory.

The media, of course, will portray the outcome as a repudiation of those statements.

Yet, I doubt that a parade of semi-popular surrogates, plus an embrace from the tea party, and a heaping helping of Cuccinelli’s brand of politics could possibly lead to the conclusion that the Virginia election shows that people truly do like what they see in Obamacare.