If you were trying to predict the future four years ago, you might have expected Republicans to be in better shape in Virginia than New Jersey. Republicans romped in the election for governor in the first state, while winning more narrowly in the second. Jersey is also much more Democratic than Virginia: It went for President Obama by a bigger margin than any other state with a Republican governor.
Yet the polls show GOP Gov. Chris Christie is cruising to an easy re-election in New Jersey while Republican Ken Cuccinelli is trailing in the race to lead Virginia. Cuccinelli is losing even though he’s running against Terry McAuliffe, widely derided even among Democrats as a weak candidate.
In northern Virginia, where I live, McAuliffe’s campaign has been pounding Cuccinelli with ad after ad making him out to be an extreme social conservative who wants to restrict birth control and divorce. Those ads appear to have worked, especially among women, who favor McAuliffe by a huge margin. The federal government shutdown, which affected a lot of people in northern Virginia, probably hurt Cuccinelli, too, but he was down in the polls and losing support before it began.
The social conservative Maggie Gallagher blames Cuccinelli’s poor showing on his failure to stand up for his views. She argues that the flaw of the “truce” strategy now favored by many Republicans is that the other side doesn’t observe it. Last year, for example, Democrats said that Republican views on social issues amounted to a “war on women.” When Republicans don’t respond vigorously to such attacks, they demoralize their allies and lead moderate voters to think that maybe the Republican candidate really is a social- issues extremist who wants to hide it.
The argument is persuasive but incomplete. To get a fuller picture, think back to the 2009 contest for governor in Virginia. Republican Bob McDonnell, the current governor, won big even though Democrats tried to paint him, too, as a social-issues extremist.
Why do they seem to be succeeding now when they failed then? It’s partly countenance: McDonnell was cheerful (if boring); Cuccinelli often appears dour and argumentative. And it’s partly because McDonnell, unlike Cuccinelli (or Mitt Romney), responded to the attacks with his own effective ads.
Another difference, though, is that Cuccinelli made his name as a conservative crusader, especially on social issues, where McDonnell made his as a bipartisan problem-solver. McDonnell’s Democratic critics had to dig up his 20-year-old grad-school thesis to make him look out of the mainstream; Cuccinelli’s have more recent initiatives and statements to work with. Refusing to defend that record put Cuccinelli in the worst possible position.
He’d probably have been better off restating his views while criticizing McAuliffe’s own extremism. (McAuliffe refuses to say if he thinks partial-birth abortion should be legal, for instance.) That would’ve given conservatives more reason to come out to vote for Cuccinelli, and at the least given moderates less reason to vote against him.
Cuccinelli may have hesitated because polls have shown him losing a significant number of votes to a third-party candidate running as a pro-choice libertarian. But even a lot of libertarian-leaning Republicans are willing to vote for pro-life candidates, as McDonnell’s landslide proved.
Socially conservative positions on hot-button issues don’t seem to be a deal-breaker even for New Jersey’s much more liberal voters. Christie has vetoed legislation to grant state recognition to same-sex marriage (a judge later ordered it; Christie briefly appealed) and vetoed bills to fund Planned Parenthood five times.
Yet he doesn’t seem obsessed by social issues: Democrats haven’t gotten much mileage out of ads saying that his priorities are different from those of voters, as they have against Cuccinelli. Christie has also avoided taking unpopular socially conservative stands on issues that aren’t live debates, and taken the occasional opportunity to soften his profile.
If the polls hold up, Cuccinelli’s defeat may demoralize social conservatives — especially if the media spin the defeat as a sign that their concerns are a millstone around the neck of GOP politicians. Christie’s likely re-election shows that such an interpretation is wrong. Being a social conservative is not by itself a political death sentence even in deep-blue territory.
If Christie wants to run for president, he may find that pointing this out is a low-cost way of appealing to a national constituency that matters a lot in his party.
Ramesh Ponnuru is a Bloomberg View columnist and an American Enterprise Institute visiting fellow.