The Rock is back and he is now the Gov. of Virginia!

Let’s identify why Mick Staton, a good man with solid principles, lost today’s election in Virginia’s 33rd Senate District.

The conventional wisdom in Virginia is that low turnout favors Republicans, because they can do a better job turning out the base. That was true in the 1990s, but the GOP got lazy towards the end of that decade and has since failed to do effective or coordinated voter identification. At the same time, two factors came into play that would benefit the Democrats.

In the first case, Virginia’s population took off and we had a lot of new people move in. This antiquated all the old voter id efforts. (While knocking on doors and making phone calls for Staton you wouldn’t believe the number of people who moved… sometimes two or three owners again.) While I am not yet sold that a majority of the new people are left of center, the GOP is clearly not identifying those who are right of center.

In the second case, Mark Warner and the Democrats learned to do effective voter identification and GOTV. In 2001, he spent $1,460,000 on “GOTV/Election Day Activities.” His opponent, Mark Earley, spent $36,140. So the Democrats whipped the GOP in voter id, the basis for effective GOTV efforts. This doesn’t explain the entire Staton-Herring debacle, however.

IMHO, I’d also hazard a guess that money and party unity played a significant role. In plain speak, Mark Herring raised $156,280 and Mick Staton raised $36,500. Yet where the money comes from is telling.

According to the Virginia Public Access Project (VPAP) Democrat Mark Herring received $96,750 from his party’s state, local, leadership, and campaign committees. If you include individuals listed as Democrats, that jumps to $100,200.

In contrast, Mick Staton received only $10,000 from the GOP. The GOP party establishment provided less than one-tenth the support to their candidate that the Democrats did to theirs.

This funding disparity has larger implications. As party moderates frequently speak about the need to run moderates to win, they set up those conditions by failing to support conservatives. This is particularly true in the Virginia State Senate.

Two questions now arise: how should conservatives punish the establishment for failing to support their candidates, if they should at all, and how do we go about repairing the rifts in the party’s wings.

It’s something I’ll have some thoughts on later. For the time being, I simply want to assert that Staton lost not because of his ideology, but because the party is both dysfunctional and failed to support the candidate.

I thought it would be cool if we had an open thread of the State of the Union so those of us who are watching can live blog it in the comments section.

Though the story is old news, here’s something from the Washington Times:

Legislators in at least five states are proposing bold anti-abortion measures as the Bush administration reshapes the U.S. Supreme Court, a report said.

With the goal of challenging the Roe vs. Wade ruling that ensured a woman’s right to an abortion, lawmakers in Georgia, Indiana, Ohio, South Dakota and Tennessee propose banning all abortions except when the woman’s life is in danger, Stateline.org reported.

It’s as predictable as the sun rising that lower courts would strike down such state bans, said Americans United for Life Director Clarke Forsythe.

It would be better to pass legislation “that can be enforced,” such as parental notification requirements and fetal pain warnings, the constitutional lawyer told the state issues organization.

Now people, I’m as pro-life as the day is long, but Forsythe is 100% correct. Without a reason for believing that SCOTUS will uphold sweeping bans like these, all we are doing is setting ourselves up for failure. Worse yet, it could greatly deflate our efforts to reach the point where SCOTUS is changed in a meaningful way.

I would offer the following potential consequences:

• Having just fought for two new SCOTUS appointments, pro-lifers are optimistic for the future. Now the court turns around and smacks them down. Deflated, they question why all their efforts mattered.
• Chief Justice John Roberts decides against the sweeping ban. (He was not as clearly originalist as Alito and there’s some legitimate questions on how pro-life he is, though I’m optimistic.) Pro-lifers now question the quality of the nominees.
• Additional precedence is built-up for Roe.
• It provides an opportunity to fundamentally reshape abortion jurisprudence and throw out the “undue burden” criteria. Yet its a gamble: will we be better off, or worse off?

Sorry if I sound pessimistic, I’m just wary of trying to pick this fight when we know the landscape is against us.