Gubernatorial polls will be test of Obama's popularity

AMERICA: The stakes are national for elections in Virginia and New Jersey – even if the politics is local

ON NOVEMBER 3rd, the citizens of Virginia and New Jersey will vote in the most significant US political elections of the year: two hotly contested gubernatorial polls that are seen as a test of President Barack Obama’s popularity and a bellwether for crucial 2010 midterm congressional elections.

Each of the five candidates embodies an American political archetype.

In Virginia, an ideological and religious conservative Republican is likely to triumph over a middle- of-the road “electable” Democrat who can’t seem to make up his mind on any major issue – not even what he thinks of Obama.

New Jersey exemplifies the difficulty of re-election for any incumbent during a recession. The sitting Democratic governor, a millionaire former chairman of Goldman Sachs, has made a muddle of state finances, but voters are having a hard time deciding between him and a Republican prosecutor who thought he could breeze into office on a corruption-fighting record, but turned out to have a few skeletons in his own closet.

Also in New Jersey, an independent dark horse with a background in the oh-so-trendy field of environmental protection symbolises Americans’ disgust with established parties.

Independents are the fastest- growing category of US voters, comprising up to 40 per cent of the electorate.

As usual, the nasty cuts and low blows have drawn the most attention. Robert McDonnell, the religious Republican in Virginia, is broadcasting campaign ads by Sheila Johnson, a black businesswoman who has publicly mocked the stammer of his Democratic rival.

Jon Corzine, the New Jersey incumbent, has been criticised for broadcasting slow motion footage of his Republican rival’s considerable girth swinging in several directions as he gets of out a car. The former prosecutor “threw his weight around” to avoid traffic fines, the ad says.

Christopher Christie, the Republican, failed to report a $48,000 loan to a subordinate on his tax forms.

A freedom of information request by Corzine transformed Christie into the John O’Donoghue of New Jersey.

As a prosecutor travelling on government business, it revealed Christie surpassed government allowances, sometimes staying in $400-a-night, five-star hotels.

The stakes may be national, but the politics is local. The biggest issue in Virginia is how to unknot traffic on the state’s highways. In New Jersey, it’s the skewed tax system, which charges the highest property taxes in the US – an average $7,045 annually per household – but refunds huge amounts of income tax to compensate.

The White House has already distanced itself from the Democrats’ probable defeat in Virginia. (The present governor, a Democrat, is prevented from standing again by term limits.)

Obama was the first Democratic presidential candidate to win Virginia since 1964, but for three decades the state has always elected a governor whose party opposes the president.

McDonnell, the Republican, is nine points ahead of his Democratic rival, Creigh Deeds. A devout Catholic who attended law school at Regent University (founded by the televangelist Pat Robertson), McDonnell’s biggest setback was the unearthing of a thesis he wrote in the late 1980s, in which he criticised gays and working mothers as “detrimental” to the family.

It was, McDonnell wrote, “a perverted notion that each individual should be able to live out his sexual life in any way without interference from the state”.

As a state legislator, McDonnell worked to restrict abortion, limit welfare payments and harshly punish juvenile delinquents.

He looks like a television presenter and is as unflappable as Creigh Deeds is easily flustered. This is their second stand-off: McDonnell beat Deeds for the Virginia attorney general’s job by only 360 votes in 2005.

The margin will be wider this time, for voters seem to prefer McDonnell’s clear-cut ideology. Not unlike Obama, Deeds seems incapable of enunciating a clear line on America’s most divisive issues: gay marriage, gun control, abortion.

Deeds has distanced himself from Obama, saying he’s not an Obama Democrat. Little wonder then that the White House keeps putting off sending the president across the Potomac to make another campaign appearance for Deeds.

In New Jersey it’s different. A Democratic state by tradition, New Jersey so loves Obama that Corzine has put up hoardings showing him beside the president all over the state and Obama has promised to return to New Jersey to give Corzine a boost before the election.

Corzine and Christie are running neck and neck, but their poll scores are falling, while Christopher Daggett, the environmentalist who seemed to emerge out of nowhere, is gaining ground.

Daggett has no party and no treasury. His two great achievements were defeating a project for an underground highway on the west side of Manhattan that threatened striped bass in the Hudson, and producing a consensual report on reforming New Jersey’s department of environmental protection.

Governor Corzine appointed Daggett to that job. Daggett told the New York Timeswhat the experience taught him. "Wall Street guys are terrific people, but you can never ask them to manage anything."