Digesting

I’m still digesting the events of yesterday. In the meantime, here are some thoughts from a friend of mine:

At the end of the day, the lesson from this campaign ought to be (a) know you’re base, (b) know your opponent’s base, and (c) secure your base while making your opponent fight for his. Creigh Deeds’ statewide votershare closely mirrors his voteshare in the three NOVA Congressional Districts (8,10,11) and with slightly more than 1/3rd of the vote coming out of these three districts, that once again looks fairly decisive.

Brian’s strategy from the very beginning was to lock down wins in these three districts as the NOVA candidate. Terry’s entry into the race utterly terrified him because he was no longer the only game in town — but even if we assume that everyone who voted for Terry in those districts still would have voted for Brian, Creigh still would have locked down 47% of the vote in NOVA. Meanwhile Creigh carried his base of support in the 5th and 9th Congressional Districts handily, securing nearly 70% of the vote in a 3-way race. These two districts accounted for another 12% of the vote; in a Brian-Creigh heads-up race, Brian would have had to carry a sizeable chunk of the black vote in the 3rd Congressional District (another 11% of the voteshare) to be assured of a win. Considering Moran’s voteshare in this up-for-grabs constituency, that was probably unlikely. It’s not precisely clear who would have won the race if Terry had never gotten in, but it probably would have been a nail-biter — which in itself is remarkable, considering Brian’s election was a foregone conclusion two years ago.

From Terry’s perspective, he entered the race with a lot of fundraising potential, a lot of baggage (good and bad), a huge staff, and no base whatsoever to speak of. It’s tough to say what his strategy was to win this contest as a consequence. Tactically they were operating very well, but as Sun Tzu wrote, strategy without tactics is the longest path to victory, but tactics without strategy is the surest path to defeat.

He closed his comments with this:

This is a great day to be a Democrat; it’s a lousy day to be a Republican. Raw turnout numbers for this year’s primary totalled more than twice the number of primary voters who turned out for the Senatorial Dem primary in 2006. Credit to the folks on all three campaigns, Moving Virginia Forward, and the Democratic Party of Virginia — we are clearly much better organized going into this year’s election than we were back in 2005. The engine keeps chuggin’.