It was a long night but the results are in: Republican Bob Turner won the special election to fill the seat vacated by the disgraced Anthony Weiner.
While David Weprin’s name was on the ballot, Republicans and others, including former New York Mayor Ed Koch, cast the race as a referendum on President Obama. The New York Times reports:
As Mr. Turner declared that the election had been a referendum on the president, his buoyant supporters, gathered at a restaurant in Howard Beach, Queens, shouted “Yes, we can,” appropriating the galvanizing phrase of Mr. Obama’s 2008 campaign. Mr. Turner predicted that voters elsewhere would also rebuke Mr. Obama in the elections next year.“We have lit one candle today,” he said. “It’s going to be a bonfire pretty soon.”
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The unexpectedly tight race stirred anxiety among Democrats already worried about elections next year for president, the House and the Senate. The Turner campaign had eagerly courted disenchanted Democrats, and outside polling places around the district on Tuesday, multiple longtime Democrats confessed that despite concern about Mr. Turner’s eagerness to slash federal spending, they chose him hoping that his election would get lawmakers’ attention.
Political commentator Stuart Rothenberg recently wrote:
But make no mistake about it, the albatross around Weprin’s neck is named Obama, and Democrats who value honesty will tell you privately that the president’s 37 percent approval rating in the district is making it difficult for Weprin to win a race that in almost any other time would be a slam dunk, no matter how mediocre a campaign the Democratic nominee ran.Polling conducted by Siena College shows that jobs and the economy are the top issues of the day, and Republican calls for voters to “send a message” to President Barack Obama clearly have worked far better than Democratic charges that Turner and his party want to eliminate Medicare and Social Security.
Israel is also a very visible issue, and popular former New York Mayor Ed Koch (D) has endorsed Turner because of the former mayor’s unhappiness with Obama’s level of support for Israel.
Rothenberg continued:
Democrats also want to avoid the public relations disaster that losing a reliably Democratic district would entail. The loss would play into the Republicans’ narrative about the president’s unpopularity, giving GOP talkers ammunition to argue that 2012 will be a nightmare for Democrats and that Medicare will not be the disaster for Republicans that Democratic strategists hope it will be.
Weprin, an Orthodox Jew, lost in a district with a heavy population of Jewish voters and where Democrats outnumber Republicans by a 3-to-1 margin.
If Weprin couldn’t make it there, can Democrats make it in Florida next year?