Teeny Little Bright Spot

by digby

Howie found a small kernel of something good in a week of horrific bad news on every front:

Yesterday I had to put off a meeting with the Blue America attorney because he was manning a northern Virginia polling station. I hadn’t realized there was a special election, but he reminded me that when lunatic-fringe sociopath Ken Cuccinelli was elected Virginia Attorney General, his state Senate seat came open. It’s a Republican-leaning district and no one really expected it to go from insanely die-hard Republican to unapologetic Democratic. But I had to postpone the meeting again today because he was celebrating. His candidate, state Delegate Dave Marsden, a former Republican, won the seat last night!

Marsden, 61, a two-term delegate from Burke who switched political parties earlier this decade while serving as the head of the state Department of Juvenile Justice under both Republican and Democratic governors, won the 37th state Senate seat vacated by Attorney General-elect Kenneth T. Cuccinelli (R) by rallying a voter base reeling from big losses in November’s statewide and House races.

Marsden’s victory over Republican Stephen M. “Steve” Hunt, a former Fairfax County School Board member, also expands the control of Virginia Democrats in the Senate chamber… Rex Simmons, the newly-elected chairman of the Fairfax County Democratic Committee, said Marsden’s victory would ensure Democrats would have a “seat at the table” with Republican Governor-elect Robert F. McDonnell.

“This is a tremendous win for Democrats in a district that has been largely Republican in the past,” Simmons said. “This will give us a state senator for every inch of Fairfax County.” The 37th has had a Republican state senator since 1992.

Republicans were left scrambling late Tuesday to figure out what happened.

“It’s very disappointing,” said Anthony Bedell, chairman of the Fairfax County Republican Committee. “We had the momentum, we had the support and we just didn’t get it done.”

Voters in the district voted for McDonnell in the governor’s race against state Sen. R. Creigh Deeds (D-Bath) in November but both Senate candidates knew that their biggest challenge was simply to get voters to the polls. Hunt tried to energize his party’s faithful at a Fairfax County Republican Committee last week, telling members: “The U.S. is at a crossroads. The state of the nation depends on a special election in Fairfax County.”

In the final days, both campaigns turned aggressive. Marsden decried Hunt’s “very bad judgment,” referring to his views on homosexuality and sex education, and Hunt told a group at a Fairfax County Republican Committee last week that he intended to “demolish” Marsden in the election. Hunt’s wife, Monique, even tried to drum up publicity by calling in to Fox News commentator Sean Hannity, who rebuffed a request for an interview with her husband.

After all the talk about Virginia being a bellweather, it seems to me that this at least confirms some people’s view that the Deeds loss really was about his singularly lackluster self rather than a broad embrace of teabaggery.