The Democrats lost two governorships yesterday as New Jersey and Virginia went Republican. The GOP candidates in both races had avoided talking about Obama yet the Democrat candidates made Obama a centerpiece of their races, and Obama openly campaigned for the Virginia Democrat. The GOP also picked up contested state legislative seats across the USA and, as of this morning, had not lost any contested seats.

The night was a loss for the Democrats and Obama and the night was a portent of things to come for next year's mid-term elections.

The media *before* the election were saying how this would be a plebescite on Obama and the Dems and now *after* the election they're saying this means nothing.

Also yesterday, the liberal state of Maine soundly rejected gay marriage and kept the run going where every time the issue has come up to a vote the voters say no to gay marriage.

Gay marriage only wins in the courts and it is a predictable loser at the polls in every state it has been run in. The result of this election is that it is now even less likely for Obama to try to put gays in the military or for the Democrats to try and revoke the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act.

   

Didn't an expansion of same-sex benefits pass in Washington State though?

And what about NY-23 Bartman? I think it's safe to say that the rigid ideologues on the right showed what happens when they push moderate incumbents out of town: Democrats win seats that they haven't won since the Civil War.

   

Incumbents? You realize the seat wasn't an incumbent at all, but rather freed up by the former seat holder joining the Obama Administration. The problem is, and the reason why that race was different from the others was that there was no Primary race, and she was basically put into the running without consulting the actual members of the Republican party, instead of those who make a living being the chief of something or other. On top of that, once she dropped out, she endorsed the Democratic candidate.

You're making it sound like they split the party (and the vote) just for the hell of it.

Edit: I didn't realize the United States had a Civil War in 1989.

   

The US Civil War of 1989 was a bloody, traumatic, and terrible part of our history that we have worked hard to forget and to excise from our collective memory. Please don't mention it again, thank you.

   

Whoops. My bad. My apologies to your war dead...

   

The real story was that it was a victory for Republican moderates, especially in NY-23. The New Jersey race was won because Joe Corzine is an obnoxious dick. Virginia is a harsh and unforgiving state that went Republican and took their anger out on the Democrat because of the bad job the outgoing Democrat governor had done. NY-23 is self-explanitary. Rural New Yorkers are Republicans, they aren't conservatives hyperactive populist radicals of the Glenn Beck/Sarah Palin ilk. The outside influences that propelled the independent candidate forward basically crapped all over local upstate issues and tried to turn the district into another front for their ideological war. It failed miserably for them, moderate Republicans went towards the local Democratic candidate, and repudiated the extremist carpetbagger that the nutcases were using as their stalking horse.

The lessons are thus:

1) Moderate Republican conservatism isn't dead.
2) Populist radicals from the right-wing fringe are too stupid to notice this and will continue their Stalinist purging of the "un-conservatives" from the Republican party.
3) Off-year elections have squat to do with the popularity of the sitting President, and anyone who says otherwise is just passing gas as usual.
4) The radical puritan ideological garbage that the populists have embraced might work in Dixie, but it has no traction anywhere else.
5) A Sarah Palin/ Fox News endorsement is a kiss of death but, once again, they're too damn dumb to figure it out.

Normal people win, idiots lose. And that's the way the whole world should always operate.

   

The only elections I am really aware of are the two governorships and the NY-23 race. Did anything else big go down?

Being the perennial skeptic of polls and statistics that I am, I don't really see any definite conclusions coming out of these races. I know people are voting against the Democrats/Obama/what have you, but I don't think we can adequately quantify those numbers to make any far-reaching conclusions about a "referendum on Obama" in the two governors races. I do see that Obama personally campaigning for Corzine didn't bring home the win, but that is simply an indication that he can't sway the elctorate on his own. So from the governors races, I see the political vulnerability of the Democrats and Obama, but I don't regard anything as a foregone conclusion. The Congressional elections in 2010 will be a much more definite barometer.

And on the NY-23 election, while I am disappointed that Hoffman didn't pull out the win, the 30% jump in the polls he made in three weeks was very impressive. Hopefully the RNC will get the message to not waste money on candidates more liberal than their Democrat counterparts (who also end up endorsing the Democrat when they withdraw from the race). Congratulations to Bill Owens, and we'll see him on the campaign trail next year.

   

Virtually all US elections one year after a Presidential Election go against the party of the President. It's people who lost the previous year regaining some of their lost power while those who won are still basking. It doesn't mean anything about Obama.

It was caused by H.W. Bush declaring "Read my lips... no new taxes!" and then raising taxes. He had to ban the import assault weapons into the United States to quell the violence.