Larry Sabato has some interesting statistics from Tuesday's election that tell us a lot about what happened:...In Virginia, one result of absentee Democrats was the lowest voter turnout for a gubernatorial election in the state's modern two-party history (1969 to 2009). The 2009 turnout of 39.8 percent of the registered voters was the lowest in forty years. Even with all the population growth since 2005, the absolute voter turnout in 2009 (1.97 million) fell below that of four years ago (2.0 million). And the electorate was barely more than half that of 2008 (3.7 million). Astounding.In sum:
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Does anybody doubt African-Americans weren't engaged in this week's elections? Here's some proof for remaining doubters, in a sampling of heavily black precincts around Virginia. Even though Creigh Deeds received a larger percentage of the black vote (93 percent) than the previous Democratic gubernatorial nominee, Tim Kaine, in 2005 (90 percent), the turnout was miserable for Deeds--more than 10 full percentage points lower. He received many fewer African-American votes than Kaine, despite near-unanimous backing from blacks who cast a ballot.
Far too few of the "Obama voters" who came out last year turned out this year for Creigh Deeds. Overall, we went from 3.7 million votes last November to just 1.97 million votes this November. Now, obviously, there's always going to be a dropoff from a presidential year to a gubernatorial year in Virginia, but a decline of 1.7 million voters? In contrast, the dropoff from 2004 (3.2 million votes; 1.7 million for Bush, 1.5 milion for Kerry) to 2005 (2.0 million votes; 1.0 million for Kaine, 0.9 million for Kilgore) was just 1.2 million votes, or 500,000 fewer than the 2008-2009 dropoff. Think about this for a second: Creigh Deeds lost by 345,000 votes on Tuesday. That's sounds like a lot, and it is a lot. On the other hand, it's just 20% of the 1.7 million voters who came out last year but not this year.
Let's look at the numbers from another angle, more "granular" so to speak: last November, Barack Obama received 2.0 million votes and John McCain received 1.7 million votes. This November, Creigh Deeds received 0.8 million votes and Bob McDonnell received 1.2 million votes. Which means that Deeds "underperformed" Obama by 1.2 million votes, while McDonnell "underperformed" McCain by only 0.5 million votes. The difference between those two "underperformances": 700,000 votes, or more than twice the total that Creigh lost by. Compare that to 2005, when Tim Kaine got 0.5 million fewer votes than John Kerry, while Jerry Kilgore got 0.8 million fewer votes than George W. Bush. That's a 0.3 million vote advantage righ there for Tim Kaine over Jerry Kilgore. Guess who won that election? :)
Given all these numbers, the analysis of Tuesday's debacle becomes quite simple. If Creigh Deeds had managed to motivate Obama/Biden voters at the same rate as Bob McDonnell managed to motivate McCain/Palin voters, he would have won. Easily. Heck, even if he had only managed to motivate them at half the rate McDonnell did, he still would have won. Instead, the geniuses - David Petts, Joe Abbey, Monica and David Dixon, Susan Swecker - at the Deeds campaign decided it was smarter to run away from the very things that got those "Obama voters" out to the polls last year. As if that's not bad enough, the Deeds' geniuses decided to spend way too much time tooling around the mirage known as "Deeds Country" (I say "mirage" because Deeds got absolutely wiped out there on Tuesday) instead of focusing on African American voters and the "urban crescent" more broadly. This is almost criminal negligence, utterly mind boggling in its stupidity. And yeah, I'm real sorry Deeds diehards, but as Jim Webb says, "the fish rots from the head down," so Creigh Deeds is ultimately responsible for this. He hired those folks, let them "plan their work and work their plan." And boy, did they ever. Ugh. Plus, Deeds is the one who said he's not an "Obama Democrat."
Dumb. Dumber. Dumberest.
