Deeds is a little out of focus

I’m not as inclined to dismiss the Rasmussen poll as Riley is, although it should be noted that the poll’s margin error is nearly as large as Creigh Deeds‘ lead.  Moreover, I think there is some confusion in comparing this poll to the last Rasmussen figure (in April, when Deeds was barely hanging on for dear life).  Odds are had Rasmussen been polling in the run-up to June 9, we would have seen Deeds closing the gap with Bob McDonnell.

I go into detail on Rasmussen’s poll here, but suffice to say, it’s pretty clear that Virginians don’t have the full, clear picture on Deeds yet.  Odds are all most Virginians remember about the fellow is he’s a rural Democrat who had the NRA backing in 2005 and has the Washington Post’s support now.

In other words, he’s basically all things to all people.  That will change.  For starters, it might help the 22% of Republicans that Deeds has managed to pry off McDonnell to notice why the WaPo endorsed Deeds in the first place, as Garren Shippley reports (NV Daily, h/t Norm at TQ):

Operatives from more than one campaign told me that, during interviews, the Post’s editorial board zeroed in on one issue and one issue alone — transportation. And given that this is the Post’s edit board, they focused on the same part of the issue that they’ve hammered on for as long as I’ve been covering Virginia politics, the gas tax.

At the end of the day, Moran said he wouldn’t raise the gas tax, McAuliffe said he wouldn’t raise any taxes until the economy improved. Enter Deeds, who said he would. The endorsement speaks for itself:

In 18 years in the General Assembly, Mr. Deeds has time and again supported measures that might be unpopular with his rural constituency but that are the right thing to do, for Northern Virginia and the state as a whole.
…
Last year, however, as both candidates [Deeds and Moran] were laying the groundwork for their campaigns, Mr. Deeds courageously voted for a proposal that included raising the state’s gas tax, unchanged since 1986; Mr. Moran helped kill the bill by opposing it in committee.

In other words, the Post was looking for the candidate most willing to raise taxes, and Deeds was their man.

How willing is Deeds to raise taxes?  Last year, his “solution” to the transportation issue (largely confined to the dynamic regions of the state – Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads) was the hideous SB6009 (LIS), which would have . . .

• Increased the gasoline tax by 6 cents
• Increased the state sales tax by 1/4%
• Increased the state sales tax on cars by 1/2%
• Imposed an addition sales tax of 1/2% on Northern Virginia
• Imposed a hotel occupancy tax of $5 per night on Northern Virginia
• Imposed a grantor’s tax (real estate) of $.40 per $1000 on Northern Virginia
• Imposed an additional 1% sales tax on Hampton Roads
• Imposed an additional 1% gas tax on Hampton Roads
• Imposed an addition 1% sales tax on the Richmond metropolitan area, the Fredericksburg region, and (by my reading) the SWAC area

Now, Deeds and his minions will try to tell us that all of these tax increases (which would have been enacted in the middle of a recession, BTW) were necessary to fund transporation.  They would be wrong.  In fact, House Republicans presented their own road-funding bill (then HB6055, now HB1579), which would have tied transportation funding to a region’s economic activity, and thus assured Hampton Roads and NoVa would get funding worthy of their economic dynamism.  In fact, the House GOP proposal ($600 million and $300 million per year, respectively: LIS) would have enabled NoVa and HR to collect more transportation funds than the Deeds tax hike would have (less than $350M and less than $250M per year respectively - State Senate Finance Committee).

So, Creigh Deeds perfectly willing to impose tax increases on every single Virginian so that NoVa and HR would get less money than the no-tax-increase version that his friends on the Senate Finance Committee shot down.

Something tells me that once voters take all of this in – especially voters in NoVa and HR – Mr. Deeds won’t be leading this race.