By Selwyn Duke

There has been much analysis of the Virginia governor’s race
in which Clinton crony Terry McAuliffe edged out Republican Ken Cuccinelli by
two points. Liberals have portrayed the outcome as heralding the death of the
Tea Party, while conservatives have, among other things, blamed the GOP
establishment for failing to provide the financial backing that could have put
Cuccinelli over the top. But the truth?

The Virginia race bodes well for the Tea Party in 2014.

One problem with most of the analysis involves a common
human failing: people want simple, one-dimensional explanations and don’t truly
wrap their minds around the fact that an outcome can reflect multiple factors.
So we hear that Cuccinelli’s loss was due to establishment GOP neglect or even
hostility, or media bias or poor Republican tactics or vote fraud or
Fluke-foolish young women or Robert Sarvis the libertarian vote siphoner.

Replace every “or” with an “and” and you have close to a
complete explanation.

Having said this, I’d like to focus on Sarvis and his seven-percent
vote share. As you probably know by now, it has been revealed that an Obama
bundler was helping to finance the Sarvis campaign in order to split the
conservative vote.

And it likely worked.

Election analysis seems to indicate that if the conservative
votes won by Sarvis had gone to Cuccinelli, the Republican would have won this
very close race. This is why even libertarian stalwart Ron Paul said that
voting for Sarvis would be “insane.”

Now, I’m not indulging sour grapes, nor am I descending into
the error of single-factor analysis. My point is this: the Democrats obviously
believed that despite their media advantage and war-on-women propaganda and the
GOP’s tactical timidity, they couldn’t
win without splitting the conservative vote. Theirs was not the behavior of
people confident in the strength of their ideology and record.

It was an admission of
weakness.

This bears repeating. The Democrats have tacitly
acknowledged that they could not win without splitting the conservative vote —
which was the majority.

To buttress this point, consider what American Thinker’s C.
Edmund Wright wrote
about Michael Barone’s statistical election analysis: “Barone's figures show
that Virginia voters disapprove [of ObamaCare] by 53-45%, strangely close to
the vote tally of Cuccinelli and quasi-libertarian Robert Sarvis combined.” In
other words, the Democrats had an eight-point ideological disadvantage with
respect to the main issue of the day and likely could not have won a head-to-head
race against Cuccinelli.

So what will happen in November 2014? It’s hard to predict
outcomes a year before an election, and the Democrats’ dirty-tricks specialization
is always a factor difficult to quantify. But they just may need all the tricks
they can muster to hold their own, as the GOP’s ideological advantage will
likely carry over into the next election.

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