What Will Election Night Really Mean For Republicans

The election of 2008 was the longest election in human history. Lasting from January of 2007 until Senator Al Franken was seated in July of 2009, it’s now been about a year since that crazy election night. But now we are left with the most boring of election years, the off year election. CNN is billing tonight as “Election Night In America” but for all intents and purposes we have three races, one of which has been over for at least two months. Everyone in the politics starved punditocracy is making these races out to be a referendum on the Obama administration but miss the point entirely. The special election in New York’s 23rd Congressional district is more so an indication of the Republican party’s civil war and schizophrenia than any indication of any turn away from the politics of the age of Obama.

In addition to the special election in New York 23, there are gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey. The election in Virginia has been realistically over for a while. Pat Robertson minion Bob McDonnell has been comfortably ahead of Creigh Deeds for months with only slight fluctuation in the polling. Due to recent Democratic success in the state this race is being looked at for how it affects Obama, but this is more about the reality of the Republican nature of the state and the poor candidate the Democrats fielded. As Republican as Virginia is it couldn’t be expected to have three straight Democratic governors win, and that wasn’t helped by the poor campaign that Deeds ran. In the New Jersey race it’s shocking that the Republicans could not find a better candidate than the rotund former Bush hand Chris Christie, as unpopular as John Corzine is. But the race of the evening will be New Jersey as polling shows it going to the wire neck and neck.

The race that most in the political world have been focusing on for the political trends it portends is the special election for the NY-23 seat in the House. In such a reliable republican district it’s remarkable that there will not even be a Republican in the race. Despite spending over a million dollars on her candidacy the RNC is now trying to claim Doug Hoffman’s third party candidacy as their own doing.

The media theme for the evening will be to see how these three elections will portend for momentum going into the 2010 midterm elections. These races will be looked over to see if the Republican party is on the way back, and if people are turning against the Democrats. In reality you can draw your conclusions even before the polls close. Republicans could not even field a candidate for the NY-23 race in a district that would normally elect a dining room table with an (R) next to it. In New Jersey they could lose a gubernatorial election that was practically handed to them with such an unpopular incumbent. In Virginia, Republicans will win a governorship that was normally a slam dunk up until 8 years ago. At the end of the evening the Republican party will most likely have won one out of three despite claiming the Hoffman third party win as their own. This is what the Republican party and Fox News will claim as a Republican wave.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 at 11:57 am and is filed under 2008, History, Media, Politics, Television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.