Well, based on my misplaced confidence as expressed in a previous post, I owe five people lunch. It's okay; I'm good for it, as long as your tastes aren't hideously expensive.
Christie did, indeed, blow Buono (and, perhaps, the future of his state) out of the water. This chart, courtesy of the Web site Real Clear Politics, shows that the average for all of the most recent polls in the New Jersey Governor's race, and the actual final percentages for each candidate, varied by less that a 3% margin--in other words, well within the statistical margin of error for most polls. So, while the polls showing Christie winning by nearly 30 percentage points or more were outliers, so were the ones showing Buono with a deficit in the teens. It's an interesting question as to why there was so much variation, and, in the end, it may just come down to different methods of sampling, questioning and statistical analysis.
But, by whatever margin, as that well-known election analyst Gertrude Stein probably once said, a win is a win is a win, and Christie won first and foremost by hoodwinking people into thinking he is a much more moderate politician than he actually is, clinching the process by his post-Sandy embrace of Obama. Is Christie really that popular? I'm sorry, but I'm still a dissenter, and here's one big reason why. In the end, Christie's not-really-a-landslide may simply be all about an ancient principle: Democrats win when people vote, and lose when they don't. In turn, this leaves me with two feelings: (1) Progressives need to work like mad at turning out the vote in 2014, and (2) I'd love to see Christie at the top of the GOP ticket in 2016 against Hillary; it'll teach him in a hurry what it feels like to be Buono now.
Then, there's Virginia. You've no doubt read all about how this is being read by what Paul Krugman describes as Very Serious People as an indictment of the Obamacare rollout problems. Terry McAuliffe was supposedly supposed to win by seven percentage points, and actually won by two-and-a-half points. This might be significant, statistically and otherwise, except for one thing: when it comes to percentages of the voters for each of the three candidates, McAuliffe outperformed the average for all of the latest polls and the individual results for all but two of them. Take a look. Any shrinkage in the margin of victory appears to have come from voters moving away from Robert Sarvis, the Libertarian candidate, toward Ken Cuccinelli. And, given that libertarianism is a mix of liberal and conservative views, it's more likely than not that the ones who stayed with Sarvis were left-leaning libertarians who couldn't stand McAuliffe based on his Clinton-moneyman past. Bottom line: in Virginia, the Tea Party shot the elephant in the foot again. And the fact is that McAuliffe was far from the strongest Democrat who could have run and, in spite of that fact combined with a consistently negative attitude toward the ACA in Virginia, he still won. That's something that should worry Republicans a lot more than it apparently does.
Congratulations to Buono, who fought an uphill battle with little support from her party. Greater congratulations to McAuliffe, who now gives the Democrats one more Governor going into a critical election year. And greatest congratulations of all to Bill de Blasio, who won the New York City mayor's race in a blowout despite the efforts of the New York Post and Rudy Giuliani to smear him. I'd cautiously say it was, overall, a good night for Democrats, but it did contain a cautionary tale from Colorado on the subject of taxes. Apparently, even a tax increase focused on education with wealthy supporters is a very tough sell. I love the quote from the voter who said he didn't like giving the government a blank check. Giving the 1% a blank check and getting nothing for it, apparently, is so much better. Shame on him, and shame on Colorado voters. They may not want to be another California but, if they're not careful, they'll end up as another Texas. And, if Democrats aren't careful in how they frame the tax issue next year, they may miss a golden opportunity to defy history and send the Obama presidency out on the high note it deserves.
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