'A Wipeout Election'
Popularity and success couldn't save one Republican governor from the Democratic tide.

by BRENDAN MINITER
Tuesday, December 5, 2006 12:01 A.M. EST

ANNAPOLIS, Md.--In the four weeks since losing his bid for re-election, Gov. Robert Ehrlich has been braced by an outpouring of support from constituents. Each day he reads some of the thousand of letters and emails that have come in and marvels as one after the other expresses regret for his defeat.

But every so often, the governor told me on Friday, he comes across a letter of a different sort. These come from residents who say that they're "sorry" that they couldn't support him "this time," but that if he runs again they'll likely vote for him then. Here the governor, the first Republican chief executive the state has seen in more than three decades, pauses. We're sitting in a private study in the governor's mansion, and over some 90 minutes a half dozen of his top staff members will trickle in and take a seat. None possess an answer to the question he now asks: "How do you respond to that?"

The story line out of the midterm elections is that Republicans were defeated across the country because they lost the support of independent voters. That was likely the case in Missouri, Montana and Virginia, where incumbent Republican senators were voted out of office. In Colorado and Ohio, where GOP gubernatorial candidates came up short, it was, in part, a failure to appeal to Republican voters. But in crunching through the numbers with Gov. Ehrlich, a different picture emerges for the results in Maryland--a picture that may be even more troubling for Republicans who have only recently begun to think of themselves as members of the majority party.

Gov. Ehrlich won big among Republicans and independents. And he enjoyed high marks among voters of all stripes for cleaning up a fiscal mess he inherited four years ago (he turned a $4 billion deficit into a $2.3 billion surplus). He succeeded at killing $7.5 billion in tax hikes pushed by the Legislature, cleaned up the Chesapeake Bay, and granted clemency to a surprising number of convicted criminals who had cleaned up their own acts. He signed a medical marijuana bill into law and throughout his tenure won praise from even those who disagreed with him for sticking to his principles of limited government and pro-growth economic policies.

He lost last month because the Democratic voters who had supported him four years ago decided this year to use their votes to "send a message" to Republicans in Washington. His mistake, he told me, was in thinking that approval ratings above 50%, wide agreement that he's done a sound job as governor, and high marks for personal integrity would allow him to differentiate himself from the national party. In a state where registered Democrats amount to about 53% of those who cast ballots on Election Day, it just wasn't possible to distance himself from his party. In the end, support from Republicans and independents left him with 46% of vote.

This approach, however, didn't work for the governor in the campaign--something he would readily acknowledge. "I can't think of a single policy decision" that if made differently would have changed the outcome of the election, he told me. In an election where his opponent, Baltimore's Mayor Martin O'Malley, ducked nearly all of the debates and mentioned President Bush more than a dozen times in one of the two that he showed up for, there likely isn't a substantive policy change that would have altered the outcome of the race in favor of the incumbent.

There is a lesson here for conservatives hoping to regain the policy initiative. Gov. Ehrlich did not mention the names Mark Foley, Bob Ney, Randy "Duke" Cunningham or Tom DeLay--the four Republican congressmen forced to resign amid scandal over the past year--or even that of disgraced former lobbyist Jack Abramoff. But looking over his election results it becomes clear that when unprincipled Republicanism is allowed to dominate in Washington, conservatives outside of the Beltway will be made to pay a price of it.

The temptation may be to lay blame for the election results at the feet of President Bush. And Gov. Ehrlich might well have paid a political price for being in the same party as a president waging an increasingly unpopular war--though the governor will not point a finger at the White House and still displays in his office photos of both the former and the current President Bush. But then at least the president has traded away popularity for a principled stand on national security. It becomes infinitely more difficult for even a popular Republican incumbent to survive in a state dominated by Democrats when a Republican Congress makes the party unpopular by abandoning its principles.

The damage from that may run much deeper than the loss of Congress and may take a lot more than winning back support among independent voters. Four years ago Mr. Ehrlich won an upset victory and appeared ready to return conservatism to a state that had come to be dominated by a brand of liberal politics better associated with Massachusetts. He even beat a Kennedy, then-Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. His running mate, Michael Steele, became the first African-American ever elected statewide in Maryland. His election carried with it the promise of planting conservative roots in liberal territory and perhaps even winning significant support for the GOP within the black community--two necessary steps if the GOP was to solidify itself as the majority party.

Now that's all been undone. Along with voting Gov. Ehrlich out of office, Maryland voters handed defeats to Mr. Steele, who was running for Senate, and to down-ballot Republicans who had hoped to pick up seats in the state Legislature. Not parsing words, the governor described it as "a wipeout election."

Mr. Miniter is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com. His column appears Tuesdays.