Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, March 25, 1994                   TAG: 9403250132
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: GREG SCHNEIDER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

ALLEN GETS GOOD RATING IN VA. POLL

Gov. George Allen's performance during his first nine weeks in office was rated excellent or good by 57 percent of the 837 registered Virginia voters surveyed last week by Mason-Dixon Political/Media Research Inc. of Columbia, Md. The poll was conducted for the Roanoke Times & World-News and television station WDBJ (Channel 7).

Only 5 percent said Allen was doing a poor job; 24 percent rated him as fair and 14 percent were undecided.

President Clinton's performance rating was considerably weaker, sliding to 39 percent approval after peaking at 46 percent just two months ago.

Clinton got poor marks from more than one-fifth of those surveyed, up from 16 percent in January. Thirty-nine percent judged him to be doing a fair job. No one was undecided.

The poll has a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.

Virginia did not support Clinton when he was elected and never has given the Democratic president high marks. The new poll indicates that more women approve of his performance than men, 42 percent to 36 percent, and that black voters are almost twice as supportive as whites, at 64 percent approval to 33 percent.

The governor's support is exactly the opposite: His performance was rated excellent or good by 64 percent of the men surveyed but by 50 percent of the women. And 61 percent of white voters approved of Allen, compared with 38 percent of black voters.

There also was regional disagreement on how well Allen is running the state. The biggest pocket of Allen anti-Allen sentiment was in Northern Virginia, where 14 percent of those surveyed said the son of a former Washington Redskins head coach is doing a poor job. Allen stirred anger there with his efforts to put a Walt Disney Co. theme park in Prince William County. No other section of the state had more than 5 percent rating Allen as poor.

The Shenandoah Valley - traditionally the state's most conservative - is the most ecstatic about the governor; 70 percent of those voters approved of his performance.

Allen's overall job approval of 57 percent is nowhere near the 71 percent mark reached by former Govs. Charles Robb and Gerald Baliles, both Democrats, after their first eight months in office. But it's far better than the 37 percent approval former Gov. Douglas Wilder logged last fall; what's more, Wilder's poor rating once topped 50 percent.

Allen's rating also is high compared with the way voters in most other states view their governors. According to Mason-Dixon, Allen is tied with Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson for the fifth-highest positive score in the land. Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont leads the pack with 68 percent job approval.