WASHINGTON — Virginians elected Republican Robert McDonnell the Commonwealth’s 71st governor today, halting a decade of Democratic advances in the critical swing state.
The state’s former attorney general defeated Democratic state Sen. Creigh Deeds with a promise to create jobs in the down economy and fix the state’s clogged roadways without a tax increase.
McDonnell, 55, boosted by a political mood shift that has left many voters cool to Democrats, prevailed with a disciplined economic message and a campaign that steered clear of the hot-button social issues that in recent elections had alienated voters in northern Virginia and other urban centers. The Republican also benefited from a lackluster Democratic opponent voters came to know in good part from a video clip in which he waffled and stammered when asked if he would raise taxes.
Deeds, 51, failed to recreate the voting coalition that last year helped Barack Obama become the first Democratic presidential candidate to capture Virginia in more than four decades. Many of the black and young voters who had helped send two Democrats in a row to the governor’s mansion and two Democrats to the U.S. Senate stayed home Tuesday. In the campaign’s final days, Deeds made an explicit appeal to Obama voters that a vote for him was a vote in support of the president. But earlier he had distanced himself from Obama’s agenda, especially on health and energy policy.
McDonnell’s lead came as he dominated Deeds among independent voters.
McDonnell inherits a state government burdened by a severe budget crisis and a transportation network so underfunded that Virginia will soon lack the matching funds necessary to secure federal dollars for road building.
From the start, McDonnell had history on his side: Since 1977, no party that has won the White House has gone on to capture Virginia’s governorship the next year.
McDonnell’s campaign — supported, like Deeds’, with millions of dollars from his national party — was on the defensive for only a few weeks, starting with the publication in August of a Washington Post report detailing a master’s degree thesis the candidate wrote in 1989 at what is now Regent University in Virginia Beach. In the thesis, written at the Christian-oriented school founded by televangelist Pat Robertson, McDonnell, then 34, outlined an action plan for strengthening the traditional family and wrote that working women were detrimental to the family.
Deeds seized on the thesis, making it the centerpiece of an advertising campaign designed to convince voters that McDonnell was a right-wing extremist who had undergone a disingenuous campaign-year makeover.
The strategy appeared to work for a time, as polls tightened. But McDonnell fought back with a series of TV spots featuring supportive testimonials from his daughter, an Army veteran who served in Iraq, and a gallery of professional women who had worked for him in the attorney general’s office. Increasingly, voters said they saw Deeds’ campaign as a largely negative one that failed to define his own vision for the state.
McDonnell campaigned on his opposition to federal policies. He criticized the Democratic-led effort to change the nation’s health care system and sided with southwest Virginians who believe that proposed federal legislation designed to curb greenhouse gases would cost jobs in the coalfields of that region.
The Republican also relentlessly attacked Deeds over the Democrat’s willingness to raise taxes for transportation improvements. A key turning point in the campaign came in September, when Deeds was caught on camera flailing when swarmed by reporters asking whether he would raise taxes to pay for road improvements.
The moment, immediately cut into TV ads aired repeatedly by McDonnell and the Republican Governors Association, highlighted Deeds’ stammering speaking style, caught him snapping at a reporter and made him appear indecisive on the critical issues of taxes and transportation.
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