A viewer’s guide to Tuesday’s elections

By Bob Benenson, CQ-Roll Call Senior Elections Analyst

updated 1:59 p.m. ET Nov. 2, 2009

WASHINGTON - It’s easy to pinpoint the elections held in an odd-numbered year — the “off-year” — that have clear national implications. That is because there are so few of them. This year, we count just three, all being held this coming Tuesday: The elections for governor in Virginia and New Jersey, and a hotly contested House special election in upstate New York's largely rural 23rd District.

The bonus for avid political watchers is that the results of these key contests will be evenly spaced across Tuesday evening. The first poll closings will be in Virginia at 7 p.m. Eastern time. New Jersey will wrap up its voting at 8 p.m. Eastern. And votes will start to trickle in from that New York race after the 9 p.m. Eastern poll closing time.

The downside is that the race that has developed the most portent for where the elections are heading in 2010 — and where the Republican Party is heading into the future — is the one in which the polls are open latest. That’s because of the blockbuster developments in that New York House special, the kind of race that almost never draws a whole lot of national attention.

The contest — to fill the vacancy that developed when President Obama reached across party lines and tapped nine-term Republican Rep. John M. McHugh to become secretary of the Army — evolved into a fierce skirmish in the ideological “battle for the soul” of the Republican Party, which has been simmering since the GOP first lost control of Congress in 2006 and then the White House with Obama’s comfortable victory in 2008.

And the rift that this isolated House election has exposed threatens to become a schism as the result of the stunning events of the weekend before Election Day. Republican nominee Dede Scozzafava — a moderate who came under siege by prominent national Republicans and rank-and-file conservative activists supporting a third-party candidate running hard to her right — first suspended her campaign on Saturday, and then on Sunday endorsed Democratic nominee Bill Owens.

Local Republican officials in the far-upstate New York district, responding to the huge setbacks endured by their party in the Democratic-trending Northeast, nominated Scozzafava, whose support for abortion rights and gay rights and ties to organized labor marked her as one of the most liberal Republican House candidates in recent years. They made their choice under New York’s rules for House special elections, which exclude primaries and leave candidate nominations up to the parties’ organizations.

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But activists on the right, who believe the party’s hopes for a comeback are staked on sticking firmly to the national party’s conservative agenda and persuading most American voters that they are right on the issues, rebelled and lined up with accountant Doug Hoffman, the nominee of New York’s small but feisty Conservative Party. And prominent conservative Republican leaders around the country, including 2008 vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas, former New York Gov. George E. Pataki and several current members of Congress, fueled Hoffman’s surge in the polls by giving him their endorsements.

That turned the contest into a three-way race between Scozzafava, Hoffman and Owens. That is, until Saturday, when Scozzafava, her poll numbers tanking, quit the race. So the contest — a flat-footed tie between Owens and Hoffman in a pair of pre-election independent polls — will be decided by how the 20 percent or so who stuck by Scozzafava decide to break on Election Day. And it now will take some pretty stiff Republican loyalties to get the Scozzafava faithful to stick with the party, given that she has now urged them to cross over and vote for Owens.

Though this little House contest has grown to eclipse the major statewide races Tuesday, the basic story line of the off-year elections has not changed.

This is the first Election Day since 2008 when the national Democratic surge, which began in the 2006 cycle, culminated with the election of Obama as president and a major expansion of the party’s majorities in the Senate and House.

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So Republican officials have been hoping for some needed comeback victories this November. A sweep of the big contests on Tuesday would bring added force to their claims that the public is turning against Obama’s assertive efforts to use the federal government to address the recession-plagued economy and other major problems — enshrined in the high-priced economic stimulus legislation enacted last February on a near-party line vote in Congress and the current push for a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health care system.

Furthermore, a strong showing Tuesday would be spun by the party, and interpreted by many pundits, as a bellwether for a big Republican revival in the 2010 midterm elections.

But going into the campaigns’ final weekend, polls suggest a clear Republican advantage only in Virginia’s race for governor, with former state Attorney General Bob McDonnell leading Democratic state Sen. Creigh Deeds by double-digit percentages.

The New Jersey governor’s race, which for much of the year looked like Republican Chris Christie’s to lose because of Democrat Jon Corzine ’s cellar-dwelling job approval ratings, now appears a tossup, with strong third-party candidate Chris Daggett as a wild-card factor.

And it would be hard to find a race with a less predictable outcome than that in New York 23.

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