Va. Republican gubernatorial nominee Ken Cuccinelli

Now that Republicans have begun to wrap up their postmortem of 2012, one would expect to see a notable change in strategy and messaging in major state and national campaigns. The 2014 Senate elections are already in the bullpen, but a more immediate assessment of  tactics may be 2013’s two off-year gubernatorial elections, in New Jersey and Virginia, respectively.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie seems to have his race pretty much in the bag: the most recent polls from NBC News/Marist, Quinnipiac, and Rutgers-Eagleton all have him beating his opponent, Democrat Barbara Buono, by 30 points or more. The RealClearPolitics average for Virginia, on the other hand, has the race at a near-draw, between the fiercely conservative attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli and former Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe. After the May 18 state Republican convention, the ticket has been filled out to include State Senator Mark Obenshain for attorney general and E.W. Jackson for Lieutenant Governor.

This ticket—Cuccinelli and Jackson in particular—is bad news for the GOP.

To find out why, let’s look back to 2012. It was fairly clear from the Romney attack ads that the former Massachusetts governor wanted to make 2012 a campaign fundamentally grounded on economic issues—Romney was strongest when talking about fiscal policy, and Obama was certainly vulnerable on everything from the health care bill to the budget. That was the Republican message, broadcasted around the news networks, the internet, and the radio: the election was going to be a referendum between the so-called failed policies of the Obama years and the responsible management proposed by the Republican candidates.

What happened instead was exactly the opposite. 2012 was not an election about the economy. Romney’s economic plan was overshadowed by several factors: a barrage of unfortunate rape comments by other GOP candidates (looking at you, Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock); his own bumbling world tour and too-sudden response to the Benghazi attacks; the infamous “47 percent” comment; and, at the bottom of it all, a primary process that pushed him much too far to the right. Hispanics were alienated by his inability to support comprehensive immigration reform and his hesitancy to accept the DREAM Act; women were turned off once Mitt Romney put them in his “binders” and ineffectively distanced himself from what appeared to be a nationwide conservative crusade against abortion (much of which occurred in Virginia). The election became skewed towards social issues, and instead of creating a dialogue about economic policy, it became a vote on a worldview—specifically, whether Mitt Romney’s world was just too narrow and isolated to accommodate, say, 47 percent of the nation.

The lessons from 2012 then seem pretty clear. Whatever happens, GOP candidates should NEVER encourage voters to think about conservative social policy, especially if they are going to have to rely on a significant independent vote. If the candidate doesn’t share the same views as Todd Akin, make sure that nothing remotely sounding like “legitimate rape” or “self-deportation” comes out of campaign HQ. If candidates do share those positions, then the same rule applies—they should steer the conversation towards the economy and away from the culture war.

So, in the first major battleground election, the candidate for governor is an Attorney General who advised state universities to “prohibit a college or university from including ‘sexual orientation,’ ‘gender identity,’ ‘gender expression,’ or like terms in [their] non-discrimination policy”; challenged greenhouse gas regulation; and covered the exposed breast of the female figure on the state seal. Jackson, the candidate for lieutenant governor is actively against same-sex marriage and has stated that “Planned Parenthood has been far more lethal to black lives than the KKK ever was”. Obenshain has supported more stringent voter ID laws and has pledged to “fight federal government overreach”.

But Virginia is just not that conservative anymore. Both its senators (Mark Warner and Tim Kaine) are Democrats, and since 1990 there has been an equal number of governors on the left and on the right (governors are limited to one four-year term). This shift means that Cuccinelli et al. can win in one of two ways: either they convince moderates that they are not too extreme, or more conservatives than liberals show up on election day.

The first option looked feasible until the Republican Convention. After E.W. Jackson defeated his other six opponents in four contentious rounds of voting, that hope disappeared. This is the first time that the Virginia GOP has held a convention system instead of primaries—and it is the major reason why Cuccinelli’s chief opponent, the much less fiery Lieutenant Governor Bill Bolling, dropped out of the race. (Cuccinelli supporters tended to be more likely to go to the convention than Republicans from Bolling’s camp.)

The second option seems to be the path that provides the best chance of success. However, liberal groups are already gearing up to draw more left-leaning voters to the ballot box. Planned Parenthood has begun advertising heavily against Cuccinelli, and a new anti-Cuccinelli site, keepkenout.org, has the Planned Parenthood Action Fund as well as Terry McAuliffe’s campaign on its list of funders. For the same reasons that moderates may stay out of the Republican camp, loyal Democratic voters may vote in larger numbers than normal for state-wide elections.

The Cuccinelli campaign points to a larger problem inherent in a GOP desperate to attract minority, women, and moderate voters, and risks repeating the mistakes of 2012. Conservative firebrands may energize the party base, but at the same time their social policy tends to alienate the voters that the GOP needs to attract. Even if Cuccinelli tries to draw statewide attention towards economic issues, the McAuliffe campaign and liberal groups will make sure that his and Jackson’s past comments and actions on social policy remain in the forefront of voters’ minds.

But here’s the catch-22: even if Cuccinelli wins, his victory is harmful to Republicans who are trying to distance themselves from the Todd Akins and Sarah Palins of their party, and creates further issues for a party at a crossroads between polarizing ideologues and pragmatists.