CBS News tweets:

As Polls Close in Va., CBS News Estimates GOP's Bob McDonnell Is Leading the Gov. Race

As of about 7:13 PM Eastern, even Fox News is calling this race "too close to call" (note, this is not"too early to call," which is more about timing than margin). Interesting. (Update [2009-11-3 19:28:5 by Jonathan Singer]: Fox News corrects, joins others in calling this race too early to call.)

More as we hear it...

Update [2009-11-3 19:48:51 by Jerome Armstrong]: Per Lowell, "With 16.9% of the vote counted, it's now McDonnell 63.5%-Deeds 36.4%. For LG, it's Bolling 61.7%-Wagner 38.2%. For AG, it's Cuccinelli 62.5%-Shannon 37.4%. NLS has already called the races. The only part of interest seems to be whether Wagner and Shannon get more votes than top-of-the-ticket Deeds-- now that's pathetic.

Update [2009-11-3 20:1:14 by Jonathan Singer]: The Associated Press calls the Virginia Governor race for Republican Bob McDonnell.

There's more...

I haven't written about Sarah Palin for a couple of months, because her political relevance pretty much evaporated when she failed to complete the job Alaska voters elected her to do. She and her entourage seem not to have clued in yet, however:

Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell repeatedly and personally asked former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin for help this summer in his campaign for Virginia governor, a Palin spokeswoman said.

But by late August, Palin learned that the McDonnell campaign no longer wanted her assistance, Palin adviser Meg Stapleton said in an interview tonight.

Earlier this week, McDonnell reacted with a bit of sarcasm when asked whether Palin would be campaigning with him. "There was a time earlier on when she was governor when I thought she would come here,'' he said. "But I think she seems to be busy with books and other things like that. We've still got about 20 different events scheduled down the road and she's not one of them."

But Stapleton says Palin is not too busy to come. She says that her boss offered to help McDonnell numerous times both in conversations with him and his campaign and through the Republican Governors Association.

"The Governor, SarahPAC, and I have all communicated to the candidate, the campaign and to the RGA the Governor's continued willingness to assist in any way possible - even as recently as two weeks ago,'' Stapleton said.

Memo to Stapleton: Your boss doesn't seem like an authority on who's fit to serve as governor anymore. If Palin had not resigned for no apparent reason in the middle of her first term, she might have found a spot on McDonnell's schedule, along with various other Republican governors and former governors.

Assuming Terry Branstad is the Republican nominee for Iowa governor next year, he won't want Palin coming anywhere near his campaign either. I suppose the more socially conservative Bob Vander Plaats might seek out Palin's support during the Republican gubernatorial primary here, but Palin may not be enough of a maverick to campaign for an underdog in a GOP primary.

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Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell has been leading all of the recent polls out of Virginia, but this Washington Post story on his master's thesis has him on the defensive:

At age 34, two years before his first election and two decades before he would run for governor of Virginia, Robert F. McDonnell submitted a master's thesis to the evangelical school he was attending in Virginia Beach in which he described working women and feminists as "detrimental" to the family. He said government policy should favor married couples over "cohabitators, homosexuals or fornicators." He described as "illogical" a 1972 Supreme Court decision legalizing the use of contraception by unmarried couples.

The 93-page document, which is publicly available at the Regent University library, culminates with a 15-point action plan that McDonnell said the Republican Party should follow to protect American families -- a vision that he started to put into action soon after he was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates.

Blue Virginia has more analysis, while Twitter user @FakeVirginia has posted a page-by-page analysis of the McDonnell thesis. You can download the pdf file of the thesis on this page at the Washington Post site.

McDonnell responds,

"Virginians will judge me on my 18-year record as a legislator and Attorney General and the specific plans I have laid out for our future -- not on a decades-old academic paper I wrote as a student during the Reagan era and haven't thought about in years."

McDonnell added: "Like everybody, my views on many issues have changed as I have gotten older." He said that his views on family policy were best represented by his 1995 welfare reform legislation and that he "worked to include child day care in the bill so women would have greater freedom to work." What he wrote in the thesis on women in the workplace, he said, "was simply an academic exercise and clearly does not reflect my views."

Will voters in purple Virginia buy this explanation? Your guess is as good as mine.

If he was planning a political career, McDonnell should have followed the example of 99.9 percent of grad students: write a master's thesis on some obscure topic of no interest to a wider audience.

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This I don't entirely understand:

Republican Robert F. McDonnell made a bet at his first debate in the Virginia governor's race Saturday: that turning the contest into a referendum on President Obama's increasingly contentious national agenda will sway the election.

Time after time in the ballroom of the Homestead resort in Hot Springs, Va., McDonnell raised federal issues, trying to force Democrat R. Creigh Deeds to take positions on greenhouse gas emission limits, union elections, the federal stimulus package and health-care reform. The aim is to lure Virginia's crucial bloc of pro-business moderates, many of whom voted for Democrats in recent statewide elections but are growing increasingly alarmed at Obama's policies.

Leaving aside the broader wisdom of trying to turn a gubernatorial election into a national referendum -- voters in such elections tend not to focus as much on national political trends as they do on local issues like traffic (particularly in Virginia), education and the like -- it's not at all clear to me that the strategy of Republican Bob McDonnell makes particular sense here.

Virginia has seen a number of elections with national focus in the past few years. In 2006, Virginians tossed out their incumbent Republican Senator, George Allen, who until that point was one of his party's leading presidential candidates. In 2008, the state voted for Barack Obama, delivering the Democrats its first slate of electoral votes in more than 40 years. The 2008 election also saw the Democrats winning the state's other Senate seat -- by more than a 30-point margin(!) -- and a whopping three of the state's eleven congressional districts flip from red-to-blue.

Given these trends, does anyone actually think that Virginians are knee-jerkedly Republican. that hardcore partisan attacks on the Democrats are going to seal the deal for the GOP? McDonnell and his advisors apparently do. But I'm not at all convinced that this strategy is going to pan out.

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Per release:

Following his come-from-behind primary victory, gubernatorial candidate Creigh Deeds will report raising nearly $3.4 million during the fundraising period ending June 30.

[...]

A wave of grassroots support marked the latest fundraising period for Deeds, which ran from May 28 through June 30. Deeds received the support of 2,500 different donors during the period, 68 percent of whom were small donors contributing less than $100.

In 2009, 63 percent of Deeds' nearly $5 million raised came from Virginia. By contrast, just 30 percent of McDonnell's 2009 funds to date have come from Virginia, with more than $4 million coming from out of state. [http://www.vpap.org/candidates/profile/m oney_in_locality1/5666?start_year=2009&a mp;end_year=2009&lookup_type=year&am p;filing_period=all]

Deeds' total eclipses the amount raised by Governors Warner and Kaine, Mark Earley and Jerry Kilgore in a similar time period in their gubernatorial elections. In a similar period in June 2005, Jerry Kilgore raised $2.0 million while Tim Kaine raised $1.0 milion. In 2001, Mark Earley raised $1.7 million and Warner raised $1.1 million over the same period of time.

This is a tough race for the Democrats, no doubt, with the party having controlled the governorship for the past two terms and history showing that the party out of power in the White House tending to do well in Virginia gubernatorial elections. That said, with Democratic Creigh Deeds pulling in some very impressive fundraising numbers, it's clear that the Democrats have a serious shot at going against history and winning a third straight term at the helm of Virginia.

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