Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, November 4, 1993 TAG: 9311040109
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
\ Lt. Gov. Donald Beyer accomplished what other Democrats couldn't: He won.
But the size - and more importantly, the shape - of Beyer's re-election victory raises some troubling questions for Virginia Democrats as they try to regroup from Tuesday's debacle.
In fact, the Democrats' former state party chairman, Paul Goldman, warned Wednesday that Virginia's election map points Beyer - and the entire party - on the road to trouble when he aims for the governorship four years from now.
Here's why:
Democrats triumph in Virginia when they do three things - roll up big margins in the predominantly black central cities from Richmond to Norfolk, win over fickle middle-class voters in suburbs such as Fairfax County, Virginia Beach and Roanoke County, and hold onto blue-collar Democrats in rural Southwest and Southside Virginia.
Republicans win by depriving Democrats of one of those three constituencies.
Tuesday, Allen took away two of them - he swept all but one suburb (liberal Arlington County was the lone holdout) and he wiped out Terry in rural communities. The only rural localities she carried were five Southside counties with large black populations.
Most analysts cited a familiar list of causes for the breadth of Allen's victory - from voters' desire for change to a backlash against prominent Democrats from President Clinton to Gov. Douglas Wilder.
But Goldman blames the roots of Terry's defeat on a campaign that, he says, was offensive to a critical but overlooked Democratic constituency: rural voters, who constitute between one-quarter and one-third of the state's voters.
It's not just that Terry made gun control a centerpiece of her campaign, Goldman says. Just about every analyst targeted Terry's emphasis on a five-day waiting period for buying handguns as a political blunder.
Instead, Goldman said guns was just part of a larger political makeover that turned a moderate candidate into a liberal one that he privately dubbed "Mary Sue Hollywood."
"The Democrats just ran the most culturally extreme campaign ever run by a major candidate for governor in this century," Goldman said. "No one has ever run against every restriction on abortion, not even parental notification for teen-agers; rejecting every compromise on VMI; bashing the National Rifle Association by name; and reverend-bashing."
He says Terry made the mistake of focusing too much on winning over suburban voters - which she didn't get many of anyway - while ignoring the need to hold onto her base of rural, conservative voters.
Ray Garland, a former Republican state legislator turned newspaper columnist, agrees. "She offered nothing except to the brie-and-chablis liberals. There was no lunch meat to the lunch-pail crowd."
The contours of the Allen-Terry race could be written off as a one-time occurrence, Goldman said, except that the voting trends there also slopped over into the lieutenant governor's race between Beyer and Republican Mike Farris.
Beyer ran stronger than Terry in rural areas, but he still lost in most of the coalfield counties. Even in the rural localities Beyer carried - such as Franklin County and Alleghany County - he still didn't win by as much as a Democrat should have.
"It was just poison to be a Democrat this year," said University of Virginia political analyst Larry Sabato. Yet even on a bad night for Democrats, Beyer carried some suburban localities that Democrats don't win even in good years - such as Henrico County outside Richmond.
The unusual shape of Beyer's victory is due to two factors.
"Beyer is your classic suburban candidate," Sabato said of the Northern Virginia car dealer. "He depends on the Democratic vote in the central cities and getting invited to all the suburban cocktail parties."
But the analysts agree that Beyer got lucky in hogging the suburban vote Tuesday - Farris' ties to the religious right were too much for many GOP-leaning voters in the suburbs to stomach.
"Farris was a rural candidate; he didn't have the right appeal to suburban Republicans," Goldman said. "If Republicans can assemble a rural-suburban, center-right coalition in a Southern Republican state, Republicans are going to be very hard to dislodge absent a scandal. Farris just fell through one of the fault lines in the Republican Party."
Or, as Sabato put it: "The guy had the air of a kook about him. Was some of it media bias? Sure. Was some of it negative campaigning? Sure." Regardless of the cause, though, suburban voters recoiled from Farris' candidacy, while rural voters tended to embrace it.
In fact, Garland believes Beyer's attempts to depict Farris as a religious extremist may have helped Farris in rural areas. "He in a sense made Farris bigger. People said, `Farris can't be this villain.'"
Emory & Henry College political analyst Tom Morris says one of the exit polls conducted Tuesday suggests Garland's analysis may be right, and not just in rural areas: 41 percent of the voters surveyed identified themselves as born-again or evangelical Christians. "I think Democrats at their detriment ignore that bloc of votes," Morris says.
If Beyer runs for governor in 1997, he won't be able to count on making such a clean sweep of the suburbs as he did this year, Sabato says.
That's why Morris says it's crucial for Democrats to rebuild their rural base.
"For Democrats to concede rural voters is to put to much pressure on rolling up big margins in the urban corridor," he said. "That's something you can do only occasionally."
by CNB