How the future of the GOP is being decided in New York and Virginia

It’s kinda odd when you think about it.

The future of the Republican Party is being played out in two places that look very different at first glance: liberal New York and conservative Virginia. True, both states voted for Obama last presidential election, but national elections don’t really matter all that much in state-based campaigns.

When you take a deeper look, however, the difference in not what you might expect. The 23rd district in New York has been one of the few safe Republican seats in New York for many years, while Virginia looks more and more purple and less and less red every day.

But the dynamics of the House of Representative’s race in New York and the governor’s race in Virginia point to two very different directions for the GOP. And if you’re a Democrat, you have to hope that the Republicans choose New York and not Virginia as their model for the future.

New York’s 23rd district has become a showdown between Republican moderates and far-right conservatives. Although she has the backing of party heavyweights like Newt Gingrich, New York GOP assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava has been excoriated by the party’s right wing – especially by Erick Erickson of the website Red State who has basically declared a fatwa against Scozzafava. Prodded by Erickson’s denunciation, other far-right stalwarts like Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh has jumped on the anti-Scozzafava bandwagon and are now supporting Doug Hoffman of the Conservative Party.

Here’s how the Atlantic Wire described the situation:

Erickson called the race “a Hill to Die On” for conservatives. He accused Scozzafava of “Funnel[ing] Campaign Cash to Family.” He slammed Newt Gingrich, Scozzafava’s most high-profile backer, writing, “Today Newt Gingrich Takes Himself Out of the 2012 Running [...] Gingrich no longer wants to nor can he be seen as a conservative.” Erickson called for Scozzafava to withdraw and demanded new national GOP leadership. He even raised money for Hoffman. The wider conservative world took note, and soon endorsements for Hoffman rolled in from Sarah Palin, the Club for Growth, Steve Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, even sitting Congresswoman Michele Bachmann.

This is what every Democrat would see as the perfect storm – an internecine squabble that will pull the GOP farther and farther to the right. And in the confusion, the Democrats might even end up picking up the seat. (Obama beat McCain here 52% to 47%, hinting at a more purple future.) Blissful.

Then there is Virginia. And that’s a problem for Democrats.

It use to be in Virginia that you could run to the right of Glenn Beck and win the state in a breeze. (And GOP candidate Bob McDonnell is pretty conservative.) But Washington has changed all that. And I don’t mean the government intentionally engineered the change. But as government grew, the businesses that support it grew as well. Meanwhile, lobbyists were moving into the area, as were immigrants (legal ones at that). The suburbs expanded at a dizzying rate. Suddenly Northern Virginia was looking as blue as Vermont and had a lot more voters than the rest of the still quite red state. The past decade has been a slow march to the Democrats’ win column for almost any candidate who ran here on the state-wide level, culminating in Obama’s electoral victory here last November.

So why is conservative Bob McDonnell about to become governor? The answer is easy – he learned how to look like a moderate.

OK, there are other factors: the historical record of the state of electing a governor from the opposite party of the president; the coalition of African-American, women, and young voters who supported Obama don’t feel any passion for Democratic candidate Creigh Deeds (my wife, a yellow dog Democrat from Georgia, told me yesterday that if Deeds can’t get her excited about voting for him, then he’s in big trouble); the glow of the Obama presidency has faded for many independents; and the miserably ineffectual campaign run by Deeds.

But McDonnell has also created his own luck. In particular, he has campaigned hard in Northern Virginia. And that’s meant that he hasn’t talked about immigration, or abortion, or where the president was born. He held rallies for ethic minority groups. When news leaked about a very conservative, misogynist, homophobic college dissertation he had written not as a callow youth, but as a 33 year-old adult, McDonnell basically denounced his former self and said he was a changed man. He even said he was very happy for the president when Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize.

The result is that McDonnell is only running about 4-5 points behind Deeds in this crucial part of the state. As a GOP consultant told the Washington Post Sunday, McDonnell doesn’t have to win Northern Virginia, he just needs to stay close, knowing that the red part of the state would vote for him even if he was brain dead.

Learning to look and act like a moderate is the trick that conservative Republicans have not mastered, until this point in time. Mitt Romney tried, but did it the wrong way around – a moderate who wanted to act like a conservative. That dog won’t hunt.

And so you see the paths laid out for the Grand Old Party. On the one hand, a retrenching of the rabid-right, anti-moderate, mouth-foaming conservatism that many think has lead the party to the edge of irrelevance. On the other hand, a more enlightened conservatism that acknowledges that the demographics of America has changed forever, but you can still sell a conservative if you wrap him or her up in moderate colors.

I know which path I hope the Republicans take.

Go get ‘em Erick!