Creigh Deeds Beats Former DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe....Here's How, Why

Politico----

State Sen. Creigh Deeds’ surprising blowout win in Tuesday’s Virginia gubernatorial primary can be summarized in 30 seconds.

That was the length of the ad he aired on Washington-area broadcast stations in the pivotal final days of his 2-to-1 victory over former state Del. Brian Moran and former Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe.

In that brief half-minute, the Deeds campaign made some critical points to the well-informed Northern Virginia primary electorate that helped turn undecided voters his way in droves and made a son of the Alleghenies the unlikely victor over two suburbanites in the most populous part of the state.

At the start and finish, the ad’s narrator noted that Deeds had won the endorsement of The Washington Post, a meaningful credential in a race with relatively little-known candidates, and that he was in the mold of Virginia’s two moderate and well-liked Democratic governors, now-Sen. Mark Warner and Gov. Timothy Kaine.

In between, viewers were informed that Deeds supported abortion rights, had high ratings from teachers (translation: safe for the region’s left-leaning Democratic base) and that he was focused on transportation and education (translation: He may be from a place that is culturally light-years away from traffic-choked Tysons Corner, but he understands the region’s perennial priorities).

Though he appears in the ad, not once did Deeds speak and reveal his country-inflected twang to voters in the least-Southern part of the state.

The size of the ad buy was as important as the message. For all the talk of McAuliffe’s massive spending, Deeds’ late momentum sparked a critical influx of dollars that Democratic sources say allowed him to match his deep-pocketed rival on the airwaves at the end. For the last week of the campaign, Deeds spent $950,000 on TV ads to McAuliffe’s $1 million.

Electability, continuity and acceptability on the issues — it was the right message on TV but also in his mail pieces and on the stump. It allowed Deeds to carry all three of Northern Virginia’s congressional districts and turn what would have been a win into a rout.

He was also helped, as runaway winners almost always are, by the flaws and mistakes of his rivals.

Moran, many Virginia Democrats believe, never recovered from McAuliffe’s entry into the race. He became an attack dog — his first ad was a negative spot on the Clinton pal — and sought to position himself as the purist liberal in the race.

But neither tactic worked, as he was overshadowed by McAuliffe’s big bucks and larger-than-life persona.

Still, many Democrats remained unsold on the man known as the Macker, and polls revealed the softness of the support he did have.

“He could just never quite surmount the concern that he was somebody who just hasn’t been involved in Virginia until he decided to run for governor of the commonwealth,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.). “He had trouble shaking the image of a ‘hustler.’”

But Deeds wasn’t simply the third — or last — man standing.

“Once people made the decision not to go with McAuliffe, the electability issue became important,” Robert Holsworth, a longtime Virginia political analyst, said of the late-breaking voters. “And Deeds had that perception that he could win.”

Kristian Denny Todd, a Democratic consultant who was neutral in this race, recalled her own experience in a similarly situated Virginia Democratic Senate primary three years ago, where the more conservative and down-home candidate in the race fared the best in the state’s most liberal and upscale region.

“These are the same Democratic activists in Northern Virginia who nominated somebody who had been a Republican four months prior because they thought he was the guy that could win,” Todd said of her then-client, Sen. Jim Webb. “Northern Virginia voters consider themselves political pundits.”

Moreover, most Virginia Democrats are quite pleased with their political lot right now. They’ve won consecutive gubernatorial races and picked up both U.S. Senate seats and control of the state Senate. They also enjoy a majority of the state’s House delegation and ended a 44-year losing streak by delivering the Old Dominion to President Barack Obama last fall.

Merely by entering the race for the state’s top job — a position former Gov. Mills Godwin once described as having “no higher honor” — with little connection to the political establishment, McAuliffe had shown a considerable amount of audacity.

And by campaigning as a Richmond outsider who vowed to “shake things up,” McAuliffe left many Democrats unmoved.

“The only thing they want to ‘shake up’ are the Republicans,” said Holsworth, speaking of what is now effectively the state’s majority party.

And that’s what made Deeds pledge to continue the “Warner-Kaine tradition” so resonant — it was a promise to “continue along the same trajectory and promote from within,” as Holsworth put it.

McAuliffe’s message would have been a better fit in 2001, when Warner ran as a Richmond outsider at a time when Republicans enjoyed near-complete control of the state. This time, Democrats didn’t think they needed to take a chance on a well-funded newcomer with few connections to the state Capitol.

As the cautious and moderate choice in a state known best for cautious moderation, Deeds fit well into Virginia’s Democratic mainstream and offered little fodder for the two suburban candidates to use to scare off liberal base voters.

The one area where they tried — tardily, in the final days of a race in which Deeds was surging — was on guns. Both Moran and McAuliffe sought to paint Deeds as insufficiently supportive of firearms restrictions, but the attacks had little effect in a state where grass-roots Democrats have demonstrated little concern for their leaders’ apostasy on the gun rights issue.

“We had the same position as Mark Warner and Jim Webb on guns,” said David Dixon, Deeds’ admaker.

Democrats view May 22 as the turning point, the day The Washington Post endorsed the only non-D.C.-area resident in the race.

While McAuliffe was drawing all the attention during the spring, Deeds made a big gamble to remain alive in the polls: He laid off some field staff so he could afford biographical-heavy TV ads in the inexpensive downstate markets.

By doing so, advisers say, he reinforced his strong rural standing and remained a credible contender — in other words, a viable candidate the Post could get behind.

And when they did, it could not have been more pitch-perfect for Deeds.

The paper indicated that he opposed his own interests downstate and was a strong supporter of transportation spending, a signal that he was ideologically acceptable. The editors made the case, too, on electability, writing that Deeds’ “moderate platform would have the broadest appeal” in the fall. The endorsement nodded at the idea of continuity, making reference to the legislative veteran’s studied observation of the state’s most successful Democratic governors, singling out former Gov. Gerald Baliles and Warner.

“It provided a gateway for him,” Dixon said of the editorial.

Soon after, the campaign was broadcasting the endorsement as a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval on every mail piece, ad and yard sign seen in the 703 area code.

Fred Hiatt, the Post’s editorial page editor and a former Virginia political reporter, said that without exit polling, it was difficult to definitively determine what impact the paper’s endorsement had.

But he did allow that its move “helped make sense of a race that was hard to make sense of.”

Others are less modest in their assessment.

“It was a very important validation, because it coincided with the late-deciders,” said Connolly, who noted that the paper repeated its support for Deeds and even defended him in subsequent editorials after the endorsement. “The timing couldn’t have been better.”

“[Deeds] got that late surge, precipitated by The Washington Post, which gave Northern Virginians a reason to take a look at his candidacy, which they hadn’t been doing until that moment,” said Mo Elleithee, a top strategist to McAuliffe’s campaign.

The Post endorsement, Elleithee said, “created the story line that he was surging.”

And in politics, especially primaries, the perception of momentum can quickly turn into the real thing.


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