Election Forecast: Split Tickets Benefit Dems
Regarding his recent predictions for next week's election, I believe FF Contributor John Vecchione is right about Virginia. Republicans will sweep the executive offices. Creigh Deeds is a terrible candidate who has depressed -- in both senses of the word -- the Democratic base. He needed to embrace Obama in order to gin up African-American voters (and receive the crucial endorsement of Richmond mayor Doug Wilder), and also to excite first-time voters who backed Obama, and Obama's liberal, college-educated professional supporters in Northern Virginia. He did none of these things. He will lose by at least 10%.
In New Jersey, blue pedigree wins out. Here it is Republican Chris Christie who is the terrible candidate -- a U.S. attorney who himself is not entirely free of allegations of corruption (a bad combination, and one which destroyed his chances to run on the obvious - and obviously needed - platform that he would clean up state government). Christie is without any message or public policy solutions save for, "I'm not Jon Corzine." If the GOP had nominated third party candidate Chris Daggett, he would have won in a walk - he's creative, thoughtful, moderate, and corruption free. But Corzine slips in because Christie is terrible, Daggett takes votes from him, and the Democratic infrastructure of the state -- public sector unions and city governments -- will kick in to give Corzine a close win.
In New York's 23rd congressional district, Democratic candidate Bill Owens takes his 40% to the bank and wins one-half of a term in the U.S. Congress. I assume the GOP will settle on a single candidate next cycle and defeat him -- or perhaps the district will disappear, as Vecchione suggests. By the way, it should be noted that, as Andrew Gelman has observed in an FF posting, Scozzafava may be left leaning by national Republican standards, but she is not so by New York state Republican standards -- she's right in the middle of the pack, according to her state legislative record. New York -- even upstate New York -- isn't Utah or Georgia.