I’m no expert on Virginia Politics, but it seems to me that this analysis, while it contains some good insight and suggestions, leaves a bit to be desired.  Certainly Virginia Democrats should ask their statewide leaders to take control of the Party, find new high-level donors, and begin developing a redistricting strategy.  But only one of Mr. Goldman’s ten suggestions–figure out why the Democratic Get Out the Vote effort failed so miserably–addresses the real reason all three major statewide offices went to Republicans during this cycle.

Republicans swept these races–and did well down ballot, by the way–because conservatives have been whipped into a frenzy during the last few months by a steady deluge of tea-bagging, birther frenzy, tax revolt, Fox News misinformation, ACORN bashing, Glenn Beck demagoguery, and scaremongering against immigrants, terrorists, and cultural change.  The liberal revolution faces a growing counter-revolution, and the radicals are ready to fight it.  McDonnell’s people had to know that they had this cohort of voters in hand, and they could count on them to show up.  He could therefore run away from his thesis and actual conservative views on social, cultural, and policy issues with a vague promise of pragmatic leadership on job promotion and economic development.

To win, Deeds needed to counter this by  motivate his own base and attracting moderates with the same popular liberal vision that earned a win for President Obama.  To do this, he had to both cozy up to Obama and his policies, which energized liberals last year, and propose practical solutions to Virginia’s problems based on liberal principles.  He should have promoted policies that would create new green energy jobs, for example, or proposed increases in education funding that would put people to work in construction and teaching.  He should have promised to work with the Obama Administration for more stimulus money, this time concentrated on public transit and other transportation improvements that would both create new jobs and position Virginia to take advantage of the inevitable economic recovery.   This would, to be sure, have  annoyed some voters–but none who could have been expected to vote for Deeds.

While negative campaigning can depress turnout, he could have used some subtle techniques to make McDonnell take ownership of the ideas presented in his thesis (e.g., simply point out that he believes what he wrote without passing judgment on what he wrote), and used the thesis not to attack his opponent but to energize his base.  He should also have made some effort to tie McDonnell and Cuccinelli to the tea party movement.  He needed ads showing the Republican candidates next to Sarah Palin and other radical national GOP officials (there’s a reason why McDonnell kept Palin at arm’s length).  When making these attacks, he would want to stress that he is simply pointing out who his opponents call “friends” so that Virginians will know that they have a clear choice between competing visions for the Commonwealth.

Some would argue that this would alienate independents, and Mr. Goldman wonders why independent voters went heavily Republican in these elections.  To be sure, some blame belongs to Deeds’ lackluster campaign.  But I believe that of traditional independents who voted, most probably went Democratic–their support changed only in terms of enthusiasm and turnout.  Exit polls incorrectly show that independents broke Republican because many of these respondents are not actually independents–they are conservative voters who could not be expected to vote for a Democrat under any circumstances, but identify as independents because they no longer feel at home in the GOP.

Rather than go after his own base by supporting national Democratic policies and picking off moderates with pragmatic proposals for solving Virginia’s economic, transportation, and taxation issues (and doing both at the same time by for example proposing reform of Virginia’s regressive revenue generation scheme), Deeds ran vacuous ads meant to appeal to homespun rural voters and vacillated on taxes, health care reform, economic stimulus, and budget planning.  This of course turned out to be a recipe for disaster.

As the right-wing blog discussion of the race in New York’s 23rd district showed, radical conservative counter-revoultionaries have begun their effort to purge the Republican Party of moderates.  They believe that conservatives can win more elections by further radicalizing the movement.  While this may work in certain gerrymandered disctricts (Eric Cantor, call your office), and in certain states, last year’s election showed that Virginia’s well-educated and pragmatic citizens want leaders who will give them practical solutions to real issues like job outsourcing, finance and capital bubbles, runaway capitalism, and rising energy costs.  To win in the future, Democrats need to make a case that liberal policies can do solve problems in a holistic way, by creating new green industries, regulating financial transactions, and generating revenue in a progressive, sensible way.

At the same time they need to show that today’s GOP prefers a radical agenda of shrinking government, increased income and wealth gaps, million dollar bonuses for capitalist gamblers, discrimiation against non-Christians, regressive taxation, and growing power for political and economic elites.  Protecting the political economic, and cultural status quo is, after all, the definition of “Conservative.”