Republicans Reclaim Virginia Governorship

Republican Bob McDonnell was elected the next governor of Virginia by a decisive margin Tuesday, giving his party a major boost in a state where Democrats had made major gains in recent elections.

McDonnell, a former Virginia attorney general and member of the state legislature, had 59 percent of the vote with about 95 percent of votes counted shortly before 10 p.m., to easily outpace Democratic state Sen. Creigh Deeds, who had 39 percent.

McDonnell will succeed Democrat Tim Kaine -- who helped plot party strategy in the race in his dual role as chairman of the Democratic National Committee -- and ending an eight-year Democratic reign in the governor's office. Kaine won in 2005 to succeed Democrat Mark Warner, now a U.S. senator, in the only state in which the governor cannot run for two consecutive terms.

Buoyed by a strong showing among political independents, McDonnell was poised to win one of the biggest landslides in recent Virginia history. The last candidate for Virginia governor to win more than 60 percent of the vote was Democrat Albertis S. Harrison Jr., who in 1961 won 63.8 percent.

"Bob McDonnell's victory gives Republicans tremendous momentum heading into 2010," Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, chairman of the Republican Governors Association, said in a statement.

History was on McDonnell's side in his bid to reclaim the state's top job for the Republicans. In recent decades, the party that has won the White House in one election year has lost the governor's election in Virginia the following year. The last time Virginia elected a governor of the same party that had just won the White House was in 1973, when Republican Mills E. Godwin Jr. won on the heels of Richard M. Nixon's re-election as president.

Still, President Barack Obama campaigned for Deeds in early August and again last week in an effort to end that Virginia voting habit. Obama took 53 percent of the vote in 2008 to become the first Democrat to carry Virginia for president since 1964.

The gubernatorial races in Virginia and in New Jersey, where Democratic incumbent Jon Corzine faced a career-threatening challenge Tuesday, were being closely watched as potential indicators of the mood that members of Congress will face when they stand for election next year.

Whether the Virginia off-year election is a good barometer is open to interpretation. Victories by Republican George Allen in 1993 and Kaine in 2005 presaged big wins for their respective parties in the congressional elections the following year. But Republican Jim Gilmore won in 1997 and Warner won in 2001, and those did not foreshadow results for their parties.

Most voters told pollsters that Obama wasn't a factor in their choice for governor. According to a CNN exit poll, 55 percent of voters said that Obama didn't influence their vote for governor, compared with 24 percent who said they voted to express their opposition to Obama and 18 percent who said that they voted to express their support for the president.

McDonnell didn't run an anti-Obama campaign and even praised the president for some education and fatherhood initiatives and for winning the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.

Kaine, speaking Monday on MSNBC, said that "these races right after the presidential year are very focused on local issues and haven't been much of a bellwether for the midterms."

Still, Democratic strategists will view McDonnell's sweeping victory as a reminder of the need to energize its party base ahead of the 2010 midterm elections, when comeback-minded Republicans will be challenging numerous Democratic incumbents across the nation -- including freshman Virginia Reps. Glenn Nye of the 2nd District and Tom Perriello of the 5th District.

Fewer than 2 million Virginians were expected to vote on Tuesday, far less than the electorate of 3.7 million that turned out in the 2008 presidential election.

McDonnell's victory also coincided with victories for Republicans Bill Bolling, who was re-elected as lieutenant governor, and Ken Cuccinelli, a state senator who was elected attorney general, the office McDonnell resigned earlier this year to focus on his campaign for governor. Republicans also were expected to increase their majority in Virginia's House of Delegates.

The Campaign In the spring, it didn't appear that McDonnell and Deeds would again be political opponents, four years after an excruciatingly close contest for attorney general that McDonnell won. While McDonnell was unopposed in his quest for the Republican nomination for governor, Deeds came from behind to defeat Terry McAuliffe, a former Democratic National Committee chairman, and Brian Moran, a former legislator, in the June Democratic primary.

Through the summer, polls showed McDonnell leading Deeds by a narrow margin. Deeds appeared to have an opening in late August, when the Washington Post reported on a 1989 thesis McDonnell wrote as a graduate student at the law school founded by religious broadcaster Pat Robertson. McDonnell wrote that working women were "detrimental" to family life, and Deeds and his political allies repeatedly described the document as a "blueprint" that guided McDonnell's pursuit of a rigid, social-issue conservative agenda during his 14 years in the Virginia legislature.

But McDonnell rebutted the charges effectively. He pointed to his eldest daughter, who served in Iraq with the U.S. Army, and said he has always been supportive of her career. He also brandished an endorsement from Sheila Johnson, an African American Democratic businesswoman who co-founded Black Entertainment Television.

There was evidence that the Democrats' unremitting attacks on McDonnell may have backfired. Polls showed that voters thought that Deeds was running a "negative" campaign.

Taylor Walker, a self-described independent who voted for McDonnell at his precinct in Democratic-leaning Arlington County, said he "would have been more receptive to voting for Deeds, but his main stance was the thesis Bob McDonnell wrote."

McDonnell played down his social-issue conservatism and focused almost exclusively on economic issues, promising to be a "jobs governor" who would attract new business and strengthen the state's transportation infrastructure without raising taxes. He criticized Deeds for his openness to tax hikes to pay for transportation improvements, and he linked him to bills promoted by national labor unions and environmental groups and opposed by business organizations.

Ali McSherry contributed to this story.