Five Big Takeaways From Election Results

From The Wall Street Journal:

Off-year elections are always picked through for harbingers of the bigger ones to come, and the races Tuesday night across dozens of cities and states offer a bigger trove than normal. One has to be cautious not to overstate the lessons, but here are some clear takeaways from Election Night 2013:

1)    Candidates really do matter. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is hardly a shoo-in to be the 2016 Republican presidential nominee, but his all-embracing, big-throated, unapologetic “I am who I am” style certainly offers the party a three-dimensional model for a GOP candidate who can wrap conservative policies in a personality that voters like. He racked up unusual vote tallies among Hispanics, African-Americans, women, and even among those calling themselves liberals. But a quick caveat: In exit polls, New Jersey voters still sided with Hillary Clinton over their governor in a hypothetical 2016 presidential race.

2)    Governors trump congressmen as compelling presidential hopefuls. Congress now teems with Republicans eyeing a White House run, including Sens. Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Rand Paul and Rep. Paul Ryan. But the governing narrative that drove Mr. Christie’s big win—taking on the teacher’s unions, healing the state after Sandy, mending the pension system—are the story lines that tend to grab national voters, particularly at a time when disgust for Washington hits all-time highs.

3)    Virginia is most emphatically a swing state tilting ever more to the Democratic column. The state’s governor-elect, veteran Democratic fund-raiser and New York-born Terry McAuliffe, was never seen as a particularly strong or compelling candidate. But he beat out Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli thanks almost entirely to support from the state’s swelling and increasingly diverse northern suburbs. With the attorney general’s race down to the wire, Democrats could still take all three of the statewide offices to go with the two Senate seats they already control. Not since Richard Nixon was president have the Democrats held all those perches. In the past two presidential elections, Virginia was the best bellwether for the national vote. The lesson from Tuesday night isn’t a good one for the national GOP.

4)    Obamacare will cast a far longer shadow than last month’s government shutdown. In Virginia, Mr. McAuliffe appeared to get a big lift in the polls in the wake of the federal government shutdown, which hit the state harder than most. But the race tightened noticeably down the stretch, as the nation’s attention—and the Cuccinelli campaign—focused on the woes surrounding the rollout of the Affordable Care Act. Exit polls suggest that unease over the health-care law helped drive a lot of wavering Republicans and independents into the Cuccinelli column in the final days. Touting the Mr. McAuliffe win, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee noted in a memo Wednesday how “Virginia has become an almost perfect predictor of national sentiment.” If so, and if the health-care rollout continues to stumble, that sentiment may not bode well for Democrats in 2014.

5)    Women decide elections. It’s become the ultimate truism in recent years, but the candidate who wins the women’s vote, wins the election. In Virginia, Mr. McAuliffe won in a tighter race than expected, but his margin among women—nine percentage points—was decisive. His edge among unmarried women, meanwhile, was eye-popping, at 42 points. In New Jersey, Mr. Christie won in a landslide against a female opponent, thanks in part to a 13-point edge among women voters.