Outside the Beltway

REALIGNMENT REDUX

James Joyner · Wednesday, November 5, 2003 · 3 comments

WaPo, along with everyone else, reports the big GOP sweep in the major off-off-year elections yesterday:

Republicans swept to victories in elections for governor of Kentucky and Mississippi yesterday, ending 32 years of Democratic control in the Bluegrass State and ousting the only Democratic chief executive of a Deep South state in Mississippi.

Haley Barbour, a powerful Washington lobbyist and former chairman of the Republican National Committee, won in Mississippi, getting 441,369 votes (53 percent) to 378,416 (45 percent) for incumbent Gov. Ronnie Musgrove (D) with more than 90 percent of precincts reporting.

***

Republican Ernie Fletcher decisively won the Kentucky governor’s race. With all of the state’s precincts reporting, Fletcher, 50, a three-term House member from Lexington, had 593,508 votes (55 percent) to 484,938 (45 percent) for his Democratic opponent, Attorney General A.B. “Ben” Chandler.

Indeed, the only high profile race the Democrats won was the easy re-election of Philadelphia mayor John Street, who strangely seemed to have been greatly helped by the fact he was under criminal investigation:

The Philadelphia contest attracted national attention after the disclosure that the FBI, as part of an investigation of municipal corruption, had placed a bug in Street’s office. The disclosure appeared to energize Street’s campaign in the closing days of the contest.

Go figure.

WaPo also supplies this map:

The fact that the four largest states (California, Texas, New York, and Florida ) all have Republican governors is stunning, even when one takes into account the moderation of Schwarzenegger and Pataki and the odd circumstances which led to Schwarzenegger’s “election.”

Does all of this mean George W. Bush is a shoe-in for re-election? No. Races generally take on their own dynamic based on the candidates themselves as well as the major issues in particular campaigns. I’d be very surprised if Bush could carry California, for example. But the trends are generally going in the right direction.

Update (1118): Stephen Green has some interesting analysis of this phenomenon as well.

Also, as I note in Stephen’s comments section to another post, one remarkable thing about Barbour’s win is that he actually managed to exploit his Washington connections, arguing that he could use his network of influential Republicans elsewhere to help improve Mississippi. That’s a truly novel–and gutsy–approach to campaigning, since most candidates do anything they can to avoid the “Washington insider” label.