Election 2009: Independents go on a donkey-shoot

November 4, 11:50 AMDC Republican ExaminerBill Dupray

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All the poll-tracking is over. All the speculation about the meaning of the 2008 election is over. All the wondering about the vitality of the Obama magic is over. Elections have a nice way of clearing the air of prognostications and predictions. We have results. We have actual votes, not polls of possible voters. And the lesson this year is very simple.

Independent voters utterly loathe the Democrats.

There really is no other way to spin it. Most Democrats will try to blame this debacle, and it was a debacle of historic proportions, on local issues or bad candidates. But as they say, denial is not a plan. You can pretend that you don't have a problem, but that does not make it so.

Looking at these numbers should scare the bejesus out of Democrats, especially those who represent the 49 congressional districts that McCain won.

From American Spectator.

Exit polls showed Christie, a former U.S. attorney, trouncing Democratic New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine by 58 percent to 31 percent. In Virginia, independents opted for McDonnell over Democrat Creigh Deeds by an astonishing 65 percent to 34 percent. Both states have been trending Democratic for a decade, as swing voters turned a deaf ear to Republican appeals.

Those are margins of 27 and 31, respectively. The Republicans almost doubled the number of independents who voted for Democrats.

And while the Hoffman loss in NY-23 is a tough one for Conservatives, one has to keep some perspective. About 654,360 people live in the district. By contrast, in just Fairfax County, Virginia alone there are over 1,000,000 people. The sheer number of voters that repudiated the Democrats in Virginia and New Jersey cannot be balanced by one congressional race in upstate New York.

The Democrats did not lose a 2-1 squeaker last night. They lost two huge races, saw an overall evaporation of 25 basis points of support -- and lost by nearly 500 thousand votes cumulatively in the three high profile elections.

Or put another way, Republicans won two races decided by millions of voters -- and Democrats won a small race dominated by party operatives. . . .

What we did not know was just how overwhelming the anti-Democrat tide would be among voters. In the three talked about races, it was a blow out of something like 55-42% overall in precincts that voted for Obama 56-44 just a year ago. The raw totals will end up a tad under 2.4 million GOP votes to 1.9 million for the Democrats in round numbers.

So don't buy into any 2-1 split decision analysis. It was a stunning reversal of a full quarter of the electorate in one year's time.

Also on the NY-23 race, one has to bear in mind that the Republican Party spent $900,000.00 trying to defeat Doug Hoffman before Dede Scozzafava dropped out. For a guy that was in single digits 3 weeks ago to battle both the DNC and the RNC and come within a few points of winning is pretty remarkable. This was also a special election to finish out the term of a Republican who carried the district by a margin of 30 points in 2008 and which hasn't voted for a Democrat since the Civil War. This is a temporary win at best for the Dems.

All year, we have seen parallels with 1993. Democrats pooh-pooh it, but we have seen a young, rock-star, Democratic president overreach on health care and taxes before. And in 1994, the voters punished the Democrats, and Republicans took back the Congress for the first time in 40 years. So the morning after election day in 1993, just like this morning, we had a new governor in New Jersey named Christie Whitman who won by 1 point and a new Virginia governor named George Allen, who won by 17 points. Yesterday Chris Christie did even better than Whitman, winning by 4. McDonnell won by 18, which was the largest margin of victory for a Virginia Republican in history. People can say Creigh Deeds was a bad candidate, but was he really the worst candidate in history? So to the extent that 1993 was a harbinger of 1994, last night's elections make 2010 look worse for Democrats than 1994.

So when the Democrats today start bleating about how the extremist wing of the Republican party cost the GOP the election in upstate New York, be sure to remind them that it was the extremist wing of the Democrat Party in Washington that cost them Virginia and New Jersey.