Election Winners and Losers

GWEN IFILL:

The outcomes weren't even close. From Virginia to New Jersey to California, Democrats defeated top-of-the-ticket Republican candidates and initiatives in Tuesday's voting.

But is this a sign of things to come, or more proof that all politics is, indeed, local? For answers we turn to Dan Walters, a columnist at the Sacramento Bee, who's been following California politics for over 30 years; Ingrid Reed, the director of the Eagleton New Jersey Project at the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University; and Mark Rozell, a professor of public policy at George Mason University– he's a veteran Virginia political analyst.

Let me put that to the test, Mark Rozell. Up until last weekend we were led to believe that the governor's race between Kaine and Jerry Kilgore, the Republican, was going to be very tight. Instead, it was quite a wide margin of victory for the Democrat. Why?

MARK ROZELL:

The latest polls showed that the race was breaking away from the Republicans and so George Bush, President Bush came to Virginia the day before the election, which surprised a lot of people but it also suggested that the Republicans knew that they were in trouble and they had to do something to mobilize their base. I think ultimately what happened though is that this gave an opportunity to create kind of a counter-mobilization of anti-Bush voters who just happened to be right now much more numerous than pro-Bush voters.

GWEN IFILL:

And much more intense. So you're saying by coming to campaign for his candidate he had the opposite effect of what he intended.

MARK ROZELL:

I think it really did have the opposite effect. The intention was to try to mobilize the base and try to rely upon a larger Republican base in this red southern state, of course, in order to pull the Republicans through, but what ended up happening instead I think is that this gave a real incentive to a lot of Democratic activists and anti-Bush voters to come out and make a statement against President Bush and the Bush presidency.

GWEN IFILL:

You know, for people who don't follow Virginia politics like you do, it also is true that the incumbent governor, a Democrat, the outgoing one-term limited governor is amazingly popular in Virginia.

MARK ROZELL:

Right.

GWEN IFILL:

Did Tim Kaine benefit from that as well?

MARK ROZELL:

Oh, certainly. Mark Warner, Gov. Warner is now with over a 70 percent approval rating in Virginia which is extraordinary. And if his name had been on the ballot, he would have won by acclamation, no doubt about it. So Tim Kaine, the lieutenant governor, of course, ran a candidacy saying in effect stay the course. If you're happy with the policies of what he called the Warner-Kaine administration, then stick with us and vote for Tim Kaine and not the Republicans.

I think it was an effective message so in politics a lot of things just come down to timing. You had a very popular governor in Virginia. That helped the Democrats. President Bush, the low point of the Bush presidency coincided with this campaign. And that ended up hurting the Republicans quite significantly.

GWEN IFILL:

Ingrid Reed in New Jersey we saw a lot of money was spent in those expensive media markets in New York and Philadelphia and the Democrat Jon Corzine was expected to win you he won by quite a bit. What made the difference for him?

INGRID REED:

He apparently was able to capture the imagination of his base. This election had a rather low turnout. And so New Jersey is more of a blue state, more Democrats, and the ultimate vote was very similar to the balance between Democrats and Republicans in New Jersey. And so you might have looked at it as a super primary. And Corzine was able to capture that Democratic vote.

The campaign was also characterized by very a nasty ad campaign that got personal at the end. And there's some suspicion that that turned off the more independent-minded voters. At the end of the campaign, the Eagleton Rutgers Star Ledger poll showed that 23 percent of the independents were undecided. And we didn't know if that was undecided whether they were going to vote or who they were going to vote for. It looks like the more independent-minded voters stayed home.

GWEN IFILL:

It looks like people stayed home. One of the things you alluded too, this very negative nasty campaign. In the closing days ex-wives were involved making allegations about ex-husbands. And all of this may have affected whether people wanted to be bothered with any of this at all. But I wonder if you saw anything in New Jersey like Mark Rozell saw in Virginia in terms of attempts to link the Republican candidate Forrester to an unpopular Republican president.

INGRID REED:

Right. Throughout the campaign, that was one tactic that the Corzine campaign took. There were ads that portrayed Forrester similar to Bush. There were lots of references to the Rove team. But Bush did not campaign in New Jersey, although Republicans did. But I wouldn't say that it was a dominant theme.

There are people who suspect that some of the voters looked at this and said they simply were not going to vote for a Republican as a way to demonstrate their unhappiness with the Bush White House, but we have no way of actually corroborating that.

GWEN IFILL:

Dan Walters, as we watched California politics we have watched the plummeting popularity I guess you could say of Gov. Schwarzenegger, which was personified last night in these four initiatives which failed that he supported. Could you give us kind of the gist of what these initiatives policy-wise were really about.

DAN WALTERS:

Well, they were really about hurting the unions, the public employee unions that Schwarzenegger came to believe were the biggest impediment in the capital because of their influence in the Democratic-controlled legislature. And he went at them with a measure to boost the probationary period for teachers before they could get tenure, with a measure that would require public employee unions to get the permission of their members to take political money out of their paychecks, to give the governor more power over the budget vis-à-vis a Democratic legislature, and finally to appoint a commission of retired judges that would draw entirely new legislative districts as early as next year in hopes of getting a friendlier legislature in place, I'm sure.

GWEN IFILL:

Did these fail because they were bad policy-wise in the views of many voters or because Gov. Schwarzenegger had tied himself so tightly to them?

DAN WALTERS:

Well, actually the issues themselves seemed to resonate somewhat with voters according to the polls. They agreed there were problems in these areas. And it looked for a long time as if the union dues measure and the teacher tenure measure were going to pass. In the end however they became a referendum on Schwarzenegger, which is ironic, because when he started this whole thing a year ago he wanted it to be a referendum on him. He was sitting up there around 70 percent popularity a year ago but the unions spent something in excess of $100 million mostly to demonize him, and it succeeded along with some of fumbling on his part. And by the end of the campaign, they were wanting to — they were trying to tie these measures to him. They wanted it to be a referendum on Schwarzenegger. And he was a little bit trying to distance himself from them personally. It's kind of a huge turn-around.

He got hurt yesterday. His popularity is half of what it was a year ago. He lost all these measures. On the other hand, the voters also rejected four other measures that he wasn't involved in: Two liberal measures and two conservative measures. So maybe the voters were just in a mood to say no yesterday.

GWEN IFILL:

Sometimes that happens with initiatives. Mark Rozell, so the Democrats are saying today, big sweep, big victory. Republicans are saying this is just a victory of the status quo — no big deal. In Virginia which is it?

MARK ROZELL:

Well, I think it's a little of both. You have a very, very popular incumbent governor and the lieutenant governor running as his natural successor. So in that sense it's a status quo election, no doubt about it.

But we also saw that there was a very strong mobilization of Democratic voters and anti-Bush voters in this campaign. And I think it's quite remarkable that the Democratic candidate won some very heavily Republican areas of the state which tells me that there's more going on here than just simply a one-dimensional answer that it was a vote for the status quo – that also a lot of voter had an opportunity to express some disgruntlement with the Bush presidency.

And we can't ignore the fact that George Bush came to Virginia the day before the election and that was the major story going up to election day that the president himself had put his own prestige and popularity on the line in trying to help the Republican gubernatorial nominee.

GWEN IFILL:

Ingrid Reed, in New Jersey, is it a matter of victory for the status quo or victory for the Democrats?

INGRID REED:

Well it's an important victory for the Democrats because this election came in the wake of Gov. McGreevey's resignation for personal reasons and for the appointment of an unqualified person and the revelation that is gay. The Democrats have had a difficult time with the budget — big deficits. And so this gives the Democrats another chance.

It follows on a very popular year for the acting governor, Richard Cody, who restored some confidence in the state, in government, and the fact that Corzine won and won handily really gives the Democrats another chance in the state. It could have been a very different election.

GWEN IFILL:

But I have to ask you in New Jersey you had two candidates who decided to opt out of the campaign finance limited public funded system —

INGRID REED:

That's right.

GWEN IFILL:

— and finance their campaigns out of their own pockets — tens of millions of dollars later — is that the only way you can run statewide in New Jersey anymore?

INGRID REED:

Well, it looks that way. New Jersey, of course, has very expensive television ads because it's both in the New York and Philadelphia market. But I think there are a lot of people who are asking questions about whether all of those ads make a difference, if they are so negatively oriented and so old-fashioned and really don't give the voters what they want.

I think Sen. Corzine will really have a challenge to get the confidence of the voters who opted out of this election.

GWEN IFILL:

Dan Walters, I want to get back to you briefly also on the money question in California — big initiatives, hundreds of millions of dollars spent there. Does that change the formula between what happens now and the mid-term elections next year?

DAN WALTERS:

Oh, I don't think so. California voters are notoriously fickle and California interest groups are notoriously willing to put up a lot of money. When all the dollars are counted in this election, there will probably be $300 million on all sides. Actually, the big spending initiative wasn't the governor's stuff really; it was a couple of measures dealing with pharmaceutical drugs, prescriptions.

The pharmaceutical industry spent upwards of $100 million to defeat a measure and to try to pass one that they preferred. And, in fact, both of them were defeated, so the big money tradition in California continues. The escalation is just incredible. The unions probably spent $130 million on all of the governor's ballot measures to defeat those.

We're talking — and the governor probably spent $65 million or something like that.

GWEN IFILL:

After a while —

DAN WALTERS:

They'll be all back at it next year.

GWEN IFILL:

After a while, it becomes real money. Dan Walters, Ingrid Reed, and Mark Rozell, thank you all very much.

MARK ROZELL:

Thank you.

INGRID REED:

Thank you.