Washington: Terry McAuliffe, a businessman and former head of the Democratic National Committee, captured the Virginia governor’s seat Tuesday, defeating Republican Ken Cuccinelli II, the state attorney general whose conservative crusades made him an icon of the tea party movement.
With 99.80 percent of the precincts reporting, McAuliffe led Cuccinelli by more than 54,548 votes.
“What a great night, everybody!” McAuliffe told supporters assembled in a Tysons Corner ballroom, before pledging to work with supporters of Cuccinelli and Libertarian candidate Robert Sarvis.
“I understand emotions are raw--I get it,” McAuliffe said. “I will be governor of all Virginians. I will work with both sides.”
Democrats were also victorious in the lieutenant governor’s race, as state Sen. Ralph Northam defeated Republican E.W. Jackson, the Chesapeake minister whose history of inflammatory remarks about gays and abortion became a flash-point of the campaign.
Late Tuesday, Mark Obenshain, the Republican candidate for attorney general, was clinging to a razor-thin lead over Democrat Mark Herring, with 98 percent of the precincts counted. Republican Party of Virginia chairman Pat Mullins said Obenshain did not plan to make a speech that night because the party is preparing for a recount.
Cuccinelli, appearing before supporters in a Richmond hotel ballroom, said he was “disappointed” but “immensely proud of the campaign we ran.”
Even with his defeat, Cuccinelli called the election a referendum on President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, saying that the campaign was close even though McAuliffe had a massive fundraising advantage.
“Despite being outspent by an unprecedented $15 million,” he said,”this race came down to the wire because of Obamacare. That message will go out across America tonight.”
Chris LaCivita, Cuccinelli’s strategist, questioned whether his candidate might have won if national Republican organizations had not stopped giving the campaign financial support.
“There are a lot of questions people are going to be asking and that is, was leaving Cuccinelli alone in the first week of October, a smart move?” LaCivita said in an interview. “We were on our own. Just look at the volume [of ads].”
And yet, he said, the campaign closed to within a point and a half as Cuccinelli picked up momentum after the shutdown of the federal government and the nation’s attention turned to the Affordable Care Act.
“There was definitely a national mood that was moving, that is moving, that is continuing to move against the White House and the Affordable Care Act,” he said. “I can’t help but ask myself what would have been the result had he had five weeks of this discussion instead of just 2 ½?”
For McAuliffe, the triumph vaulted him to the top of Virginia’s political pyramid four years after losing his first bid for governor. On stage Tuesday, the governor-elect wore a purple necktie, representing Virginia’s status as a state populated by a bipartisan electorate.
For Cuccinelli, the defeat halted his rise as a Republican party star.
Sarvis, who captured about 6 percent of the vote, became a factor in the race, as he was seen as an alternative by some voters disappointed in the major-party candidates.
In New Jersey, Gov. Chris Christie (R) defeated his little-known Democratic opponent, state Sen. Barbara Buono. In New York City, Bill De Blasio defeated Republican Joe Lhota becoming the first Democrat to win City Hall there since 1989.
Across the commonwealth, voters spent the day settling a race defined by ferocious attacks. In interviews, many Virginians described their votes as more an expression of disgust for the opponent than support for either McAuliffe or Cuccinelli.
“I wish we had better candidates,” lamented Brent Lander as he and Laura Loechler left their Arlington polling place walking hand-in-hand with their seven-year-old twins.
Lander, who works at the National Cancer Institute, said he voted for McAuliffe because “I was not real fond of the affiliation between Mr. Cuccinelli and the tea party.” But, he added, “in the South, we call that ‘the lesser of two weevils.’ ”
A preliminary exit poll conducted Tuesday in Virginia found that McAuliffe and Cuccinelli were splitting the vote among men. Among women, however, McAuliffe was drawing far more support than Cuccinelli, the exit poll found, echoing surveys that were done during the campaign.
The Republican held a commanding lead among white voters, according to the poll, though they were voting for him at a lower rate than they did for Gov. Robert McDonnell in 2009.
The survey also found that early voters were more likely to be Democrats, less white, and more highly educated than the electorate that turned out in the 2009 governor’s race.
Nearly four in 10 voters identified themselves as Democrats, while just over three in 10 said they were Republicans or independents, according to the exit poll conducted by Edison Media Research for the National Election Pool.
If the results bear out the poll findings, the numbers would represent a dramatic shift from four years ago when Republicans outnumbered Democrats by four percentage points.
The poll also found a marked increase in the number of voters who described themselves as moderate. Four years ago, conservatives outnumbered liberals by more than a two to one margin. On Tuesday, just over a third of early voters identified themselves as conservative.
As the day began in Northern Virginia, turnout was steady and, in some precincts, strong in the first hours after polls opened at 6 a.m. There were no major problems reported anywhere in the state, although some glitches delayed voting in a few precincts in Loudoun and Fairfax counties. But local election officials said most problems were quickly resolved and that voting was going smoothly.
In Northern Virginia, which is home to one-third of the state’s total population, there were obvious signs of the bitter divide between Republicans and Democrats. Several voters at Claude Moore Recreation Center in Sterling shunned sample ballots offered by campaign volunteers, saying they already knew how they would vote.
“Republican all the way!” one woman said sharply to the Democratic volunteer who extended a blue sample ballot.
Several voters who were interviewed said that as they considered their choices, worry over the economy and last month’s 16-day government shutdown weighed heavily on their minds.
“I’m here because of the shutdown,” said Husna Khalil, a government worker married to another federal worker, after casting her ballot for McAuliffe at Balls Bluff Elementary School in Leesburg. “We didn’t vote in the last [gubernatorial election], but this time we came out. The shutdown was just so bad.”
In McLean, voters voiced their disgust with attack ads, shutdowns, the health-care law known as Obamacare and the politics of abortion. Kathy McEnearney, 55, whose husband was furloughed due to budget cuts, said that while she has voted for candidates from both parties in the past, this year she is exasperated with the GOP.
“I just hope this is a referendum on the tea party: We don’t need you,” she said. “You’re bad for politics.”
From the start of the gubernatorial race, the candidates attacked each other with an intensity typically reserved for the final weeks before an election. Day after day, McAuliffe portrayed Cuccinelli as an anti-gay, anti-women tea party zealot, incapable of modulating his social views to lead a state as sprawling and demographically diverse as Virginia.
Cuccinelli cast McAuliffe as an unethical businessman who lacked the gravitas, government experience and knowledge of Virginia to manage the state. For months, Republicans sought to remind voters of McAuliffe’s ties to the Washington political establishment, and his sometimes questionable history as a Democratic fundraiser and business investor.
McAuliffe, 56, a Syracuse native, spent four decades raising vast sums of money for presidential candidates, beginning with Jimmy Carter, when he sought re-election in 1980, and Bill and Hillary Clinton.
From 2001 t0 2005, McAuliffe was chair of the Democratic National Committee, building on his reputation as an ebullient and often flamboyant salesman for the party.
In 2009, at the age of 52, McAuliffe chose to switch career paths, seeking the Democratic nomination for governor in Virginia. Despite his fundraising advantage and connections to the Clintons, he was defeated in the primary by Creigh Deeds, among the Democrats who portrayed McAuliffe as a carpetbagger who was ill-suited for the state’s top job.
Within months of his defeat, McAuliffe was touring Virginia again, meeting with political analysts and civic leaders, and laying the foundation for another campaign.
At the same time, Cuccinelli, 45, Virginia’s Attorney General, was planning his own run for governor. Initially elected to the State Senate in 2002, he soon emerged as one of the state’s leading conservatives, opposing increased state spending, immigration reform and abortion. As attorney general, an office he won in 2009, he became a hero of the tea party movement, with his legal challenge to President Obama’s Affordable Care Act.
As the governor’s race began, Cuccinelli sought to focus on the economy, steering away from the divisive social issues that had made him well-known. But McAuliffe kept reminding voters of Cuccinelli’s views, using his massive fundraising advantage to inundate the airwaves with ads focusing on Cuccinelli’s opposition to abortion, among other issues. By the early fall, polls showed McAuliffe leading Cuccinelli by 24 points among likely women voters.
The campaign’s dynamics were further shaped by external factors, one of them the shutdown of the federal government that occurred after tea party lawmakers in Congress refused to approve the budget because of their opposition to the health-care law.
Another factor was the alleged ethical transgressions of McDonnell for taking gifts from an influential businessman, Johnnie Williams. Cuccinelli’s attempts to cast doubt on McAuliffe’s ethics were undermined when he acknowledged that he himself had taken $18,000 in unreported gifts from Williams.
In the race’s final days, while McAuliffe was appearing with his party’s luminaries, Obama and Vice President Biden, Cuccinelli could not count on Virginia’s governor, the state’s top Republican. Instead, he had to rely on Sens. Rand Paul (Ky.) and Marco Rubio (Fla.), among the GOP’s most conservative voices
After casting his own ballot Tuesday, McDonnell told reporters he planned to phone the victor after the election is called and invite him to the Executive Mansion for lunch Thursday to begin discussing the transition.
Though the Washington region fared well during the recession that ravaged the rest of the nation, sequestration and the shutdown have affected many Virginia employers and their workers.
Cheryl Blackwell, 53, was laid off from her job as a federal contractor last year and is about to join a new company -- a relief, she said.
“It was scary, scary times,” said Blackwell, recalling how she worried she would lose her home. Blackwell said she had voted for all Democrats when she cast her ballot at the River Oaks precinct in heavily Democratic eastern Prince William. But while she said the “economy will always be first” in terms of importance, the topics she most wanted to discuss were health care and women’s issues.
She said she believes Republican opposition to abortion and to some types of contraception means the party wants to impose an impractical, rigid system that restricts women. “I think women have a choice what to do with their bodies,” she said. “We’re not ‘Stepford Wives.’ ”
Turnout was heavier than expected in precincts around Richmond and in Northern Virginia, especially in an off-year election with no presidential or congressional races on the ballot. In Arlington County, both early morning votes and absentee balloting were up significantly, said county registrar Linda Lindberg.
Don Palmer, secretary for the Virginia State Board of Elections, said voting was going well around the state, except for a glitch that slowed check-in procedures at almost half of Loudoun County’s polling places. But Palmer said the software problem was with laptops containing voter registration information, and there were no problems with the voting machines in those precincts.
At the River Oaks precinct in Woodbridge, where massive lines and delays tarnished the 2012 presidential vote, citizens moved through in a steady, efficient stream.
McAuliffe campaigned heavily in the Woodbridge area, along the Route 1 corridor in one of Virginia’s bellwether counties. Support from the many immigrant and minority voters there is a key part of his election strategy.
Several Hispanic voters mentioned a controversial McAuliffe ad that sought to portray Cuccinelli as anti-immigrant. Though Cuccinelli said his remarks were taken out of context, several voters said they were offended, motivating them to vote against the Republican candidate.
“This is the one issue that brought me here today,” said Pedro Delcid, the Salvadoran owner of a small remodeling company in Manassas who heard about Cuccinelli’s immigration comments on Spanish-language television. “I have an issue with the way he talks about immigrants.”
At Forest Grove Elementary in Sterling, several voters — both Democrats and Republicans — said they were voting a straight party-line ticket. And some were not happy with their choices.
“I vote the straight Republican ticket,” said Vincent Sheehy, 85, a retired car dealer from McLean who wore a tweed cap and left the polling place with his wife. “My grandfather used to say he’d vote for a yellow dog if he was running on the Republican ticket, and I’ve continued that.”
This year, though, he said, “I don’t think too much of either one of them. McAuliffe is definitely an interloper in Virginia, and Cuccinelli is extremely right wing — there’s no doubt about it.”
Some voters said they were fed up with the race’s nasty tone.
“There was just so much negativity,” said Doug Growitz, 70, of Haymarket. “It was hard to focus on positive issues.”
In the end, he said, he voted for Cuccinelli, citing his low-tax policies. #Source: The Washington Post
