Democrats win Virginia, New Jersey races

Kaine's win called into question the power of capital punishment as an issue to move voters, even in a state that ranks second only to Texas in the number of convicts put to death since 1976.

During the campaign, Kilgore, a former attorney general, said Kaine could not be trusted to carry out the death penalty "when he has spent his entire life and career opposing the death penalty.... What he says in his ads is that he’ll follow the law. Following the law in Virginia allows the governor for any reason or for no reason at all to commute the sentence of anyone on death row.”

Kaine denounced Kilgore’s ads as inaccurate and said in his own ads, “I’ll enforce death sentences handed down by Virginia juries because that’s the law.” But he also said he did not think the death penalty was necessary in order to have a safe society.

The campaign also called into question the power of illegal immigration as an election issue. Kilgore had sharply criticized Kaine for not joining him in condemning a center for day laborers, some of them illegal immigrants, being set up in the northern Virginia town of Herndon.

Personal battle in New Jersey
The Corzine-Forrester race turned personal and harsh in tone, with a television ad aired late in the campaign which quoted Corzine's ex-wife who told the New York Times that "when I saw the campaign ad where Andrea Forrester said, 'Doug never let his family down and he won't let New Jersey down,' all I could think was that Jon did let his family down, and he'll probably let New Jersey down, too."

Ray Stubblebine / Reuters Sen. Jon Corzine celebrates his New Jersey gubernatorial victory over Republican Doug Forrester on Tuesday night.

The two rivals traded charges over who would do more to lift the property tax burden in New Jersey, one of the highest in the country. In his ads, Forrester claimed that Corzine had cast 133 votes in the Senate for higher taxes, while Corzine said in his ads that he had cast 70 votes for lower taxes.

The independent non-partisan group Factcheck.org reported that "both lists are padded with multiple votes on the same tax measure, and most of the votes Forrester says are for higher taxes' actually would not have resulted in any tax increase at all."

In races elsewhere that will have national resonance:

• Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick won re-election in Detroit, while the FBI announced an investigation into the handling of absentee ballots, including claims of ballots cast in the names of dead people.
• San Diego surf-shop owner Donna Frye, a maverick Democratic councilwoman who nearly won the mayor’s race in a write-in bid last year, lost to Republican Jerry Sanders, a former police chief backed by the city’s business establishment.
• In Washington state, voters approved a measure expanding the state’s ban on indoor smoking to include bars, restaurants and non-tribal casinos.

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