Yesterday, the GOP in Virginia lost big time. Both the Governor and Lt. Governor slots fell to the Democrats, and the AG race is still tied at 50% each - less than a thousand votes apart.
I watched the whole thing on Rachael Maddow last night and was interested to see her pet Republican political commentator pass the whole loss off to the Republican's poor tactics. He felt that if the big national money doners hadn't sat out, the Party had paid more to put ads in the crucial northern Virginia market, and hadn't used a convention method to choose an ideologically pure Tea Party candidate, and that candidate had tried harder to appeal to the independent voters instead of his base, that "We'd be sitting here talking about the Republican Governor- elect."
Now, I am not a political pundit, nor any kind of expert on Virginia politics. But, I can read the proverbial tea leaves in the form of polling data, and from what I've seen in the last month, plus exit polling from yesterday, Cuccinelli and the Tea Party lost, not because of esoteric electoral tactical failures, but because Cuccinelli and the Tea Party are out of touch with American's social values.
The one thing that kind of leaps out at you is the fact that in exit polling, 20% of those voting noted that abortion was their main reason for casting the vote they did. 59% of those voted in favor of the Democratic winner. That translates to over 12% of those casting votes, more than enough to put the winning tally in the Democratic column. Add to that the pissed off women who disliked the Republicans efforts in the last year to push invasive ultrasound procedures on women getting abortions, and I'd say that pretty much clinches the idea that the Tea Party's efforts to ensure an ideologically pure candidate is the main reason for their defeat yesterday.
Not esoteric, failed electoral tactics.
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