What happened to Jerry Kilgore's VA gov. campaign on 2005?

[sg0508]

-Did he just overplay the social conservative card in VA?
-Did he just underestimate how popular Mark Warner was?
-Did he underestimate northern VA's growth, which has killed the GOP here the last 10 years?
-Too much negative campaigning, which aliented moderates?
-Did Kaine just run a better campaign?
-Was Kilgore just an idiot who ran his own campaign into the ground?

I remember he was consistently up in the polls by 5-7 pts throughout 2005 and then suddenly in Sept, the polls switched and he fell apart. Kaine won the race going away and from what I remember, Kilgore barely made a concession speech to supporters, whicih was pathetic.

What happened? 

[JohnnyLongtorso]

- Kilgore overreached with some of his ads, particularly one in which he attacked Kaine on the death penalty, saying that Kaine would have let Hitler live. Here's a good article about it: http://www.roanoke.com/editorials/wb/wb/xp-36011

- Katrina happened two months before the election, which was the tipping point for Bush's approval ratings. On the other hand, Warner was leaving office with approval ratings in the 70s or so.

- Kilgore was not a very good campaigner. He's from the extreme southwestern tip of Virginia, so he didn't have much of an electoral base, and he won the Attorney General election by default since the Democratic candidate was Don McEachin, a very liberal black State Delegate from Richmond who had no chance of winning.

- Kaine wisely didn't try to win using the Warner playbook (win over the rural Southside and SWVA) but went with the same metropolitan strategy that Obama used. He ran up big margins in Richmond, Hampton Roads, and Northern Virginia, and he was the first Democrat to win the NoVa exurbs (Loudoun and Prince William) in a long time.

[Landslide Lyndon]

I read that the Democrats succesfully painted Kilgore as a Palin-like figure: a not very bright rural hick.
And also that his heavy accent featured prominently in all Democratic ads and was the subject of endless mockery.

[SamInTheSouth]

Kilgore was an awful candidate.  I was in Washington D.C. two weeks before that election and watched a debate between Kaine and Kilgore on tv and I knew at the end of that debate Kaine was going to win.

[Smash255]

The answer to all of those questions is yes.

[Brittain33]

I read that the Democrats succesfully painted Kilgore as a Palin-like figure: a not very bright rural hick.
And also that his heavy accent featured prominently in all Democratic ads and was the subject of endless mockery.

My recollection is that his accented voice was played up in Kaine's ads because it made him sound gay like Jim Nabors. Few newspapers would state that openly.