Obama wasn't on the ballot

What do these strange, odd-year elections – suddenly so feverishly important, now that America's excitable right-wingers from Rush Limbaugh on down demand that they be – tell us about Barack Obama's political health? Not very much, really.

Certainly, the Republicans have reason to celebrate their wins in the governors' races in Virginia and New Jersey. The latter, especially, is a feather in the party's cap, and if Obama suffered one hurtful blow tonight, it happened because he campaigned for that state's Democratic governor Jon Corzine on three occasions. That Obama couldn't pull Corzine's irons out of the fire does tell us that some of that 2008 lustre is gone, even in a pro-Obama state.

But it tells us other things too. As much as pundits try every four years to use Virginia and New Jersey results as precursors to next year's congressional elections, what they actually are is post-cursors: in every election since 1989, the two states have chosen a governor from the opposite party of the president elected the year before. So they're simply reacting against what America (and often they themselves) did 12 months prior.

Exit polls say that Obama wasn't much of a factor in either state. In Virginia, evenly divided on whether they were voting to express support for or opposition to him.

In addition, both Democrats happened to be bad candidates. And both results, New Jersey's especially, tell us that a financial crisis is a lousy time to be a governor. I hate to be so tacky as to insert a bit of substance into a political column, but since the crisis hit 14 months ago, 31 states have raised taxes and most have chopped all manner of services. All but a handful of governors sank below 50%, as Chris Christie in New Jersey and Bob McDonnell almost surely will by next summer or fall, when voters re-learn the old lesson that it isn't possible to cut taxes while improving services after all.

The McDonnell victory was widely expected, the Christie win certainly not a shocker. But the night's most surprising outcome, and the one with the most significant and least predictable impact, came in the high-profile race in a congressional district in upstate New York, where Democrat Bill Owens pulled off an upset against a Conservative, Doug Hoffman.

It was a special election, to fill a vacancy. The local GOP mandarins put up a veteran politician, a moderate woman. The national right-wing went ballistic – she's pro-choice, among other thought crimes – and rallied around Hoffman (New York state has a multi-party system, so Hoffman was the nominee of the Conservative party). The Republican, Dede Scozzafava, was surrounded and attacked by the likes of Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and others. Last weekend she quit the race – and then endorsed Owens.

The district voted narrowly for Obama in 2008 but hasn't sent a Democrat to Congress in more than a century. Late polling was relatively close, but it showed Hoffman ahead, and conservative Palinites across the country were licking their chops – this result, they said, will show that America is fed up with Obama's socialist agenda. A Hoffman win would have emboldened the Palin wing of the GOP, which has promised to find tea-party style conservatives to challenge Republican moderates in primary contests next year (there's only one Republican moderate left in Washington, but I suppose they see matter differently than I do).

A Hoffman win also would have scared moderate Democrats in Congress out of their knickers, which in turn could well have had an impact on the coming healthcare votes. So a major bullet was dodged there, by a margin of roughly 4,200 votes, and Republican and conservative self-immolation will, delightfully, continue.

Oh yes – Mike Bloomberg. Well, he was re-elected New York City's mayor. But in spending $100m of his own money, against about $8m spent by opponent Bill Thompson, he finally repelled a sizeable chunk of New Yorkers, because he won by a far lower-than-expected 4%. Maybe New Yorkers will finally say "enough" four years hence.

And finally, and sadly, a ballot proposal in Maine to outlaw gay marriage was narrowly passed. All 30 such measures that have been placed on state ballots have passed, but there was hope that this one, in a northeastern state, might not make it. It almost didn't. That wall will fall soon, somewhere.

In sum, a good Republican night, but you can bet that Hoffman result, which came in after midnight, darkened their moods considerably. It was the only major race in which the candidates were arguing about what's going on in Washington. The guy who runs that town still is not as despised as the right wing thinks he ought to be.