she an incredibly boring candidate. boring at best. the rnc as you know as we talked about, the rnc spevent only $3 million. four years ago they spent 9 million. that alone, shutdown is different. if the $9 million comes in, cuccinelli could be governor elect today. oh my lord. i think you still need to deal with the nomination process. absolutely. these caucuses and conventions do always bring out the least electable general election candidate. i money, who shows up? which know who shows up. the other thing, too, in terms of building a campaign infrastructure. if you are spending your time on a thousand or something voters showing up in richmond, versus a wider electorate. a wider but much, much more diverse electorate. i think a lot of that to your point cokie about the process of
editorial board writes this, the portense of election 2013 on christie, one mistake for the gop to avoid casting is mr. christie as a moderate because he won twice in a democratic state t. governor has by and large governed as a conservative reformer. he vetoed a tax increase on millionaires and capped property taxes. he pushed tenure reforms that will make it easier to fire bad teach officer and he extracted far more pension reform out of the democratic legislature than did democratic governors jerry brown in california or andrew cuomo in new york. republicans everywhere should study how he managed to when among non-republican voters. you need them to become a majority party. michael steele used to celebrate when republican candidates can win independent voters and democrats. that s the idea. you steal from the other side. now it seems to me that people that are able to do this are branded heretics.
if very thing that drives core republicans and sort of the base tea party republicans, the fact that chris christie stood with the president of the united states in the midst of a disaster and worked with him to try and deal with new jersey problems, was one of the reasons why he did so well last night in new jersey. so the republican party ha has to resolve its own internal conflict if they re going to win a national election. by the way, julie, or mika. go ahead. a one sec hubby charlie kris destroyed his standing. what you learn here from chris christie, you embrace, if are you going to empractice is the president, if you do something like i always say, nobody stoups when you are going 90 miles an hour, he pummelled critics. that s what makes this also silly. it s down to, it s almost like grammar school. when you hug the president when he comes to your state to help at a time of severe crisis and your party can t even get behind
virginia than barak obama or ken cuccinelli. or terry mcauliffe. bob mcdonald remains popular. he has a big story if virginia is women which helped lead, of course the nbc news exit polls the democrats to victory. more than half voted for mcauliffe. voters believe the economy and health care were top issues in the election. cuccinelli beat mcauliffe on votes, keeping it close. the issue of abortion rights helped mcauliffe eek out the win. voters said it was their tough issue preferred mcauliffe. he won big with virginia voters affected by the government shutdown as we said. but we got to talking about cokie. obama care. wait a second, normally, you don t see it. normally, you do not see voters that many voters that they care about abortion. it s usually way down the list. right. but it was like the third issue in voters concerns and
obama care story line had been out there a little longer? i couldn t tell. my guess is that the obama care played into this. on the other hand, as axelrod before, mcauliffe s polk is at two or four and ends up at three, so we re not so sure. to me the take away from this election was this. while mcauliffe won, democrats and liberals by slightly bigger margins than cuccinelli did by conservatives and republicans, the fact that cuccinelli could win independents by 9 percentage points and lose the election by three tells you something, that the gap between democrats and republicans has gotten to wide that a republican can win the independent vote and still lose the election, just as mitt romney won the independent vote by five points nationally and lost the election by almost 4 points. that this party i.d. gap between the two parties, it s very, very real. but i can t tell for sure how much obama care was in there. but i have to think it was