"You basically had a cultural race -- death penalty, immigration -- and cultural races don't play well in suburban areas," said Rep. Thomas Davis, a Fairfax Republican who saw Kaine take 55 percent of the vote in his district. "Jerry just failed to connect with those areas."
Although the Northern Virginia vote was decisive in Tuesday's election, Davis noted that the state Republican Party is still controlled by a downstate establishment and said that there has not been a Northern Virginian on the state GOP ticket for five elections. "We had virtually no input into the [Kilgore campaign]. All the decisions were made in Richmond."
Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.) represents the neighboring district, which was won by Kaine. Like Davis, he said something was missing from Kilgore's campaign.
"I've been out there for the last two weeks [campaigning for Kilgore], and you could just feel there was a different mood than I've experienced before," he said. "The mood in the capital [Washington] kind of spreads over Northern Virginia."
Virginia doesn't register voters by party, but exit polls after the 2004 presidential election found that people identifying themselves as Republicans outnumbered those who said they were Democrats by about 4 percent. But when Brodnitz and other pollsters asked voters whether they were definitely going to the polls this year, that Republican advantage dropped to 2 percent. In other words, Kilgore was gearing his appeal to a base that was shrinking, while the clout of Democrats, and especially independents, grew.
Those voters were especially unhappy with Kilgore's negative tone.
Kaine's victory means that when he leaves office in 2010, Democrats will have controlled the governor's office for 20 of the past 28 years in Republican-leaning Virginia (and marks the eighth straight time Virginians have chosen a governor from the opposite party of the president).
But Republicans hold both U.S. Senate seats, eight of 11 spots in the state's congressional delegation and two of the three statewide offices, depending on whether Robert McDonnell holds on to his lead in the attorney general race. The Republicans lost a seat in the state House but still easily control the General Assembly.
"I think to try to make broad comments about the demise of the Republican Party in Virginia is just wrong," O'Brien said. "But I think it shows that the electorate, in every election in Virginia, is waiting to be impressed" and is willing to vote for whichever candidate makes the case.
Staff writer Michael D. Shear and researcher Derek Willis contributed to this report.
