There's no point in pretending that last night was anything but a washout for Republicans. The race that everyone's pointing to is in Virginia, where Democratic Lieutenant Governor Tim Kaine beat Republican Attorney General Jerry Kilgore. I haven't been following my home-state politics all that closely, but everyone seems to want to read the morning coffee-grounds and turn this into a proxy national fight. Guru Larry Sabato says that they have a 50-50 chance of being right:
So what does this show? In two cases, the off-off year elections were indicators of the following year's political trends, and in the other two cases, they weren't. Please remember this unimpressive record of prognostication when you read the party press releases and the gee-whiz news stories next month. Here's the useless summary, based on history: The off-off year elections of 2005 may either be a harbinger of things to come in 2006, or they may not be.
What people miss is that Virginia has a one-and-done term limit, and that outgoing Democrat Mark Warner is extremely popular, having governed as a centrist. (Even liberals tend to govern as centrists in Virginia. It was First-Black-Governor-Elected-Since-Reconstruction-Doug-Wilder who signed a bill combining Lee-Jackson Day with MLK's birthday to make Lee-Jackson-King Day.) So people were voting for what they see as Warner Redux.
Yes, the race was a proxy, but not between Bush and whatever shrieking conspiracy theorist the Dems have making the rounds on Sunday morning this week. It was between Warner and George Allen. Kilgore is Allen's protege, and both Allen and Warner have presidential ambitons. (I think a Warner-Allen matchup in 2008 would be great fun. Virginia would probably end up being the swing state, and they could set up the debates at all those Civil War battlefields, just to remind people which side the Democrats were on back then.)
To the extent that Kaine's win validates the idea that a centrist Democrat can win in a state without a coastline, this is bad news for Hillary.