Doug Hoffman, Bob McDonnell and Chris Christie

WATERTOWN, N.Y. — Conservatives declared victory in the 2009 off-year elections four days before voters went the polls. With the withdrawal of Dede Scozzafava, the embattled moderate Republican candidate, from the special election in New York’s 23rd Congressional District, activists and organizers are toasting a shocking victory over the Republican establishment.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

The hero of the moment is Doug Hoffman, the first-time candidate of the Conservative Party who effectively forced Scozzafava out of the race after national conservative groups like the Club for Growth and the Susan B. Anthony List showered his campaign with cash and staffed it with volunteers. On Sunday night, campaign strategists reacted to Scozzafava’s endorsement of Bill Owens, the Democratic candidate, by projecting confidence and dismissing the efforts Democrats made to win her over. Hoffman’s campaign was cheered by a survey from the North Carolina-based Public Policy Polling showing the candidate easily consolidating Scozzafava’s support. It did not push back against reports that the candidate failed to win over Scozzafava for an endorsement.

“I didn’t reach out to her,” said Hoffman’s spokesman Rob Ryan. “From day one, I haven’t had a thought about Dede Scozzafava unless it was about getting her out of this race.”

Still, conservative activists and Republican strategists told TWI that they were watching the results from NY-23 as part of a picture with at least three other high-profile elections on Tuesday. They are also looking to, and preparing to spin, an all-but-certain victory in Virginia’s statewide races, a possible victory in New Jersey’s gubernatorial election, and Maine ballot measures on tax rates and gay marriage.

In even the most disappointing scenario, where Republicans only gain ground in Virginia, they are getting ready to argue that voters are growing cold on the Democratic agenda and Barack Obama’s vaunted brand. (None of of the conservatives who spoke to TWI mentioned the mayoral election in Atlanta, where Mary Norwood, a onetime Republican activist, is expected to win the first round of voting and head to a runoff. If elected, Norwood would be the first white mayor of Atlanta since Richard Nixon’s presidency.)

“After the 2008 election, [there] was a lot of analysis that this country had made a big seismic shift to left of center,” said Gary Bauer, the president of American Values, and one of the first conservative organizers to endorse Hoffman. “I don’t think anything is going to happen to confirm that analysis. It’s still a right of center country. The ‘blame Bush’ card is getting old.”

Last week, the Los Angeles Times characterized the White House’s optimal election day scenario as a loss for Virginia gubernatorial candidate Deeds, a win for Gov. Jon Corzine (D-N.J.), and a “tie-breaker” Democratic win in NY-23. Conservatives, while optimistic about sweeping every one of these races, gave TWI some reasons why losses in New York, New Jersey and Maine would not necessarily be big defeats for the movement. But all suggested that the night would start out with unalloyed good news for the GOP: sweeping victories in Virginia. Polls in the commonwealth close at 7 p.m., and former Attorney General Robert McDonnell, the GOP’s candidate, leads Deeds by double-digit margins.

“This is a state that Democrats said was going blue, or least purple,” said Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform. “How do they explain it if they lose?”

Republicans are doing what they can to refocus on attention to what, according to polls, could be a Republican landslide. It would happen in a state that the Obama-Biden ticket carried by six points. Last week, RNC Chairman Michael Steele trekked across the Potomac and into Virginia for rallies with the GOP ticket. Victories in the races for governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general on Tuesday would mark only the second time in history–the first was 1997–when Republicans grabbed control of all three of Virginia’s statewide offices.

Republicans are optimistic, too, about a handful Republican candidates winning back state legislative seats that had fallen to the Democrats over the past few election cycles. One of those candidates, Barbara Comstock, is a powerful Republican lawyer running for a seat in Virginia’s House of Delegates who worked for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign and the defense teams of both I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby and Tom DeLay. In the summer, her partisan image was seen as a possible impediment to victory. Today, conservatives are hopeful that she’ll be swept in on McDonnell’s coattails.

There is less conservative optimism about New Jersey. It’s a Democratic-leaning state that’s played host to many Republican candidates who lost early poll leads as the electorate moved back to the majority party. Chris Christie, the GOP standard-bearer, has watched a once-commanding lead dwindle into a tie with Corzine. President Obama has repeatedly stumped for Corzine, hitting two of New Jersey’s vote-rich but poor cities in a Sunday campaign swing.

If Christie loses, Republicans have multiple scapegoats at the ready. One is Chris Daggett, a liberal Republican who ran as an independent and trained most of his fire on the GOP candidate. The other, to conservatives, would be Christie himself. He beat Americans for Prosperity state chairman Steve Lonegan in a surprisingly tough summer primary, taking hits from Lonegan for allegedly being too far to the left. At AFP’s “Defending the American Dream” summit held last month in northern Virginia, Lonegan told TWI that Christie was failing to give conservatives a reason to come out and vote. This week, Lonegan has joined Christie on the campaign trail to fire up conservative voters, but this pessimistic spin is at the ready if Corzine pulls out a win.

“If Christie is to win in New Jersey,” said Citizens United President and conservative activist David Bossie, “it would be a good day for America. It would be a rebuke of the establishment that is in complete control of New Jersey politics. But Christie is not really a leading conservative. He’s a good Republican, and he’d do a good job, and his election would be a rebuke to Barack Obama.”

Polls in New Jersey and in Maine close at 8 p.m., and few expect the results for either state to be announced quickly. And polls close at 11 p.m. ET in a special election for Congress in CA-10, a northern California district that Democrats have easily held in the past. Few conservatives give Republican candidate David Harmer a chance there, as Lt. Gov. John Garamendi (D-Calif.), who’s won elections in the state for decades, holds strong leads in polls of the early and absentee voters who make up more than half of California’s electorate. Inevitably, the election will be seen in the context of what happens in NY-23–where polls close at 9 p.m., and where counting could go on for hours. Some Hoffman backers believe that Mike Huckabee, one of few prominent Harmer supporters, endorsed the candidate before he endorsed Hoffman because of Huckabee’s long-standing feud with the Club for Growth.

Heading into Tuesday, most conservatives and Republicans professed optimism about what will happen at the polls. But an alternative take has already been written. Michael Barone, the editor of the Almanac of American Politics a conservative-leaning columnist, told TWI that it would be practically impossible for Democrats to claim significant wins even if they succeed in the White House’s “tiebreaker” scenario.

“If Corzine and Owens win,” said Barone, “they both will have gotten well under Obama’s percentages in those constituencies.”

“The Republican Party’s embrace of the nativist base is probably the most self destructive” decision party leaders could make, Frank Sharry, executive director of the immigration reform group America’s Voice, told Roll Call.

Given that Latinos tend to be Catholic and socially conservative, many might have leaned Republican, Sharry notes, had the GOP not started adopting a nativist agenda. This latest anti-immigrant stance, Sharry argues, risks transforming Latino voters  from a swing group to “a reliable bloc” for Democrats.

Henry Fernandez, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, agreed.

“Immigration is a constant theme,” he told Roll Call. “It’s red meat for foot soldiers who are willing to hold up signs at town halls,” adding that the anti-immigrant rhetoric encourages the participation of “dangerous people in our public discourse.”

As I reported last week, protesters at town hall meetings are increasingly railing against lawmakers for seeking to provide health care to illegal immigrants, although the pending House bill not only denies benefits to illegal immigrants but severely restricts benefits to legal immigrants as well. Still, the anger fomented by anti-health care reform groups has spilled over into nativist death threats.

Last week outside President Obama’s town hall meeting in New Hampshire, one protester shouted, “We don’t need illegals,” adding, “Send ‘em back with a bullet in the head.”

Josh Kraushaar notices that Republicans have gotten the U.S. Senate candidates they wanted in New Hampshire and Illinois, where they “lacked a deep bench of viable recruits — and their political hopes were largely dependent on one specific candidate running.” This feeds this week’s meme that Republican candidate recruiting is taking off, and the party is looking at a comeback after two disastrous election cycles.

Two side notes. One, the story of the party’s Senate recruiting is the story of moderates being enticed to run in blue states. If Republicans perform well in 2010, they’ll add Mike Castle (Delaware), Mark Kirk (Illinois), Charlie Crist (Florida) and Kelly Ayotte (New Hampshire) to the Senate. That would be a net gain of two seats, with two candidates who supported cap-and-trade legislation, one who supported the stimulus and one who was re-appointed by a Democratic governor. If the party scores an upset in California, it would be with Carly Fiorina, a pro-choice moderate who was silenced by the McCain campaign after angering social conservatives. who was thrown under the bus by the McCain campaign after a series of gaffes.

Second note: The White House failed to get Lisa Madigan to run in Illinois and Roy Cooper to run in North Carolina, but it got the candidates it wanted in Missouri, Kentucky, Ohio and New Hampshire. For all the attention paid to Rep. Carolyn Maloney’s (D-N.Y.) run in New York, the White House scared two potential candidates out of the field to help Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.). Rep. Joe Sestak’s (D-Pa.) primary challenge in Pennsylvania doesn’t seem to be creating an opening for former Rep. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.). It all seems like slightly less success than George W. Bush had in 2002 Senate race recruitments, but much more than Bill Clinton had in 1994 races. In other words, pretty average.

- Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), one of the last Republican stars in suburban Chicago, is considering running for President Obama’s old Senate seat, currently occupied by Sen. Roland Burris (D-Ill.), who has reached an almost comic level of political weakness.

- Trey Grayson, Kentucky’s Republican state treasurer, might have the go-ahead to replace Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) if the enfeebled Bunning retires next year.

There is no plausible scenario under which Republicans can grow into a majority while shrinking our ideological confines and continuing to retract into a regional party. Ideological purity is not the ticket back to the promised land of governing majorities — indeed, it was when we began to emphasize social issues to the detriment of some of our basic tenets as a party that we encountered an electoral backlash.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because Specter himself voiced the same sentiments Tuesday, as did former GOP Sen. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island — who was quick to point out in a phone interview that the same conservative Club for Growth that contributed to his defeat in 2006 is largely responsible for pushing Specter out of the party this year.

Echoing Snowe’s criticism of the GOP’s misguided focus on hot-button social issues, Chafee blasted the 2006 decision of party leaders to dwell on contentious items like bans on gay marriage and flag burning — things popular among the Rush Limbaugh base, but alienating to many moderate Americans.

The message from these moderates seems to be this: The decision by Republican leaders to unite around a theme of right-wing social conservatism should also be accompanied by the recognition that most of the country thinks differently — and the shift in congressional power is simply the natural consequence of this ideological incongruity.

Snowe ends her screed by invoking the words of Ronald Reagan:

We should emphasize the things that unite us and make these the only “litmus test” of what constitutes a Republican: our belief in restraining government spending, pro-growth policies, tax reduction, sound national defense, and maximum individual liberty … As to the other issues that draw on the deep springs of morality and emotion, let us decide that we can disagree among ourselves as Republicans and tolerate the disagreement.

“I couldn’t agree more,” Snowe writes. “We can’t continue to fold our philosophical tent into an umbrella under which only a select few are worthy to stand.”

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From the Republican National Committee’s 2008 Platform:

The recent attempt by congressional Democrats to deny workers a secret ballot in union referenda is an assault, not only against a fundamental principle of labor law, but even more against the dignity and honor of the American work force. We oppose “card check” legislation, which deprives workers of their privacy and their right to vote, because it exposes workers to intimidation by union organizers.

This appears to be about core Republican principles. Well, sort of … except that it really isn’t. In its own elections, the RNC actually prohibits the use of secret ballots.

Here’s the relevant RNC Rule [RNC Rules, Rule No. 7(d), pg. 7]:

No votes (except elections to office when properly ordered pursuant to the provisions of Robert’s Rules of Order) shall be taken by secret ballot in any open meeting of the Republican National Committee or of any committee thereof.

Apparently, the Republicans are now more concerned about the dignity and honor and right to privacy of union workers than they are about the rights of their own members.

Is this the party’s way of following RNC Chairman Michael Steele’s directive to “think outside the box?”

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2006:

2009:

To be fair, the GOP did pretty well in 2004.

In key areas of vending and contracting at the RNC, many documents were signed before Mike Duncan could get a team in place. It may not be well known, but it is a fact that Duncan, by and large, had to live with decisions made before he got there. In fact, there is only one area where Duncan could fully stretch his legs as Chairman of the Party unhindered by either a de facto party head in the White House and a Presidential campaign calling the shots — fundraising. In that area, Duncan thrived.

This has the ring of truth. We forget this, but circa May and June Duncan was viewed as a low-key whiz kid, a mega-fundraiser who had solved the Florida and Michigan primary crises (which roiled the Democrats for months) with a Solomoniac solution: Give each rogue state half of its delegates.

I’ve heard a number of DC Republicans and McCain campaign vets credit Duncan’s fundraising for keeping them in the game with President-elect Barack Obama. They stress, though, that the RNC chairman isn’t ever going to become the face of the opposition.

Still it’s interesting to see this (which follows from this) at RedState. It’s becoming the grassroots conservative site that makes no real demands from the Republicans, as long as they win.

Bob Poe, a former state commissioner and past president of the Anchorage Economic Development Corp., is the first to announce for the race. Republican Gov. Sarah Palin hasn’t said for sure whether she plans to run for re-election.

Poe, asked why he’s announcing so early, said it gives him time to get out and meet voters. He cited a comment in the Alaska Ear, which, reporting on rumors he would run, suggested the first thing that people would ask is, “Who’s Bob Poe?”

Palin is still popular, mind you: Her approval rating is 60 percent, and as much as 51 percent of Alaska wants her to win a second term. That’s just way, way down from approval ratings that once topped 80 percent.

At the least, Poe might spur Palin to spend more time governing and less time belly-aching about how the media mistreated her.