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2009-11-02 Home Front: Politix
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A Viewers' Guide to Watching Tuesday's Elections
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CQ Politics rates the Virginia race as Leans Republican.
 Virginia (7 p.m. Eastern) The crucial region to watch as Virginia's results come in is the populous suburban area outside Washington, D.C., in the northern part of the state.
This area generally voted Republican before the population boom of the past couple of decades, but it recently has trended Democratic - and tipped the balance to the Democrats in their signal victories this decade as they reversed a period of statewide GOP dominance: the races for governor in 2001 (won by Mark Warner) and 2005 (current incumbent Tim Kaine), for U.S. Senate in 2006 (Jim Webb) and 2008 (Warner again), and for president in 2008 (when Obama won by a 7 percentage-point margin to become the first Democrat to win the state's electoral votes since 1964).
Although McDonnell's base is in the southeastern Tidewater (a.k.a. Hampton Roads) region, polls show him running above par in Northern Virginia, in part because he was raised in suburban Fairfax County, in part because his campaign has taken a well-modulated approach that emphasizes economic and transportation issues and plays down the conservative social issues that long were major priorities in his past state legislative tenure.
Deeds has sought to regain momentum in Northern Virginia by portraying McDonnell as hiding radically social conservative views, wielding a thesis McDonnell wrote, when he attended a college founded by religious broadcaster Pat Robertson, that conveyed very traditionalist views about the role of women in society and the workplace. But Deeds, a rare statewide Democratic nominee who hails from rural and mainly conservative western Virginia, just has not caught fire in this important region.
The other place to look is in the southeast, McDonnell's home turf, but also home to many of Virginia's black residents. A strong turnout among this overwhelmingly Democratic constituency is crucial to the party's hopes in statewide contests.
If the polls are right and McDonnell is declared an early winner, look for the GOP to claim that the outcome was a declaration of voter dissent against Obama and the agenda of the national Democratic Party. They'll want to do that quickly -- just in case the other contests don't turn out so well.
CQ Politics rates the New Jersey race as Tossup.
New Jersey (8 p.m. Eastern) If this were a straight-up contest between Democrat Corzine, the popularity-challenged incumbent, and Republican Christie, a former U.S. attorney, the focus would simply be on which candidate is better holding typical party margins and producing voter turnout in traditional areas of strength. For Corzine, that would be in urban centers such as Newark, Jersey City, Paterson and Camden and in the more liberal-leaning areas of the New York City and Philadelphia suburbs. For Christie, that would be the suburban and exurban areas, many of them affluent, that have stayed steadfastly Republican even as the state as a whole has trended strongly Democratic.
But the strong independent candidacy staged by Daggett, previously appointed by Republican state and federal administrations to high-ranking environmental policy posts, has knocked partisan presumptions off kilter. So a key thing to watch on Tuesday is whether Daggett's strength in polls - he's been drawing percentages in the teens - holds up, or if voters drift back, as they often do, to one of the major party contenders.
If Daggett is running well, the outcome of the race likely will be determined by whether he is eating more deeply into the vote that normally would be expected to accrue to either Corzine or Christie.
CQ Politics rates the New York 23 race as Tossup.
New York's 23rd District (9 p.m. Eastern): The stunning decision by Republican House nominee Scozzafava to quit the race three days before Election Day means the tossup election there will be decided by one thing only: what the voters who remained loyal to her, despite the barrage from the right, decide to do.
If her voters are mainly died-in-the-wool Republicans, they may be inclined to suppress their disappointment and vote for Hoffman as the un-Democrat remaining in the race. If that were to happen, Hoffman almost certainly would win the election.
If her voters think she has been treated unfairly and was bullied out of the race, they could defect to Owens, and if they do, he could win by a comfortable margin. What makes this a highly plausible scenario is the fact that Owens, a Democratic moderate with a military background, is actually more conservative than Republican Scozzafava on key social issues.
Finally, Scozzafava's name remains on the ballot, of course. So Republican backers who don't want to vote for Democrat Owens but can't abide the attacks launched against their candidate by Hoffman and his conservative supporters might cast what amounts to a protest vote for her. Or, they could just decide to stay home and not vote.
At stake is a district that, while no Democratic stronghold, is not the Republican bastion that it traditionally was. Though district voters in 2004 stuck with President George W. Bush as the Republican nominee, they did so by just a 4 percentage-point margin. And in a big breakthrough for the Democrats, Obama in 2008 carried the district for president by 5 points over Republican John McCain.
While McHugh kept the district in the GOP fold with a career's worth of easy House victories, he was never a conservative firebrand and his voting record had in recent years become more moderate. His focus throughout his career was on defense-related issues -- he was ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee at the time of his resignation, which was popular with most voters in a sprawling district that include the Army's Fort Drum.
So what we at CQ Politics will be watching Tuesday night as we try to call the winner in the House special election is how the county vote percentages for Democrat Owens and Conservative turned de facto Republican candidate Hoffman compare with those in the key 2008 contests. If Hoffman's leads in key counties are anywhere near to those enjoyed by McHugh when he won re-election with 65 percent of the vote, he will score a big victory and the conservatives will claim justification for their rebellion. But if Owens' vote is paralleling that for Obama in 2008, then the Democrats will likely be a step closer to a total monopoly on Northeastern House seats -- and Scozzafava's tormentors on the right will have scored a dramatically pyrrhic victory.
CQ Politics rates the California 10 race as Safe Democratic.
California's 10th District (11 p.m.) There is one other House special election on Tuesday, in California's vacant 10th Congressional District, is an island of calm compared to the rest of the day's slate. It isn't on the races-to-watch list because its outcome, in favor of the defending Democrats, appears a foregone conclusion.
Lt. Gov. John Garamendi, the Democratic nominee, is an overwhelming favorite to defeat Republican businessman David Harmer for the seat from which seven-term Democrat Ellen O. Tauscher resigned to take a high-ranking post in the State Department.
The 10th District, located in East Bay suburbs of San Francisco, is reliably Democratic. District voters gave 65 percent in 2008 to both Obama in the presidential contest and Tauscher as she won House re-election. 
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Posted by Fred 2009-11-02 00:00||
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