CNN is helpful for the White House this morning, offering this banner on its Politics page:
The lead analysis is,
"This time, all politics was local" by left-leaning pollster Nate Silver. He leads with the Conservative Party loss in NY-23 (the fault of conservative activists for not understanding the moderate needs of the distirct, he says), moves on to New Jersey (solely the fault of Corzine for being lame), and finally comes to Virginia (Hmm, maybe there's a case that an 18-point win for a Republican in a state Obama carried a year after his election has something to do with him.) Silver's a smart guy who's right about a lot of things, but leading with a Congressional race that speaks to an internal GOP struggle in a race of extenuating circumstances rather than two huge gubernatorial wins (one of them almost entirely unexpected in deep-blue New Jersey where Obama has been campaigning aggressively) betrays his bias. I think he's right about Owens' grasp of local issues over Hoffman's, but Scozzafava was not the responsible moderate alternative the media says she is. But even the New York Times is having trouble
papering over the implications. Conclusion: the magic is gone.
The results in the New Jersey and Virginia races underscored the difficulties Mr. Obama is having transforming his historic victory a year ago into either a sustained electoral advantage for Democrats or a commanding ideological position over conservatives in legislative battles. The coalition that swept him into the White House was absent on Tuesday night, with evidence that the young, African-American and first-time voters who supported Mr. Obama failed to turn out to help the Democrats Mr. Obama had campaigned for: Gov. Jon S. Corzine in New Jersey and R. Creigh Deeds in Virginia. (There are no exit polls in the upstate Congressional race to provide demographic information on the electoral outcome.) Independent voters who had flocked to Mr. Obama in Virginia and New Jersey last year shifted on Tuesday to the Republican candidates in both states, Christopher J. Christie in New Jersey and Robert F. McDonnell in Virginia, according to exit polls in both states. That is a swing that will certainly be noted by moderate Congressional Democrats facing re-election next year, who may now be more reluctant to support Mr. Obama on tough votes in Congress.
Let's take a minute to recall whether the Democratic campaigns in New Jersey and Virginia wanted voters to think they had anything to do with Obama. Those flashbacks to '08 are brought to you by the Democratic Party. But DNC head Tim Kaine has this to say about those races that had absolutely nothing to do with Obama:
Kaine said that both Democratic hopefuls, Creigh Deeds and Jon Corzine, were strong candidates, but faced uphill battles. Both states tend to vote for the party that is not in power in the White House in their off-year gubernatorial elections. "It would have been historic if not unprecedented to win one or both of these races given historical trends,'' he said. Kaine downplayed the notion that these races were a referendum on President Obama. "These races turned on local and state issues and circumstances and on the candidates in each race - and despite what some will certainly claim - the results are not predictive of the future or reflective of the national mood or political environment,'' he said.
The Washington Post also inexplicably finds an Obama angle on this election that had nothing to do with Obama. The front-page online headline: "GOP wins reveal cracks in Obama coalition":
Off-year elections can be notoriously unreliable as predictors of the future, but as a window on how the political landscape may have changed in the year since President Obama won the White House, Tuesday's Republican victories in Virginia and New Jersey delivered clear warnings for the Democrats. Neither gubernatorial election amounted to a referendum on the president, but the changing shape of the electorates in both states and the shifts among key constituencies revealed cracks in the Obama 2008 coalition and demonstrated that, at this point, Republicans have the more energized constituency heading into next year's midterm elections. The most significant change came among independent voters, who solidly backed Democrats in 2006 and 2008 but moved decisively to the Republicans on Tuesday, according to exit polls.
So, even though voters did not overwhelmingly identify Obama himself as the reason they voted for Republicans, Obama's first year in office has created a national environment wherein Independents he won overwhelmingly in '08 are voting Republican in even Northern Virginia and New Jersey. A year after the Republican party had allegedly become a rump, regional party of the Southeast, it's back to winning Loudoun County (which Obama carried with 60 percent) and New Jersey.