Local Virginia election showing Obama backlash?

February 5, 5:16 PMDC Republican ExaminerBill Dupray

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Unless you live in Fairfax County, Virginia, you probably didn't know there was an election for Chairman of the County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday. Fairfax is home to more than 1 million people and is in the deep blue part of Northern Virginia in the affluent Washington suburbs. During the presidential campaign, the candidates and their surrogates were here nearly every week, and it paid off for Obama, who won the state for his party for the first time in more than 40 years.

The Democrats have had a strangle hold on the County for years, so when the former Democrat Chairman Gerry Connolly ran to fill (and won) the congressional seat of retiring (moderate) Republican Tom Davis (who probably saw the writing on the wall), there had to be a special election to fill the Chairman's seat.

That race pitted Republican Pat Herrity against Democrat Sharon Bulova. By rights, Herrity should have had his keister handed to him, what with all the Hope and Change in the air in our big blue county. He ran as a conservative, pounding fiscal and economic issues. He lost, in a squeaker, 49% to 48%.

Conservative activist and attorney Dan Gray summarized it to me this way.

Pat Herrity’s near miss tonight at about 48% to Sharon Bulova’s 49.3 percent was the best performance by a GOP candidate in Fairfax County since Bush narrowly beat Gore 48.7 % to 47.4% in the 2000 general election. George Allen, who always claimed to run well in Fairfax, ran almost five points behind Chuck Robb that night when he won his one U.S. Senate term. . . .

Pat kept Bulova under 50%, due to the extra candidates picking up some votes. Bulova had a VERY STRONG public employee union presence, with firefighters and teachers working the polls for her. She surely outspent Herrity by a large margin, but Pat pounded away on the themes of limited government, reducing spending, and the massive Fairfax County budget deficit created by Gerry Connolly and his vice chair Bulova.

One can posit that Tom Davis’s absence from this race made Pat comfortable to pound away on these issues, because Davis has done nothing but undermine the GOP on fiscal/budget issues for this county and Virginia in the past two decades. Could Davis’s retirement from the 11th District Congressional District seat, and his perch as County GOP Overlord, amount to “addition by subtraction”? We shall leave that question for general speculation.

The race offers hope for this fall [in Virginia's statewide elections] for the GOP, IF OUR STATEWIDE CANDIDATES POUND THE ECONOMIC AND FISCAL ISSUES the way Pat Herrity did the past several weeks.

Now that Obama and the Democrats in Washington are actually governing, instead of offering empty platitudes, the public is beginning to see what they actually made of - more spending, more taxes, in a time of economic hardship. Can one local election, albeit in a large Democrat county in the Washington suburbs foretell the public's verdict on Obama and the Democrats? Perhaps. But this is probably the first election of any note in the country since Obama took office and the verdict on the Democrat candidate in Fairfax was decidedly lukewarm.