When you type the words, “Why is Nancy Pelosi” into Google, the search engine offers to complete your question with three popular queries:

1. Why is Nancy Pelosi so stupid?
2. Why is Nancy Pelosi so powerful?
3. Why is Nancy Pelosi bad?

Every national politicians has his or her share of critics, but Nancy Pelosi seems to inspire a special kind of agitation from her detractors. This is a point highlighted in a new profile of the Speaker in New York Magazine:

To conservatives, she’s the devil: “Mussolini in a skirt,” “Nancy Botox,” a “domestic enemy of the Constitution.” In August, when she and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer wrote a USA Today editorial calling town-hall shouters “un-American” for stifling national debate, a radio host said he’d like to punch her in the face; Joe the Plumber wanted to “beat the living tar” out of her; and Glenn Beck brought out a cardboard cutout of her likeness, then pretended to drink wine alongside it: “I wanted to thank you for having me over here in wine country,” he cackled. “By the way, I put poison in your—no, I look forward to all the policy discussions we’re supposed to have. You know, on health care, energy reform, and the economy. Hey, is that Sean Penn over there?” She’s a high-handed lady who needs to be “put … in her place,” as the National Republican Congressional Committee said when she questioned General McChrystal’s advice on Afghanistan. “It’s really sad. They really don’t understand how inappropriate that is,” Pelosi shot back, smirking a little and trailing a hand in the air. “That language is something I haven’t even heard in decades.”

Nancy Pelosi is occasionally called the most hated woman in America, but it’s hard to escape the conclusion that much of that hatred seems to stem from the fact that she is a woman. Harry Reid, for instance, is the victim of similar approval ratings, but his enemies don’t attack him with the same sort of vitriol. Just type the phrase, “Why is Harry Reid” into Google — you get no suggested completion to your query at all.
When she isn’t being threatened by conservatives, Pelosi often escapes national attention altogether. That’s a shame, because in terms of accomplishment, it’s hard to imagine how she as Speaker could be more effective. She’s raised $155 million for the DCCC since 2002 and helped to orchestrate the new Democratic majority in Congress. Of course, from the floor, she’s been a champion for major increases in college aid and pay for veterans, upping the minimum wage, climate change, and now, health care.
That’s leadership we as Democrats can be proud of.

Chris Bowers has an Open Left post that taps exit poll data to reveal the influence of the youth vote, or rather the lack of it, in the NJ and VA gubernatorial election outcomes. Bowers presents charts depicting a significant decline in the percentage of voters 18-29 and 29-44 for both states, and explains:

About two-thirds of Christie’s victory margin can be accounted for by this shift in the age of the electorate. While Deeds still would have been wiped out even with the 2008 age composition of the electorate, the change there is no less striking:..In Virginia, Democrats went from a 39-33 advantage in party ID, to a 33-37 deficit. In New Jersey, Democrats went from a 44-28 advantage, to a 41-31 advantage.

Bowers concludes “Republicans seem to have gained another 3-4%, simply from turnout differential based on age,” and adds “…the lack turnout among voters under the age of 45 threatens to cost Democrats more votes than any other factor.” It’s understandable, says Bowers, because “…younger voters have been hit hardest by the recession, and that they tend to not turnout in off-year elections.”
Bowers is skeptical that the Blue Dogs and beltway insider Dems will address the age gap. Let’s hope our mid-term candidates are paying more attention.

It would be hard to find a more astute observer of Virginia politics than Larry J. Sabato, Director, U.Va. Center for Politics and head wizard at Larry J. Sabato’s CrystalBall website. Although it’s been well-reported that Democratic turnout and especially African American turnout were critical factors in the NJ and VA gubernatorial elections, just to flesh it out a bit, here’s a couple of nuggets regarding VA turnout from his “Sabato’s Fun Facts–Election ’09” post today:

…In Virginia, one result of absentee Democrats was the lowest voter turnout for a gubernatorial election in the state’s modern two-party history (1969 to 2009). The 2009 turnout of 39.8 percent of the registered voters was the lowest in forty years. Even with all the population growth since 2005, the absolute voter turnout in 2009 (1.97 million) fell below that of four years ago (2.0 million). And the electorate was barely more than half that of 2008 (3.7 million). Astounding.

And the African American vote in particular:

…In a sampling of heavily black precincts around Virginia. Even though Creigh Deeds received a larger percentage of the black vote (93 percent) than the previous Democratic gubernatorial nominee, Tim Kaine, in 2005 (90 percent), the turnout was miserable for Deeds–more than 10 full percentage points lower. He received many fewer African-American votes than Kaine, despite near-unanimous backing from blacks who cast a ballot.

And while you’re at the CrystalBall, read Alan Abramowitz’s post-mortem, “What Happens in Virginia and New Jersey, Stays in Virginia and New Jersey,” which provides elegant numbers-crunching to verify that the data,

…provides no support for the belief that the Virginia and New Jersey results predict what will happen across the entire nation next year or that these elections constituted referenda on President Obama’s performance. Instead, the Democratic defeats in Virginia and New Jersey reflected a combination of normal turnout patterns favoring the out-party in off-year elections and the weaknesses of the Democratic candidates in both states.

Abramowitz expects Democratic losses in the mid-terms next year, the extent of which would at that time more likely be linked to how voters “evaluate the performance of President Obama.”

TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira’s op-ed in The New York Times provides one of the better antidotes for all of the hyper-ventillating about Republicans winning the governorships of VA and NJ. From Teixeira’s chill-pill:

Start with the predictive value of the Virginia and New Jersey victories: there is none. Sometimes the party that wins both those governorships gains seats in the next Congressional election; sometimes that party loses seats. Far more consequential is the historical pattern that the new president’s party tends to lose seats in the first midterm election. Once that is taken into account, as the political scientist Alan Abramowitz of Emory University has shown, victories in Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races tell you nothing about who will gain seats in 2010 or how large that gain will be.

Teixeira shreds the GOP’s “Obama was repudiated” meme, noting,

In New Jersey…it’s significant that Mr. Obama’s approval rating among 2009 voters (57 percent) was identical to the percent of the vote he received there in 2008. In Virginia, while the president’s 2009 approval rating was 5 points less than his 2008 voting result, the 2009 electorate was also far more conservative than last year’s. Besides being far older and whiter than in 2008, the voters in Virginia on Tuesday said they had supported John McCain last November by 8 points, meaning they were not favorably inclined toward President Obama to begin with. In fact, given that only 43 percent of these voters said they supported Mr. Obama last November, his 48 percent approval rating among them does not indicate a shift away from him but rather toward him.

Teixeira also points out that the GOP defeat NY-23 — one of the most staunchly conservative districts in America –provides a grim omen for a party that is now dominated by conservatives, and especially for “those in the party seeking to emulate the electoral strategies of Bob McDonnell in Virginia and Chris Christie in New Jersey,” both of whom tried to “cover up the conservatism of their views” on key issues. “That was relatively easy to do in governors’ races in an off-year election,” says Teixeira. “It will be harder for candidates to do in national elections in 2010 and especially 2012.”

No election post-mortem would be complete without insights from a couple of Democratic luminaries and occasional TDS contributors named Mike Lux and Robert Creamer, both of whom are posting at the HuffPo: Here’s Lux’s take:

Let me try to explain this to the caution captains in my party. There are two reasons we lost those Governors’ races yesterday, and they are closely related: voters are in a foul mood, and base Democrats – young folks, unmarried women, minorities – didn’t come out.
Let’s just spend a minute talking about the economy. Unless we start to produce a whole lot more jobs than even the optimists are projecting right now, voters are going to be in a really foul mood a year from now when they go to vote…And for the young people who haven’t found decent jobs, economically struggling single women, and minority voters who overwhelmingly voted for Obama and other Democrats in 2008 and 2010, they could well be feeling that they haven’t seen change they can believe in, that they haven’t seen the Democrats they voted for and in many cases worked for delivering anything that matters to their lives, and that will make them very tough to get out to vote. That’s what happened in NJ and VA this year, and it is incumbent on Democrats to change that dynamic in time for the election in 2010…In the face of a weak economy, angry voters, and a discouraged Democratic base, Democrats have exactly one chance at surviving the elections a year from now: deliver the goods.
…We are going to need to craft a strategy for winning that is based on deserving to win because we delivered important, tangible things that mattered to voters, things that make angry voters understand that we share their anger and are doing something to change things so their lives will be better, and things that help Democratic base voters feel like it is worth voting again.

And from Creamer’s “Four Lesson’s for Democrats in Tuesday’s Elections“:

First and foremost, the results show that it is critical that the Democratic message be framed in populist terms…Not surprisingly voters are unhappy. Ten percent unemployment, rising health care bills and shrinking incomes will do that. All of these problems resulted from the Republican policies of the previous eight years and the conservative values frame of the last thirty years. They have been caused by the concentration of power in Wall Street, the big health insurance companies and the dominant role of corporate special interests in Washington…But if Democrats do not clearly frame the debate in those terms, it is easy for voters to vote against whoever is in power at the moment — which now happen to be Democrats.

In Creamer’s point #3, ‘inspire the base,’ he notes:

Without an inspired base, Democrats cannot hold our own in 2010 — it’s that simple…Success at making change will help renew the faith of Independents and also help energize the base. But to be inspired, the base of the Democratic Party must be convinced that the president and his party are the champions of core progressive principles as well. A hopeful populist frame is critical to motivate mobilizable voters.

Creamer’s points #2, addressing how to win independent voters and #4, a cautionary note that comes with benefiting from the Republicans’ ‘circular firing squad,’ also merit a read. Both Lux and Creamer are saying that the wrong take-away from the ’09 elections is for Dems to embrace centrist timidity and fear of real change in the mistaken belief that the election indicates that moderation is the wave of the future. Instead, winning in ’10 and ’12 will require a bold, unmistakable commitment to fighting for jobs and reforms that benefit working people, instead of Wall St.

Last night’s legislative elections offered few surprises. As the polls closed, Republicans and Democrats each held a majority they needed to protect, and today, the status quo remains the same.
In Virginia, buoyed by a set of strong statewide candidates and a national climate that put history on their side, Republicans last night added to their margins in the House of Delegates.
But the GOP believed that this election might help them wipe out all the Democratic gains of the past six years, and it did not.
Democrats in the state were able to knock off two vulnerable Republicans, electing Luke Torian and Robin Abbott to the caucus. Their victories helped to offset losses in other parts of the state.
In a night when state Democrats were looking for good news, the New Jersey Assembly offered a sharp counterpoint to elections elsewhere.
Headed into Tuesday, Democrats held a solid majority, but Republicans had been talking about mounting a serious effort to cut into that margin, if not win the eight seats they would need to tie the chamber.
The Democratic Assembly Caucus met that challenge head-on. In the weeks before Election Day, New Jersey Democrats built up formidable advantages in fundraising, candidate quality, and organization. That in turn allowed them to counter a bad set of national trends and a strong statewide campaign from GOP gubernatorial candidate Chris Christie.
Last night, the Democratic Caucus protected all of its incumbents, ultimately holding 47 of 48 seats. The only seat that now appears to have changed hands was left open by retirement in District 4.
The NJ Democratic Assembly Caucus did nearly everything right in this year’s election, and the advantages they banked during the summer allowed them to offset the Republican climate in the state last night.
Across the country, Democrats still hold 60 legislative chambers and control 55 percent of the nation’s partisan legislative seats. Our current position remains a solid one heading into the final election before the Census and the next round of Congressional and legislative redistricting.
For more information, visit DLCC.org.

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.