Virginia Shows There is Life Still In The GOP

From Real Clear Politics, on the election in virginia:

The Republican party has no national leaders. Its standing with voters is at an all-time low. It battens itself on an ideological purity that turns off the center and can't appeal to an increasingly suburban and diverse electorate. If it is not fated to go the way of the Federalists or the Whigs, it is certainly a spent force.

This is the rote obituary for the GOP that the Left can't resist. It is all the more alluring for its elements of truth. A party that holds neither the presidency, the House, nor the Senate won't be stacked with national leaders. In polls, the GOP is still suffering from its Bush-DeLay hangover.

Yet, in Virginia this year, this death notice has been shown to be both dated and premature. It foolishly extrapolates from political conditions a year ago that have already drastically changed, and assumes that Republican candidates will never adjust to new circumstances. Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell has run a model campaign for the Obama era, energizing the Right and winning the center in a tour de force directly on Pres. Barack Obama's doorstep.

The battle over how to interpret the imminent defeat of the Democrat in the race, Creigh Deeds, has already begun. Democrats want to shrug it off as not surprising in an essentially red state - home to the former capital of the Confederacy and all that.

Except Virginia has been trending blue. Obama won it 53-47. Since 1997, The Washington Post notes, a million more people live in the state, most of them minorities and many in the affluent suburbs of northern Virginia. Democrats hold both U.S. Senate seats; they won a majority in the state Senate in 2007; and they picked up three U.S. House seats in 2008. Virginia is a swing state, even if Democrats don't like the way it's now swinging.