Ideology Mattered Less Than Partisanship

I've been reading Blue Virginia's pieces comparing Mark Warner's performance to President Obama's and Tim Kaine's there, and to Tom Perriello's there, and it's interesting stuff. While I think the finding from the numbers is a bit of a leap (that centrists don't do better than liberals in rural areas of Virginia), I also think it's basically right. I just also find it to be the wrong question.

Mark Warner and Jim Webb's centrism got them effectively the same victory as Tim Kaine's in 2012, give or take a point or two either way. Looking back, Webb's '06 run, Kaine's '12 run, and Warner's '14 runs were all close, and none ran huge numbers in Southern Virginia or anywhere rural. Only in 2008, when Warner ran a huge number up next to the President in a good Democratic year. Kaine is about the most liberal of the group, and never had to run a mid-term here yet, but he has won off-year Lt. Governor and Governor races as well. Out of all of these, and the gubernatorial runs, the only pattern I can see is that Virginia is a pretty close state for candidates of any stripe. Governor McAuliffe's 2013 victory, for example, was pretty close (closer than you think it was at least).

So what? So what I'm saying here is two things- 1.) These "liberal" and "centrist" labels don't mean much in terms of record, as Warner's record he had to defend wasn't a whole lot different than Kaine's, and 2.) Voters didn't care about Warner being a centrist very much, because they're more partisan than ideological. People in rural Virginia that wanted a Republican Senator weren't giving Warner credit for being a "centrist." That doesn't happen really in most elections, as these labels matter to a small percentage of the electorate. The 2014 electorate was worse than the 2010 electorate even, and to this electorate, being a watered-down Democrat was no difference to them, because they were more Republican than the electorate in 2012. Ideology is basically a myth here.