Virginia Governor's Race 2013 -Who's Gonna Win?

[Skill and Chance]

But the fact that Cuccinelli got closer than Romney seems relevant. 

One way of looking at is that McAuliffe's margin over Cuccinelli's was smaller. Another is that Romney got 47.28% of the vote, Cuccinelli got about 45.3% (as of now.) The 2013 electorate should have favored Cuccinelli. While he did better than predicted, really McAuliffe did worse than predicted, and McAuliffe was so much worse of a candidate than Obama...

But you also have the Libertarian , and most of his best counties overlapped with Cuccinelli's support.

[Sbane]

But the fact that Cuccinelli got closer than Romney seems relevant.  Romney = worst possible candidate for rural populist voters and the suburbs didn't swing left as much as many though.  It almost makes you wonder if GOP could have flipped OH and VA in 2012 with a SoCon getting supercharged rural turnout.  Santorum was probably too far out in right field to stay near Romney numbers in the suburbs, but what about Huckabee?

The Obama coalition of young minorities just did not turn out to vote. They will turn out to vote for Presidential elections though. The GOP can learn some lessons on how to win in 2014 (they already know) but beyond that this means nothing. Cuccinelli would have lost by 7-8 points if the entire Obama coalition showed up to vote.

[Holmes]

Difficult to conpare Romney vs. Cuccinelli because millions of 2012 voters didn't go to thr polls a week ago.

[Skill and Chance]

Difficult to conpare Romney vs. Cuccinelli because millions of 2012 voters didn't go to thr polls a week ago.

That's true, but the electorate last Tuesday was only 2% less diverse and 2% less Dem than the Obama 2012 electorate.  And McAuliffe finished... 2% behind Obama!

So the more diverse presidential electorate is a factor.  And G.W. Bush has shown that enough minority voters will give an populist SoCon R a second look.  Although that needle gets harder to thread every year.  It's worth noting, however that the Evangelical numbers are even more unanimous for the GOP now than they were for Bush.  A lot of people suspected Romney would have an Evangelical problem.  Instead, they broke stronger for him than Bush!

[publicunofficial]

The Cuccinelli campaign didn't do any polling after October 18 because they couldn't afford it.

[Badger]

There's a real argument to be made that when the disastrously bad Obamacare rollout supplanted the then-resolved federal shutdown in the news cycle, Cooch attempted to make his election a referendum on Obamacare. The effect was to allow Cooch to recover some ground lost among swing voters during the shutdown and simultaneously make back ground on an issue the same swing voters feel negatively towards Obama and Democrats over.

There was a limit to how much this could pay off in a state election as opposed to a federal race, but to the extent it could work, it did. There's little way the RGA and RNC could predict the Obamacare rollout giving Cooch such an unexpected opportunity to turn things around in such short a period, so the decision to pull resources made sense without 20/20 hindsight. However, if the funding had been fully committed all along to capitalize on this late swing, there would've been at least a fighting chance the GOP could've converted this narrow loss into a win.

More than lessons about Obamacare or the shutdown or extremism, this shows just how much the final dominant news stories in a campaign season can change everything.

[Sol]

But the fact that Cuccinelli got closer than Romney seems relevant.  Romney = worst possible candidate for rural populist voters and the suburbs didn't swing left as much as many though.  It almost makes you wonder if GOP could have flipped OH and VA in 2012 with a SoCon getting supercharged rural turnout.  Santorum was probably too far out in right field to stay near Romney numbers in the suburbs, but what about Huckabee?

A socon like Huckabee would have performed poorly in some of the R-voting suburbs and exurbs though, particularly in NOVA.