Off-Year Election Offers Clues to 2014 and Beyond

From The Wall Street Journal:

Tuesday's elections touched just a scattering of places—New Jersey and Virginia, to name a few. But they cast nationwide ripples, stirring debate in both parties over what clues they provided about the forces that will shape next year's midterm elections.

Here are five takeaways from Election Week 2013:

Both parties have big demographic problems.

Gov. Chris Christie's sweeping re-election victory in New Jersey offered a case study for how a Republican can buck his party's national trend and garner strong support among Hispanics, women and African-Americans. But in Virginia,—the best electoral mirror for the whole of the country these days, both parties got a glimpse of their emerging vulnerabilities.

 

Democrat Terry McAuliffe won the governor's race by nine percentage points among women and 82 points among blacks, highlighting a weakness the GOP has wrestled with nationally. But he also got the vote of just 36% of all whites, who still make up 72% of Virginia's electorate,—further evidence of a slippage in support for Democrats among white voters.

 

Even more telling, the Democratic candidate won just 45% of voters under 30, compared to 40% won by the Republican. (A third-party candidate carried the rest.) Mr. McAuliffe's share was down sharply from the 61% of younger voters that President Barack Obama carried in the state last year.

 

Women are political kingmakers.

 

Virginia on Tuesday offered another vivid illustration of how women voters decide elections, pure and simple.

 

Ken Cuccinelli, the GOP candidate for governor, won among men by three percentage points. But women voters were more numerous, and they sided decisively with Mr. McAuliffe. That explains why the vast bulk of Democratic attack ads hammered on Mr. Cuccinelli's opposition to abortion rights and gun control, ads particularly honed to move women voters.

 

But here's a big twist: Mr. McAuliffe owed his victory above all to unmarried women, who sided with him by a remarkable 42 percentage points. If they had voted in line with married women, Mr. Cuccinelli would have taken Virginia by seven percentage points, rather than losing it by two points.

 

Democrats are getting jittery over Obamacare.

 

Debate swirled for days over whether late-breaking anger over the Affordable Care Act is what made the Virginia governor's race,—thought to be an easy coast for the Democrat,—so unexpectedly close in the end.

 

Evidence is mixed, but Democrats facing re-election next year looked at the race as another reason to worry about their congressional challenges in 2014. Sixteen Senate Democrats streamed to the White House the next day to vent over the law, a day before Mr. Obama issued his own televised mea culpa for having promised that all Americans could keep their current health plans under the 2010 health law. Of the senators who aired their complaints to the president, 14 must face voters next year.

 

The GOP is still fighting over strategy.

 

The Republican Party has been debating whether it can best win nationally by reasserting its conservatism or by softening its tone and some of its social policies. That debate only grew wider after Virginia voters rejected Mr. Cuccinelli, who had won the support of the tea party but turned off many establishment voters and donors.

 

Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, for one, took a less-than-veiled shot at two of his GOP colleagues, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Utah Sen. Mike Lee, when he said Mr. Cuccinelli would have won "if a couple of senators hadn't shut down the government."

 

The spat was one facet of a far bigger Republican brawl that may drag on until the party settles on its next nominee in 2016. A small skirmish played out Tuesday in a corner of Alabama when the Chamber of Commerce-backed Republican beat his more ardent conservative opponent in a House run-off election.

 

The party is bracing for a larger set of primary fights in the months ahead between the party's activist base and its more establishment wing, with deep-pocketed GOP political-action groups lining up on either side.

 

Chris Christie, for the moment, is the Republican holding the spotlight.

 

Timing is everything in politics, and some may argue the New Jersey governor is stepping into the limelight too soon. But there's little doubt he roars out of his landslide win Tuesday with his party's biggest megaphone as the 2016 presidential jockeying begins.

 

Mr. Christie showed on Tuesday an ability to win votes from all slices of the electorate, which few in his party have rivaled. That success secured him the cover of Time magazine, a near-sweep of the Sunday talk shows this weekend and early raves from some of the party's biggest donors.

 

And a further sign of his prominence: He is already earning the concentrated ire of a few of his likely GOP rivals, who have argued that it takes a more conservative candidate to win the heart of the party nationally than it does to carry New Jersey.