There are some idiosyncrasies in the Virginia gubernatorial race that will complicate analysts’ ability to draw conclusions from the results and the exit polling. For starters, only 5% of Virginia Democrats think that Terry McAuliffe is too liberal, but fully 20% of Virginia Republicans think that Ken Cuccinelli is too conservative. Those are important numbers that do more than anything else to explain the likely result of the election. But, what would the numbers be in a race between Hillary Clinton and Chris Christie? I think they would be a lot different. You can throw any combination of prospective candidates into the mix (Biden vs. Jeb Bush, O’Malley vs. Rand Paul, Cuomo vs. Ted Cruz) and you’ll get different perceptions about how respectively liberal or conservative the candidate are. Candidates, and more importantly, perceptions of candidates, matter a lot. Chris Christie is a very socially conservative politician, but he isn’t trying to ban blow jobs in New Jersey. Many Republican consultants and strategists think that Christie is the perfect mix of social conservative and perceptual moderate. I agree that he’s pulled off that trick in New Jersey for now, but I think people need to take into account that New Jerseyans are not like other people.
In New Jersey, it’s a plus if you are confrontational and get up in people’s faces. It’s a plus if you won’t suffer idiots. And don’t discount that some of Christie’s most well-known tantrums have been thrown at Washington Republicans. Democrats in New Jersey give credit to Christie for throwing his arms around the president after SuperStorm Sandy, but they give him more credit for blasting John Boehner for delaying federal aid. Democrats might cringe a little when Christie berates a school teacher in public, but when he basically calls Rand Paul an idiot, he gets a lot of credit.
A lot of progressive analysts who aren’t from New Jersey think that Christie is popular with conservatives because he’s always on the attack. But that doesn’t explain why he’s popular with so many Jersey Democrats. Jersey Democrats are a lot like conservatives nationally, who like a combative style of politics.
Now, if you want to talk about how well Christie will sell in some place like Iowa, that’s an interesting question. Rudy Giuliani didn’t sell well in Iowa, and I don’t know if it was his chaotic personal life, his socially-moderate positions on the issues, his foreign New York affectation, or his combative style that presented the biggest problem for him. In general, Iowans are a polite and pacifistic people, but they also keep sending Rep. Steve King to Congress, and Sen. Chuck Grassley seems to grow more ornery with each passing year. So, there is certainly an appetite for combativeness in at least a wing of the Republican Party in Iowa. On the other hand, the Iowa GOP has been taken over by devotees of Ron and Rand Paul.
What I do know, because I’m from New Jersey and have lived in the Midwest and on the West Coast, is that the typical Jersey personality-type, which Chris Christie represents quite well, comes off as arrogant and impolite in other parts of the country. It would be a very tough sell in the Midwest in a general election, although it might not hurt him too badly in closed Republican primaries and caucuses.
If the polls are correct, tomorrow people will start trying to coronate Chris Christie as the 2016 GOP nominee for president. That will be premature. They’ll also contrast his victory with Cuccinelli’s defeat and argue that the Tea Party lost out to the Establishment. That will be closer to the truth, but it will be misleading. It will be misleading because Chris Christie is a very socially conservative guy.
The narrative will also create some problems for Christie, because the more the Establishment wraps its arms around him, the more suspect Christie will become with the conservative base. And we know how respectful and tactful Christie is to his critics…
As to Virginia, what we want to look at is how the different regions of the state vote, and then we can try to extrapolate from that how the results would translate in a full-turnout presidential election. That’s the important information because, as I’ve said, for Republicans, if you lose Virginia, you lose the presidency.
