Democrat Bill Owens won an upset victory in NY-23 over Conservative Douglas L. Hoffman, who had big-name wingnut support. Owens takes a House seat that Republicans owned for 147 years and his win drove a wedge between moderate and wingnut Republicans in NY, and to some extent nationally.
It was a big win, in part because polling analysts expected otherwise. Mark Blumenthal suggested that the data presaged a Dem loss in this one and Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com called Owens’s adversary Hoffman “the favorite.” However, Silver did sound this cautionary note about the Sienna and PPP polls, which indicated a Hoffman victory, and he identifies what may be a pivotal factor in Owens’s upset:

I’m not sure that either poll will fully capture the impact of Scozzafava’s endorsement of Owens — most of PPP’s interviews were conducted before the endorsement took place (although they showed no real difference once they began informing voters of the endorsement), while Siena noted that she had dropped out, but not that she had endorsed her former rival. Plus, the polling was conducted over a holiday weekend.

I mistakenly figured that Scozzafava’s withdrawall iced the deal for Hoffman. But it looks like her endorsement of Owens across party lines just may have flipped the outcome.
Elsewhere, Democratic Lt. Gov. John Garamendi also won, as expected, in CA-10.
With respect to the VA and NJ governorship races, which Blumenthal and Silver accurately called, perhaps the only good news for Dems is that no credible political analysts see these races as referenda on President Obama. As E. J. Dionne, Jr. put it in his ‘Post-Partisan’ blog, “Less Than Fired-Up” at WaPo:

…Substantial majorities of voters in both Virginia and New Jersey said that Obama was not a decisive factor in their decisions today. That will make it easier for the White House to say these contests were decided by local factors. And a majority of voters in both states gave Obama positive approval ratings. This will undermine efforts by the president’s foes to use words like “repudiation” in characterizing what these results tell us about popular attitudes toward Obama.

‘Undermine’ yes, ‘stop’, no.
In Atlanta, the good news is that Republican-who-calls-herself-an-Independent Mary Norwood did not win without a run-off, and Democrat Kasim Reed has an excellent chance to win the Dec. 1 run-off. But Norwood’s 45-37 edge means that Reed will have to energize the African American and white progressive base that has elected Black Mayors in Atlanta for 36+ years.
In Houston openly-Gay City Controller Annise Parker is headed for a December run-off with former City Attorney Gene Locke. Democratic Mayoral candidates also won in Detroit, Pittsburgh and Boston, with Seattle’s mail-in results to be announced later in the week. Republicans battled it out in the Miami Mayoral race, indicating that Dems still haven’t made adequate headway in the Cuban community to have an impact.
In the Big Apple incumbent Independent Mayor Michael Bloomberg won with a fairly-narrow (51-46) margin over Democratic challenger William C. Thompson. One poll showed Mayor Bloomberg with an 18 point lead and political observers were predicting a ‘huge blowout’ for the mayor over his under-funded adversary.
…Now the bad news:
As Charles Franklin observes in his Pollster.com post, “Election Night Recap, NJ and NY-23.”

…Whatever else you say about the race, Corzine lost support across all regions of the state and by relatively constant amounts. This “uniform swing” shows that he didn’t just lose in Rep areas, or Dem areas, or urban centers. The decline in Corzine support was very widespread and quite even. An across the board loss.

In VA, Republicans swept all three state-wide offices that were up for election.
In addition, as Mark Z. Barabak and Faye Fiore explain in their L.A. Times election wrap up:

More significant was the makeup of Tuesday’s electorate in Virginia and New Jersey, states Obama carried a year ago. It was whiter than the electorate that turned out in 2008 to make Obama the first black president in the nation’s history, and suggested the difficulty that Democrats could have attracting minority voters without the president atop the ticket.
Also worrisome for Democrats was the sentiment among independents, the voters who swing between parties and often decide elections. They went overwhelmingly Republican in Virginia and New Jersey; if that dynamic carries over to next year, it could mean serious losses for Obama and Democrats fighting to keep their majorities on Capitol Hill.

Overall, it’s not a completely bleak picture for Dems. As Fiore and Barabak note:

History suggests that off-year elections are far from predictive. In 2001 — at a like point in Republican George W. Bush’s presidency — Democrats won the governorships in New Jersey and Virginia, then lost House and Senate seats a year later.

But there is no denying the McDonnell and Christie victories will hurt with redistricting, and of course, the msm will give them 90 percent of the ink and air time. Although niether win was a referendum on President Obama, they do indicate that his coattails have frayed away with time. More to the point, Democrats have a lot of work to do in figuring out how to mobilize turnout in off-year elections — and wherever they don’t have a charismatic candidate leading the charge.

For a delicious taste of the circularity of political spin, don’t miss Jonathan Chait’s latest post at TNR‘s ‘The Plank.’ Chait’s post, all the more a hoot because it was put up yesterday instead of this morning, unpacks some familiar boilerplate we are now hearing. A sample:

“A Bush Political Adviser Says The Current Campaigns [For Governor In Virginia And New Jersey] Turn On Local Issues, While National Conditions Will Color Next Year’s Results.” The Wall Street Journal reported that, “Republicans say a Democratic sweep of the off-year races for Virginia and New Jersey governors and New York City mayor wouldn’t presage next year’s crucial midterm elections to control Congress. A Bush political adviser says the current campaigns turn on local issues, while national conditions will color next year’s results.” [Wall Street Journal, 11/2/01] …Republicans “Downplayed Any Larger Symbolism In The Races, Insisting They Represented ‘Personal Triumphs,”…But Were Not a Repudiation Of Bush Or Republican Policies.” CQ reported that, “Republicans ‘downplayed any larger symbolism in the races, insisting they represented “personal triumphs” for Mark Warner in Virginia and James E. McGreevey in New Jersey, but were not a repudiation of Bush or Republican policies.’” [CQ, 11/7/01]

And just for good measure:

Washington Times’ Lambro: It’s “Difficult If Not Impossible To Find Any Political Significance In The Off-Year Elections That Involve Only A Couple Of Governorships, Dozens Of Mayoralty Races, And State Legislative Races.” Donald Lambro of the Washington Times wrote that it is, “difficult if not impossible to find any political significance in the off-year elections that involve only a couple of governorships, dozens of mayoralty races and state legislative races.” [Washington Times, 11/7/01]

Chait points out that the pooh-pooh spin moves both ways and that it doesn’t get a lot of cred, since exaggerating the importance of off-year elections serves the needs of news managers to produce less boring coverage. Read his whole post for more grins.

The Republicans have won both governor’s races tonight. The Associated Press reports that Chris Christie will be the next governor of New Jersey.

Approximately one hour after polls closed, the Associate Press has called Virginia for Republican Bob McDonnell.

Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com hits on an interesting common denominator of campaigns (especially GOP) leading up to today’s elections — candidates’ reluctance to own their party affiliation. Silver displays a Bob McDonnel VA Gube ad, which super-imposes him on a bright Democratic blue background, and adds:

Go to McDonnell’s website, in fact, and the word “Republican” does not appear anywhere on his homepage. But McDonnell is not alone in this department. Chris Christie’s homepage does not identify his party affiliation, nor does Creigh Deeds’s (although the branding is very Obama-esque), nor does Jon Corzine’s (although he not-so-subtly places an [R] by Chris Christie’s name any time it appears in one of his commercials.) Bill Owens’s homepage does twice identify him as the “Democratic candidate in New York’s 23rd Congressional District”, although both instances are below the fold, and this is a guy who desperately needs to boost his name recognition. Doug Hoffman does refer to himself in passing as a “Conservative Republican” — even though, technically, he’s not a Republican, and scared the Republican nominee out of the race.
The Democratic brand is marginal in about half the country, but the Republican brand is radioactive in about two-thirds of it. The biggest story of the cycle is that a non-Republican conservative, Doug Hoffman, might win. Counterfactual: if Hoffman had in fact been the Republican nominee in NY-23 all along, would he be in the same strong position that he finds himself in today? Methinks not: it would have been easier for Owens — who isn’t much of a Democrat — to identify himself as the moderate in the race.

Silver could have also added Atlanta Mayoral candidate Mary Norwood, who Georgia Democratic Party Chairman Jane Kidd has called a “duplicitous Republican,” who is hiding her party affiliation with exceptional effectiveness, and doing quite well as front-runner in the polls. Silver also wonders if Republicans might profit in future elections by identifying themselves as Conservatives with a “C”, instead of Republicans. The hidden party affiliation thing may be a growing trend in the years ahead. Democrats need to develop some clever ads for ‘outing’ affiliation-hiding Republicans in the 2010 round.

The Governorships races in NJ and VA, along with the congressional race in NY-23 have gotten a lot of news coverage. But there is a lot more going on, election-wise, than just these three contests. For a quickie guide to today’s most interesting elections across the nation, check out CNN.com‘s “Ten Races Worth Watching.” The article has paragraphs on ‘Why it matters” and “What’s the story” for each of the ten races, plus video clips and links to more in-depth coverage for many of the ten run-downs. A sample:

Houston, Texas, mayor
Why it matters: The nation’s fourth-largest city could elect its first openly gay mayor.
What’s the story?: City Controller Annise Parker, who has been elected six times to citywide posts, has an even chance of winning, according to polls. Among her competitors are City Councilman Peter Brown and City Attorney Gene Locke.
Watch how a Texas candidate could make history
Houston Chronicle: Scouting report on mayoral race

If there are any trends with implications for national politics that can be identified, perhaps looking at the results of these ten races as a whole, rather than focusing on one or two, will provide some insight.

TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira’s latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ at the Center for American Progress web pages takes a look at conservatives’ success in propagating the “It’s Obama’s fault” meme regarding health care and the economy. Teixeira shows pretty conclusively that the public isn’t buying it. On the economy:

…A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds just 20 percent blaming Obama’s policies for current economic conditions, compared to 63 percent who say this is a situation Obama has inherited.

On the difficulty of securing health care reform:

…A question in the same poll also asked respondents who was to blame for making health care reform legislation so difficult to pass. Almost half—49 percent—said “special interest groups such as big pharmaceutical and health insurance companies” deserved “a great deal of blame” and another 26 percent thought these special interests deserved “quite a bit of blame.” By comparison, just 18 percent thought Obama deserved a great deal of blame and another 20 percent thought he deserved quite a bit of blame. Almost three-fifths (58 percent) thought he deserved very little blame or none at all.

Teixeira adds “…The Bush administration and big insurance and pharmaceutical companies—are associated strongly with the conservatives and their policies. That should make conservatives very, very nervous.”

In the hours before the Virginia Democratic primary, it was almost impossible to visit a major website from a computer in Virginia without staring at an advertisement for Creigh Deeds.
After Deeds won the nomination, lots of people took notice, including Patrick Ruffini, blogging at TheNextRight:

The coup de grace came in the final 24 hours, when with money to burn Deeds bought a “network blast” on Google’s ad network, essentially taking over ad inventory on every website (including this one) if you lived in Virginia.

Ruffini is a consultant for Deeds’ opponent, Republican Bob McDonnell, and now that we’re hours out from Election Day in Virginia, he’s putting the lesson to use.
On his Flickr feed, Ruffini posted a screenshot taken this morning from TechCrunch, an incredibly popular tech blog based in Silicon Valley.
McDonnell’s face is everywhere.
This is yet another reminder that the Democratic technological advantage is not self-sustaining.
Whether it’s a willingness to experiment with Twitter, a drive to release new mobile applications, or putting the best lessons from Democratic campaigns to use, Republicans are determined to close the Internet gap.
And while it’s easy to point fingers and laugh when those experiments fail, Democrats ought to at least recognize that we cannot get complacent.

Robert Pear and Sheryl Gay Stolberg provide a fairly balanced assessment of White House leadership on health reform in their Sunday New York Times overview, “Obama Strategy on Health Care Legislation Appears to Be Paying Off.”
As the authors report, the bills have advanced “further than many lawmakers expected” and “five separate measures have been pared down to two” — the farthest advance of major health reform legislation to date. They quote senior White House advisers saying the bills’ advancement “vindicated Mr. Obama’s strategy of leaving the details up to lawmakers.”
Stolberg and Pear describe the White House strategy as calibrated to encourage momentum above spending a lot of time trying to win on specific policy disagreements:

White House officials approached their work like a political campaign, and they said they had learned as much from the 2008 presidential race as from the health care fiasco of 1993-94. They said they learned the importance of pressing on and keeping up momentum, even when cable television commentators — and some fellow Democrats — declared their initiatives dead.
Congressional Democrats said it often seemed as if the top priority for the White House was simply to advance health care bills to the next step in the legislative process…Indeed, that is exactly what White House officials were trying to do. They described their legislative strategy as a very step-by-step process, in which they kept intensely focused on the next specific goal: passing a bill out of this or that committee, resolving the doubts of particular lawmakers, like the liberals who met with Mr. Obama on Thursday.

The article quotes White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel describing the President’s strategy as giving “leeway to legislators to legislate,” but “not leeway to take a policy off track.” But he cautions against overconfidence, adding “you don’t see any shimmying in the end zone…No spiking the ball on the 20-yard line here.”
Pear and Stolberg touch on the critique of the President’s strategy:

The legislative progress has come at a price. In the absence of specific guidance from the White House, it has moved ahead in fits and starts. From here on, the challenges will only grow more difficult…In the Senate, where Democrats will need support from every member of their caucus to reach a critical 60-vote threshold to avoid a potential filibuster, Mr. Obama’s hands-off strategy carries particular risks. ..Without clear direction from the president on the public option, the Democratic leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, moved ahead last week on his own, unveiling a bill that includes a government-run plan, but allows states to opt out.
Even close allies of the White House sometimes questioned its approach…“It felt like it was getting out of control at the end of July and in the beginning of August,” said John D. Podesta, a former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton who informally advises the Obama White House. “People were getting nervous that it was going every which way.” Mr. Podesta said the president risked “giving too much rope to a Congress that is liked a lot less than he is.”

The White House has received a lot of criticism for giving verbal support for the public option, but not fighting for it, Indeed the Administration made a point of saying the public option was not essential. It appears that Team Obama decided that joining in the public option debate more energetically might have endangered the reform package by prolonging debate and attracting more attacks from the right. Instead they will support the Democratic consensus that will be worked out between the House and Senate distillations. Keep it moving forward.
They may be right. If Democrats can keep losses in next year’s mid-term elections to a reasonable minimum, it is possible that economic recovery will kick in more vigorously, placing Obama and the Democrats in good position for ’12. With even modest gains in ’12, they can pass an amendment providing a stronger public option. OK, that’s three big “ifs,” but not an implausible scenario.
Polls indicate a solid majority of the American people want a public option of some kind. For example, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll conducted by the polling organizations of Peter Hart (D) and Bill McInturff (R). Oct. 22-25, 2009, indicated that 72 percent agreed that it was “quite important” (27 percent) or “extremely important” (45 percent) to “give people a choice of both a public plan administered by the federal government and a private plan for their health insurance.”
But Obama and Reid can add, and they don’t yet have 60 votes to support a strong public option, although Open Left‘s Chris Bowers believes a ‘robust’ public option, including “the original vision of a public option, tied to Medicare rates, that is available to everyone in America” is still a possibility.
It appears some of the DINOs and moderate Republicans are bucking the will of their constituencies. That’s where the progressive fight should be going forward: to hold those Senators accountable in their states for dissing their constituents to curry favor with the health insurance industry. Sens. Joe Lieberman (CT), Ben Nelson (NE), Blanche Lincoln (AR), Olympia Snowe (ME) and Susan Collins (ME) should be hammered with reminders that a lot of voters in their respective states want a public option.
A Daily Kos poll, conducted 9/8-10, found that 55 percent of Arkansas respondents supported a public option. Another Daily Kos poll, conducted back on August 17-19, asked Nebraskans “If Ben Nelson joined Republican Senators in filibustering and killing a final health care bill because it had a public health insurance option would that make you more or less likely to vote for him or would it have no real effect on your vote?,” 21 percent said “more likely” with 15 percent chosing “less likely” and 64 percent selecting “no effect.” Not much of an advantage either way there.
Sen. Joe Lieberman’s Connecticut constituency supports the public option by 64-31, according to a Quinnipiac University poll, conducted 9/10-14. Regarding the two Maine Republicans, a poll by Democracy Corps, conducted 9/23-27, found,

…Mainers overwhelmingly support a government sponsored non-profit health insurance option, 63 to 27 percent. And they support this option from the start significantly more strongly than they support a “trigger” (52 to 34 percent) that would create the government sponsored non-profit health insurance option only if private health insurance companies do not make affordable coverage available within several years.

Alternatively, if Reid is unable to cobble together 60 votes for allowing a majority vote on a bill with a public option, Dems could go the ‘budget reconciliation’ route, with 51 votes needed to get one. In that event, there will be even more weeping an gnashing of teeth among conservatives about the lack of bipartisanship, a theme they will try to make into a prevailing meme. Dems can challenge it by emphasizing majority rule — not super majority rule — is the moral standard of democracy and the public option is consistently supported by a majority of Americans.
Despite the assertion of Stolberg and Pear, Obama and Reid can both credibly argue that they have made a sincere effort to recruit Republicans to support the public option voters want, and media coverage has been adequate to back them up. But the GOP has become an ossified, hard-line political party that places a higher value on obstructing change than bringing it about. That’s not a tough sell.
Democratic leaders should fight like hell to get 60 votes to allow a vote on the public option. There’s no getting around the fact that support of 60 percent of the Senate would add credibility to health reform. But if we don’t get it, then anything over 51 votes through budget reconciliation is an acceptable — and defensible — alternative.

Jonathan Wesiman’s “Democrats’ Quiet Changes Pile Up” in The Wall St. Journal takes an insightful look at some of the more impressive ‘below the radar’ progressive reforms President Obama has secured so far, with the support of the Democratic majorities in Congress. Weisman explains:

Last week, Mr. Obama signed defense-policy legislation that included an unrelated measure widening federal hate-crimes laws to cover sexual orientation and gender identification — 12 years after it was first introduced. The same legislation also tightened the rules of admissible evidence for military commissions, an issue that consumed Congress in debate in 2007 but received almost no attention this go-round.
Other new measures signed into law since the administration took office, all of which kicked up controversy in past congresses, make it easier for women to sue for equal pay, set aside land in the West from development, give the government the power to regulate tobacco and raise tobacco taxes to expand health insurance for children. Congress and the White House, in the new defense-policy bill, also killed weapons programs that have survived earlier attempts at termination, among them, the F-22 fighter jet, the VH-71 presidential helicopter and the Army’s Future Combat System.

Not a bad tally for less than 9 months on the job, particularly in comparison the limited positive accomplishments of the previous train-wreck that careened through the White House for 8 years. it’s not hard to imagine conservative defenders of tobacco, insurance and timber companies, along with military contractors, fuming at these achievements. Give the Obama Administration credit for astute management of its broader legislative agenda and outflanking the GOP obstructionist machine. As conservative Republican Tom Price of Georgia is quoted as saying in the article, “The administration is pushing so many things so rapidly it’s difficult to concentrate on all of them.”
Add to these victories President Obama’s appointments and unraveling with executive orders, where possible, the Bush Administration’s institutionalization of incompetence and greed in government. No more Bush family friends and cronies running federal agencies charged with life or death decisions that affect millions — that alone is a quiet, but huge change for the better. The positive changes initiated by President Obama will continue to grow and benefit millions down the road. In terms of tangible reforms, his critics will have a very tough time comparing him unfavorably to post-war Republican presidents — and we’re only 8+ months into this presidency.