Damage Assessment
Looking at Virginia.

By Ben Domenech.
November 7, 2001 5:00 p.m.

here are ways for Republicans to find bright spots even in the disaster of the Virginia election yesterday — including the victory of Attorney General-Elect Jerry Kilgore over Donald McEachin, a liberal ambulance-chasing lawyer, the advancement of the GOP's control in the House of Delegates, and the surprising wins of several local GOP candidates over entrenched Democrats.

The bright spots lose some of their luster, however, when you consider that they follow the GOP's total domination of the redistricting process this spring. This is the first election to be held after the 2000 redistricting, and it's probably the best deal that the Virginia GOP will ever get.

The worse story for Old Dominion Republicans is Mark Warner's single-handed resuscitation of the state's Democratic party. At the Richmond Marriott last night, many Democrats remarked that this was the biggest victory party they could remember in a long time — and for good reason. Warner and the Democratic party just shot the moon, coming back from the brink of political death to win the game.

Warner's victory rolled back a decade of Republican dominance at the ballot box, and provided the coattails for a far-left candidate, former Richmond Mayor Tim Kaine, to squeak into the lieutenant governor's seat with a 50-48% victory. The Warner win was bolstered by lopsided Democratic margins in Arlington (68-30%), Alexandria (68-31%), Norfolk (74-25%), and Richmond (81-17%), which doubtless gave Kaine the edge he needed to pull off a 60,000-vote victory. Even these skewed numbers didn't give Warner the votes he needed, though, to pull off the 53% victory he'd predicted. Still, Warner has now become the first Democratic governor to win since 1989, and the first Democrat to win statewide since 1994.

There are some who will try to pin the blame for this loss on Mark Earley. There are already some commentators, whose primary source for information on the race was the always balanced reportage of the Washington Post, who claim that Earley never ran a powerful grassroots campaign, or seized on a single issue that would put him over the top, that he was a lackluster candidate who never excited his base.

Not surprisingly, most of the folks who offer these wise opinions are the same ones who think of Charlottesville as Southwest Virginia, and couldn't tell you who Richard Obenshain was if he came up and kicked them in the shin.

These commentators are awfully forgetful. They forget that it was Earley, not Gilmore, who was the standard bearer for party conservatives and received the most votes in the 1997 GOP sweep. They forget that it was Gilmore, not Earley, who mismanaged his own party so terribly this year that only one of the GOP state senators never voted against his proposals. They forget that while Warner outspent Earley by a 2-1 margin, Earley actually spent less money than Gilmore in 1997 — and Gilmore was only running against a car dealer, not a tech multimillionaire. They forget that while Warner's $17 million-plus TV ad campaign launched in August, Earley was so financially strapped that he was unable to respond in kind until October. They forget that Earley's own party chairman — Gilmore — actually conceded the race on Sunday in an interview with the Post.

There were quite a few bright spots in the Virginia elections. Unfortunately for Old Dominion Republicans, none of them were for Mark Earley.