All Politics is Local

One year had passed since the new president’s memorable election. His approval rating was hovering precariously over 50 percent. His party held the governorships of both New Jersey and Virginia, but it was becoming increasingly likely that the opposing party would poach both offices in upcoming elections.

The year was 2001, the president was George W. Bush, and Democrats Jim McGreevey and Mark Warner later went on to be elected governors of New Jersey and Virginia, respectively, after years of Republican rule. The parallels between McGreevey’s and Warner’s elections and those of Republican governors-elect Chris Christie of New Jersey and Bob McDonnell of Virginia are striking, and yet their respective characterizations in the media have been vastly different.

This year, these two local elections have been portrayed as signs of a sea change in American politics, occurring, miraculously, just a year after the last sea change in American politics. Instead, overzealous political commentators would do well to recall the old adage, “all politics is local.”

In an Oct. 28 column for The Wall Street Journal, former Bush advisor Karl Rove wrote that “Democratic enthusiasm for President Barack Obama’s liberal domestic agenda—particularly for a government-run health insurance program—could wane after the results of the gubernatorial elections next Tuesday in Virginia and New Jersey. GOP victories in either state will tell Democrats in red states and districts that support for Obama’s policies is risky to their political health.”

In light of the House of Representatives’s passage of universal health-care legislation on Nov. 7, Rove’s analysis looks particularly foolish. The notion that the results of two local races constitute a national referendum on the president’s agenda is preposterous and is not in line with the conventional wisdom for off-year elections.

There is no mistaking that the two gubernatorial contests, particularly the race in New Jersey, were defined largely by local issues. In New Jersey, defeated Democratic Governor Jon Corzine carried voters citing health care as their number-one priority 78 percent to Christie’s 19 percent—quite the reverse of the referendum on health care that Rove envisioned. Voters citing parochial issues such as property taxes and corruption, on the other hand, favored Christie more than two to one. The most obvious rebuttal, however, is the fact that President Obama is still popular in New Jersey, with an approval rating of 57 percent.

In neither Virginia nor New Jersey did the Republican candidate run against the president. Christie, in fact, dropped the president’s name frequently, featuring clips of Obama’s most inspirational speeches in his ads and often portraying himself as an ally of Obama on education policy due to their agreement on charter schools and merit pay. After his election, Christie told a crowd in Woodbridge, N.J., that “It’s [his election] not a repudiation of the president. In fact, I said the exact opposite during the campaign,” and McDonnell did the same, saying that he “ran on Virginia issues, kitchen table issues. That’s largely what got people to support our campaign.”

The inordinate emphasis placed on the events in New Jersey and Virginia last week, therefore, is nothing more than the product of a media desperate to turn minor occurrences into events of historic importance and a Republican party desperate for a comeback. The Democrats face many hurdles between now the 2010 midterms, and some opinion polling does suggest that support for their agenda is waning, but the results of two local governors races don’t spell doom for Obama and his party.