Informed Speculation

Weirdly, it’s not Joe Biden speaking, but one of my favorite analysts, Michael Barone:

There’s a ritual, a kind of kabuki dance, to interpreting the results of the two gubernatorial elections, in Virginia and New Jersey, that are held the year after the presidential election. If one party wins both elections, its spin doctors claim that they are a verdict on the national administration—up if the national party’s candidates win, down if (as in such elections going back now to 1989) the national party’s candidates lose. The spin doctors of the other party quote Tip O’Neill’s adage that “all politics is local” and say that the results were due to state and local issues and have no relevance to national politics.

So which is it?:

…The Virginia and New Jersey results show state electorates pretty much where they were in 2001. You could argue that means the Bush and Republican turnout and percentage increases of 2004 have disappeared. But that would still leave us as the 49 percent nation we were in 2000—and not a nation that is swinging as heavily to the Democrats as it did to the Republicans in 1993-94.

In other words, bad, but not disastrous for the Republicans. Clearly, though, some ground has been lost. Drilling down to the individual level, Barone sees, as do many others, a big win for Mark Warner:

The Virginia result also produces a loser and a winner in Democratic presidential politics. The loser is Hillary Rodham Clinton. That’s because the winner is Mark Warner, who evidently has decided not to run against Sen. George Allen next year but has instead embarked on a candidate for president.

Barone has this to say about the other results:

New Jersey looks a little more Republican in 2005 than it did in 2001, just as it looked somewhat more Republican in 2004 than it did in 2000. But in each case, the Democrat still won. New York City voted decisively against a left-wing Democrat and in favor of a liberal Democrat running on the Republican line who has wisely kept in place the police policies of Rudy Giuliani. Would you, however liberal you are, want to turn your police force over to an ally of Al Sharpton’s? California voted down all the major propositions on the ballot, though some by a narrow margin. This is a stunning defeat for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and a stunning victory for the public employee unions.

More solid analysis from one of the best…