It seems difficult to believe, but the candidates for governor actually talk about issues other than each other.
Sometimes their positions are counterintuitive: Republican Ken Cuccinelli questions the spiraling cost to taxpayers of the GOP-written no-parole law. Sometimes they’re conventional: Democrat Terry McAuliffe proposes junking standardized exams for public school kids because their instructors, whose union endorsed him, teach to the test.
At the beginning of the end of the Virginia campaign — the Labor Day pivot to Election Day — little of this seeps through the fog of attacks and counterattacks pegged to the nominees’ polling-confirmed flaws and the mistrust of politics fed by the scandal that is destroying the governor McAuliffe or Cuccinelli will succeed.
The state of the race is grim and promises to become more so because of factors Cuccinelli and McAuliffe choose not to control — or can’t:
• Giftgate has rendered Bob McDonnell useless to Republicans. He could become a pair of cement shoes.
Ordinarily, a popular incumbent is a potent salesman for his party’s candidates, generating good will and a surfeit of contributions. McDonnell is someone from whom Republicans run. And a Cuccinelli commercial runs over him, crediting Cuccinelli, as attorney general, with launching a conflict-of-interest investigation of McDonnell.
Expect more of that if McDonnell is indicted by a federal grand jury on public-corruption charges.
Cuccinelli will have no choice but to depict McDonnell as a pariah. There are two reasons for this: An indictment magnifies Cuccinelli’s own ethics mess, the shorthand of which is Star Scientific and Consol Energy. Also, the prospect of McDonnell frog-marched into the U.S. courthouse would depress Republican turnout and trigger a throw-the-bums-out reflex among Democrats and independents.
And a tarnished McAuliffe would be the beneficiary.
To fellow Democrats, he is viewed as ethically challenged, given his roles in many of the Clinton controversies and those in which he has star billing. This includes his electric car company, now under federal investigation for possibly abusing a visa-for-jobs program to bag Chinese investors.
• Republicans, badly divided before their statewide ticket was completed in May, are now nearly at war with themselves.
The Cuccinelli switcheroo — the shift from a primary to a convention that doomed Bill Bolling — rubbed raw nerves that were further frayed by McDonnell’s two promise-breaking initiatives: new road taxes and an expected expansion of Medicaid to comply with Obamacare. Neither would have been implemented without solid support by Democrats to make up for Republican rebels.
The struggle among Republicans is again flaring publicly.
In June and August, tea partyers jammed meetings of the legislative panel that will oversee Medicaid expansion. Last week, state Republican Chairman Pat Mullins and Susan Stimpson, defeated for the GOP lieutenant governor’s nomination, curtly dueled over Medicaid via mass-circulation email. Mullins said bigger, costlier Medicaid is not a done deal. Stimpson suggested it is.
This can only discourage Republicans, give them an excuse not to vote. Usually it is Republicans who benefit from low-turnout elections. Who could imagine the key to McAuliffe’s much-discussed get-out-the-vote program would be the Republicans who stay home Nov. 5?
• Cuccinelli is losing the money race — badly.
Fundraising is a referendum on candidates. With McAuliffe way ahead in cash, even more could flow his way because donors gravitate to perceived winners. McAuliffe has raised more than $12.6 million; Cuccinelli, nearly $8.9 million. McAuliffe has on hand $6 million; Cuccinelli, $2.6 million.
The only other campaign for governor this year is in New Jersey. Because it’s not much of one — Republican Chris Christie, a White House prospect in 2016, is heavily favored for a second term — more national money in Virginia is likely.
Independent single-interest groups are just beginning to meddle in the Cuccinelli-McAuliffe contest. For them, the Virginia election is a chance to exact a chit from the victor and to fine-tune themes and technology for congressional and presidential elections.
• Geopolitics are skewed by issues and personalities, possibly exaggerating McAuliffe’s advantages and diminishing Cuccinelli’s.
Northern Virginia is heavily Democratic. Because it is next door to Washington, national and local politics are one and the same. McAuliffe is relying on this to boost turnout, especially in the outer suburbs of Loudoun and Prince William counties.
It may not be hard because it’s easy for Democrats to vote against Cuccinelli. Cuccinelli, by his own hand and the national media, has been reduced to caricature: a no-no-a-thousand-times-no tea partyer whose policies toward women seem misogynistic; toward immigrants, nativistic.
Cuccinelli must be competitive in the urban crescent. He has to win going away in the countryside, a Republican bulwark.
That’s a challenge in Southwest Virginia. Republicans say Cuccinelli is losing friends fast in the region because of a controversy associated with his day job as attorney general.
A federal judge expressed outrage that a lawyer in the attorney general’s office advised two large energy companies in a fight with landowners over natural gas royalties. The state’s inspector general was sufficiently alarmed, too. He’s now investigating Cuccinelli’s office.
It’s bad enough, locals say, that Cuccinelli is seen as siding with corporate big boys. Worse is his perceived conflict of interest, having taken more than $110,000 in contributions from one of the firms, Consol Energy.
And we still have 65 days to go.
Contact Jeff E. Schapiro at
(804) 649-6814. His column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Watch his video column Thursday on TimesDispatch.com[1] . Follow him on Twitter @RTDSchapiro. Listen to his analysis 8:33 a.m. Friday on WCVE (88.9 FM).
