In U.S. Off-Year Election, Some Gains for Democrats

By Brian Knowlton

Democrats won elections handily in two key off-year contests for governor on Tuesday, leaving their party ebullient and raising Republicans’ concerns that the political clout of an embattled President George W. Bush may be sharply waning.

In the meantime, most of the ballot initiatives strongly pressed by Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California and a Republican, went down to defeat in that state.

But the news was not entirely bad for Republicans. New York’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, won re-election easily, overwhelming the Democratic nominee, Fernando Ferrer, by 19 points, according to preliminary results.

The outcome meant that New York City Hall, long a Democratic bastion, would rest in Republican hands for a fourth straight term.

But both races for governor the New Jersey contest between Senator Jon Corzine, a liberal Democrat, and the multimillionaire Republican businessman, Douglas Forrester; and the Virginia race between Lieutenant Governor Timothy Kaine, a moderate Democrat, and Jerry Kilgore, a Republican former state attorney general had been exceedingly close for weeks before Tuesday.

The fact that both Democrats won so easily Kaine by 5 points and Corzine by 11 points, with most votes counted raised speculation that Bush had not only failed to help Republicans but might also have weighed some down amid mounting public concerns over the Iraq war, the CIA leak scandal and other matters.

Kaine’s comeback victory was also seen as a strong endorsement by Virginia voters of his mentor, Governor Mark Warner, a possible 2008 presidential candidate trying to position himself as a pragmatic centrist with appeal in the South. Polls show 70 percent of Virginians approve of the job done by Warner, who was barred by law from seeking re-election.

In New Jersey, Forrester had been expected to run a closer race. That contest featured huge spending by both candidates and sharply negative ads by both sides that some voters said were mean- spirited.

Incumbent mayors won easily in Georgia, Massachusetts and Texas. However, support for Bush by an incumbent mayor in St. Paul, Minnesota, Randy Kelly, a moderate Democrat, appeared to have played a role in his defeat. Polls suggested that Kelly’s endorsement of Bush last fall was a factor in his lopsided loss to a fellow Democrat, Chris Coleman, by 70 percent to 30 percent.

“I have never seen anything quite like this,” Lawrence Jacobs, director of the University of Minnesota Center for the Study of Politics and Governance, told The New York Times.

Despite the Democrats’ ebullience, some analysts cautioned against reading too much into the results. Off-year elections are often poor predictors of longer-term political trends.

Republicans tried to play down their losses as not atypical in off-year elections, and largely reflecting local issues not national concerns.

Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee, told The New York Times that in the last seven elections, the party that had won the White House the year before had lost the Virginia governor’s race. Mehlman had campaigned personally around Virginia over the weekend.

Of New Jersey, he said, “It’s a tough state, and our candidate was overwhelmingly outspent.”

But the results on Tuesday appeared sure to reinvigorate Democrats making it easier for them to raise money and recruit candidates for midterm elections next year while raising doubts about the president’s leadership of an increasingly fragmented Republican Party.

Kaine’s communications director, Mo Elleithee, made it clear that Democrats no longer felt shy about taking on a president who won re- election a year ago with a record number of votes. He said the questions Virginians faced was, “Do you want someone who’s going to govern like Mark Warner, or someone who’s going to govern like George Bush?”

In other results on Tuesday, Texas voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, making their state the 19th to take that step. In Maine, however, a proposal to repeal a new gay-rights law was trailing.