Virginia Governor's Race 2013 -Who's Gonna Win?

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So why did McAuliffe underperform?

Being Terry McAuliffe didn't help, for one.

And that's an understatement.

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Ken Cuccinelli won 18-24 year olds by six points.

If that doesn't shoot down some talking points, I don't know what will.

Smells a LOT like standard subsample MoE.

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There's a real argument to be made that when the disastrously bad Obamacare rollout supplanted the then-resolved federal shutdown in the news cycle, Cooch attempted to make his election a referendum on Obamacare. The effect was to allow Cooch to recover some ground lost among swing voters during the shutdown and simultaneously make back ground on an issue the same swing voters feel negatively towards Obama and Democrats over.

There was a limit to how much this could pay off in a state election as opposed to a federal race, but to the extent it could work, it did. There's little way the RGA and RNC could predict the Obamacare rollout giving Cooch such an unexpected opportunity to turn things around in such short a period, so the decision to pull resources made sense without 20/20 hindsight. However, if the funding had been fully committed all along to capitalize on this late swing, there would've been at least a fighting chance the GOP could've converted this narrow loss into a win.

More than lessons about Obamacare or the shutdown or extremism, this shows just how much the final dominant news stories in a campaign season can change everything.