No, Virginia, the Presidential Race Is Not Competitive within You This Year

August 16, 2016

You haven't heard much talk about Virginia in this year's presidential race. This is a state Obama won twice, by six percentage points in 2008 and four points in 2012, and that Republicans had won in the previous eight presidential elections. It's still a state that the right Republican can win; Bob McDonnell and Republicans swept the statewide offices in 2009 and Ed Gillespie came within a point of knocking off Mark Warner in 2014's Senate race.

This morning, the Washington Post's survey finds Hillary Clinton with a 52 percent to 38 percent lead among registered voters. Yes, Trump is running about ten points behind Mitt Romney. If you throw in the third-party candidates, Trump "only" trails by seven.

Clinton's advantage comes despite weaknesses in her personal popularity. Fifty-four percent of registered voters report an unfavorable impression of the former secretary of state while 44 percent view her favorably. Yet Trump is significantly worse off, with twice as many negative ratings as positive ones, 65 percent to 32 percent. A 56 percent majority view Trump in a "strongly unfavorable" light, 13 points higher than for Clinton.

Sure, some of this probably reflects some help from Tim Kaine, but in the end, Trump has made himself unelectable in large swaths of territory the GOP needs to win. Some Republicans may dismiss the northern suburbs are full of immigrants and government workers, but they're full of voters that you cannot afford to just write off as unwinnable. You have to at least try to win some of them. In 2009, McDonnell won Fairfax County, the most populous county in the state, and that year the allegedly too-far-right-to-win Ken Cuccinelli won 47.6 percent. In 2014, Gillespie won 40 percent in the county, against an incumbent. The Post poll finds Trump at 23 percent in the Northern Virginia suburbs.

Kathleen Kane Was an Honorary Clinton All Along

Bill Clinton, endorsing Kathleen Kane in 2012:

"The first elected office I ever held was Attorney-General, so it's a job I know something about. The Attorney General can have an enormous positive impact, so it's important to elect someone who understands how to use the office and the legal system to protect and advance the lives of Pennsylvanians. Kathleen Kane would make a great Attorney General. She's smart and tough. She's prosecuted more than 3000 cases, protected senior citizens, and put child molesters and violent criminals behind bars," remarked President Clinton. "Kathleen is a great Democrat who understands that an Attorney General's job is to stand up for consumers and people. I'm proud to endorse my friend Kathleen Kane and I hope she'll become the first woman ever elected Attorney General by the people of Pennsylvania."

The news last night:

Four years after Kane's election in a landslide as the first Democrat and first woman elected attorney general, a jury of six men and six women found her guilty of all charges: two counts of perjury and seven misdemeanor counts of abusing the powers of her office.

Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin R. Steele persuaded jurors that Kane orchestrated the illegal leak of secret grand jury documents to plant a June 2014 story critical of her nemesis, former state prosecutor Frank Fina. Kane then lied about her actions under oath, the jury found.

Perjury, a cover-up, and abuse of power, huh? Man, Kane really did earn the Clinton seal of approval.

You know corruption is really, really bad when even the Democratic party won't stand by you:

Roughly 30 minutes after Attorney General Kathleen Kane was convicted on two counts of perjury and seven misdemeanor counts of abusing the powers of her office, Gov. Wolf called for her immediate resignation.

It may not have been a tough call for Wolf, who had already called for her step down one year ago -- after his fellow Democrat had been charged criminally, but before the state Supreme Court revoked Kane's law license, rendering her unable to take part in any of the legal aspects of her job as the state's top law-enforcement officer.

Let that sink in for a bit. She's a prosecutor who is legally prohibited from doing any legal work. What does she do all day? Attend ribbon-cutting ceremonies? How epically arrogant and power-mad do you have to be to refuse to resign under these circumstances?

And for all of those folks who endorsed her, convinced that she "understands that an Attorney General's job is to stand up for consumers and people" feel any regret about their choice? Any embarrassment that they touted a woman who was completely unfit for the officer and her duties?

History's Biggest Presidential Losers Weren't Really Losers

An important piece on the home page, pointing out that if 2016 ends in a landslide defeat for Republicans, it will mark the first landslide defeat for a party that is entirely self-inflicted. Every other factor — Hillary Clinton's weak personal numbers, the state of the economy, the state of the world, the mood of the electorate, the inherent challenge in a party keeping control of the White House for a third consecutive term — point to an election that should be at least competitive, or arguably give the GOP a considerable advantage.

We've seen some major presidential landslides in the past two generations; I picked Johnson in 1964, Nixon in 1972, and Reagan in 1984 as the best examples. The irony is that the losing candidates were pretty rational choices for their parties that year, and it's difficult to argue that the losing party would have won if they had simply nominated one of the alternatives. Some years, like 1964, 1972, and 1984, one party's loss is just about guaranteed by the national political environment and the candidate can only mitigate the damage.

Perhaps the most important point is that two of the biggest presidential losers of all time are remembered as caricatures, when the truth is quite different:

Some have compared Trump's campaign — and the strident, often-personal criticism it's invited — to Goldwater's effort in 1964. It's easy to picture the Clinton campaign recycling Johnson's infamous "Daisy" ad, which suggested that Goldwater's election would lead to nuclear war. It's even easier to picture Clinton's team repurposing the anti-Goldwater slogan, "In your guts, you know he's nuts," for use against Trump.

But if Goldwater was a lunatic, he was the kind who somehow managed to hold it together long enough to reach the rank of major general in the U.S. Air Force Reserves, flying 165 types of aircraft in his career. If Goldwater was a lunatic, he was that rare one who could write the philosophical treatise The Conscience of a Conservative. Johnson and others very effectively caricatured Goldwater as a senatorial version of Slim Pickens riding the H-Bomb, which helped cost him the election.

But in actuality he was a humble, gracious, deep thinker who worked extensively with members of both parties. After President Kennedy's assassination, any Republican nominee would have had an enormously difficult task defeating Johnson, running on Kennedy's agenda with the public's sympathy at his back. You rarely hear historians speculating that other GOP options in the 1964 primary, such as Nelson Rockefeller or James Rhodes, would have succeeded where Goldwater failed.

The caricature of McGovern's 1972 campaign was also so successful as to pass into history almost unchallenged: "Acid, amnesty, and abortion," a phrase that originated with McGovern's short-lived running mate, Thomas Eagleton. But McGovern, like Goldwater, contradicted the cartoon his opponents painted in some key ways. He was the passionately anti-war candidate who volunteered for the U.S. Army Air Forces a month after Pearl Harbor and flew 35 bombing missions over German-occupied Europe. He was a known quantity in American politics by 1972 having been elected to the House 16 years earlier and the Senate ten years earlier. His liberal agenda might have seemed extreme at the time, but no one doubted his sanity or temperament. William F. Buckley called him the "single nicest human being I've ever met."

If McGovern was an extremist, he was the kind of extremist who would work with colleagues for two-and-a-half decades in Congress, the kind of hard-line ideologue who could somehow bring himself to vote for Gerald Ford and Robert Dole over Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale in 1976. McGovern's campaign stumbled, most notably by picking and then replacing the politically toxic Eagleton, but the chaos of the late 1960s and early 1970s undoubtedly put Americans in a mood for "law and order." The Democrats' other top options, Hubert Humphrey and Edmund Muskie, had just lost to Nixon four years earlier.

You could also make the case that both men lost the election but won the battle to redefine their parties for a generation.

ADDENDA: Yesterday afternoon I asked why the riots in Milwaukee seem to be getting so much less media coverage than events in Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore. BuzzFeed offers a surprising and unnerving answer: the angry mobs are threatening journalists and some neighborhoods have become too unsafe to cover.

Meanwhile, they're covering fighting in Aleppo, Syria with drone cameras.