All what's at stake on Tuesday

The outcome of the 2004 presidential election is important in a number of ways, both in Virginia and nationwide, beyond simply determining who our war-time commander-in-chief will be for the next four years. The margin and manner in which the victor is declared will define not only how campaigns are waged henceforth, but how unified our state and nation are and how easy or difficult a time next year our leaders are going to have governing.

It goes without saying that the greater the margin of victory for the presidential winner – whether Bush or Kerry – the more convinced the country will be that he’ll be sitting legitimately in the White House. But no one really believes the next president is going to win in a Reagan-like landslide.

The ’04 election is destined to extend beyond Tuesday, though a winner most likely will be declared a handful of hours after each state’s polls close. The number of states held by both campaigns as toss-ups with 24 hours to go – Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and New Mexico – guarantees that the candidate declared the winner around midnight or so may not be accepted for days or even weeks to come. Unless one candidate or the other wins in these too-close-to-call states by wider than expected margins – three percentage points at a minimum – prepare to endure the loser’s endless litigation contesting the outcome.

The manner in which the victor is declared is equally important. We already know that both campaigns have deployed armies of lawyers in states all across the country, especially in the half-dozen or so battleground states. The Democrats, however, have vowed to use their lawyers to create chaos in the name of “voter fraud” even where no evidence of voter fraud exists. “Pre-emptive strikes,” the Democratic National Committee calls it in instruction manuals sent to their state parties. Laying the groundwork for frivolous lawsuits may be what it really is.

If the winner is declared in as cloudy – and vitriolic – a manner as we saw in 2000, voters will become ever more skeptical of the purity of our electoral process. And if the election is again decided in the courts, then voters’ skepticism will be almost intractable in the near term. It may be that the hangover effects of two straight highly controversial presidential elections may only be reversed by two back-to-back, not-so-close presidential elections – meaning it’ll be 2016 before hanging chads and electoral lawsuits are a distant memory and faith in our elections is restored.

No matter the winner, the new president will reign over a divided country, made so by the Iraq war as much as a close (or disputed) election. A Bush win will be accompanied by a continued dominance by Republicans in the House of Representatives and a likely increase in the GOP’s razor-thin margin in the Senate. Bush will have Republican majorities in both chambers, but he’ll have to work overtime to bring the overall electorate with him on even mildly controversial domestic or foreign policy initiatives. A Kerry presidency also will have to contend with a GOP dominated House and Senate, and there will exist the same divided electorate. Any way you cut it, the next president is going to have a rough go of it.

In Virginia, there is little doubt which candidate will win the state and our 13 electoral votes. The Old Dominion loves to vote Republican in presidential elections. Here, in a state with such a large military industrial complex, Bush’s accentuated role as commander-in-chief has certainly helped him.

Absent an ongoing war, however, when domestic policy issues would most certainly outweigh foreign policy ones, it’s reasonable to wonder whether Bush would still be expected to win by 6-9 percentage points instead of, say, 3-5. Let’s not forget that vote-rich Northern Virginia seems to be trending a tad more Democratic with each passing presidential election.

A big Bush win bodes well for Jerry Kilgore, Virginia’s current attorney general who’s pulling political duty as head of the Bush campaign in Virginia and also is the GOP’s all-but-certain nominee for governor next year. The converse is true, too, unlikely though it may be. A marginal Bush win will push Kilgore to run double-time toward Election Day 2005.

A narrower-than-expected Bush victory also will boost Gov. Mark Warner, a Democrat, in the eyes of his national party. And in the short run, a surprisingly good Kerry showing will allow the governor to go into the ’05 General Assembly session with a bit more spring in his step and will marginally bolster him in the remaining 14 months of his term.

Much of this, however, is academic. Bush is expected to win by a decent margin in Virginia, just as Republican presidential candidates have done in every election since Dwight Eisenhower’s run in 1952, save LBJ’s victory in ’64.

What’s not academic, though, is that a heck of a lot is riding on this election – not just in terms of who wins, but in how the outcome is accepted and communicated to the nation and world. Contesting the election in a drawn-out sort of way – especially in the courts – only colors the winner’s legitimacy and damages the institution of the presidency.

All eyes are on a half-dozen or so states. Let’s hope there’s a clear winner in each of them. And let’s hope, of course, that it’s Bush.