THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, June 11, 1996 TAG: 9606110012
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A14 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: 57 lines
Today the Virginia Republican Party has its primary election to select the party's nominee for U.S. senator in the November general election, as well as the party's nominee for the 1st Congressional District seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.
The race in the 1st District, which stretches from the Washington exurbs to the Eastern Shore and Newport News-Hampton, pits challenger David Caprara against Rep. Herbert Bateman.
We recommend voting for senior U.S. Sen. John Warner and, in the 1st District, also for Bateman.
Voters have real options today: Statewide, they may choose Warner, the No. 2 man on the Senate Armed Services Committee, or Reagan-administration Budget Director Jim Miller. The winner will joust with the Democratic Party's nominee in November, multimillionaire-businessman Mark Warner. Whoever wins the 1st District race will also face a Democrat in November.
Primary elections in Virginia aren't general elections but they might as well be: They are open to all registered voters.
Republicans most surely should vote today. We urge all Republicans to do so, although experience teaches that most will not. In which case, once again, a small minority will determine an election's outcome.
Fifteen percent of eligible Virginia voters went to the polls to pick the Republican standard bearer in the 1989 GOP gubernatorial primary. That turnout was a high point for a primary in recent times. If a mere 15 percent or less of eligible voters show up today, the passionate foes of Senator Warner could well prevail.
Fear that that could happen - and the Christian Coalition's weighing in so heavily on the side of Jim Miller with a guide-ballot blitz in churches Sunday could make it happen - may spur many independents and Democrats to vote also in the primary, for Warner.
Legions of Democrats and independents, like many mainstream Republicans, are grateful to Warner for the same reason that religious-right/anti-gun-control/anti-abortion/anti-government hardliners despise him: The senator did not support home-schooling advocate Michael Farris for lieutenant governor in 1989 and sponsored Republican-briefly-independent Marshall Coleman's candidacy in the state's 1994 general election. Coleman's entry helped to defeat GOP-nominee Oliver North and re-elect Democratic Sen. Chuck Robb.
Voter turnout in America - the second-largest democracy - is shamefully low. It is far lower than in the largest democracy, India. That's lamentable: Low turnouts make it possible for election results, which should reflect the will of the majority of the electorate, to be determined by minorities of well-organized, fervid partisans. Elections vulnerable to manipulation by minorities mock constitutional democracy.
But because political parties' primaries in Virginia are open to all registered voters, Democrats and independents - and LaRouchites, John Birchers, Prohibitionists, communists, socialists, anarchists and any other ites, ers or ists in multiethnic Virginia - may vote today alongside Republicans. Feel free. by CNB