Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, June 15, 1994 TAG: 9406160026
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Virgil Goode tried to light a brushfire of indignation in rural Virginia on Tuesday.
His attempt sputtered out, but even in defeat there were signs that discontent in the countryside could flare up again and singe incumbent Sen. Charles Robb in November.
Goode bet his long-shot Senate campaign on the belief that rural voters would be more likely than their big-city counterparts to take offense at Robb's admitted extramarital hanky-panky and the liberal positions the incumbent has taken on such culturally divisive issues as gays in the military.
In the low turnout of a party primary, perhaps a heavy show of support in Southside and Southwest Virginia would be enough to overcome an apathetic vote in the rest of the state - a novel strategy of trying to get the tail to wag the Democratic dog.
Goode was partly right; the twangy Rocky Mount legislator had a unique appeal to rural voters. He just didn't appeal to enough of them.
Goode carried a big chunk of Southside Virginia, and added pockets of support elsewhere - most notably the Richmond suburbs. But he couldn't put together a full-fledged rural rebellion against Robb. Nor did rural voters seem any more interested in the Senate race than voters elsewhere.
Outside of Goode's own state Senate district in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, where between 33 and 48 percent of the registered voters showed up to support their favorite son, voter turnout remained uniformly low.
Some political analysts contend that because of the low turnout, the size and shape of Robb's victory raise questions about how vulnerable he may be in the coming four-way Senate race in the fall.
The turnout shows voters weren't excited about Robb, said Bob Denton, professor of political science at Virginia Tech. "It's certainly not a coronation; it's certainly not a vindication." The voters who stayed home "are voters he still needs to win over. If I were the party chairman, I'd be worried."
Moreover, among those who did vote, Robb won primarily by pitching his candidacy to the most liberal constituencies within his party. "I think his aggressive primary strategy will cause him difficulty in the fall," said Tom Morris of Emory & Henry College. "He'll clearly be the most liberal candidate in the field."
And nowhere will that label hurt worse, Morris predicted, than in rural Virginia - which is emerging as a most unlikely battleground in the coming race.
What does it matter which way rural, Western voters go in a state increasingly dominated by the "urban crescent" of suburbs from Northern Virginia to Richmond to Hampton Roads?
For one thing, rural voters still account for about 25 percent of the electorate, and in a race where the vote will be so splintered, any constituency that big is important. Or, as Morris put it, "In a multicandidate race, a strong rural base could be pivotal."
Already, Republican nominee Oliver North has made it clear he'll spend much of the summer stumping the countryside, hoping to consolidate the rural vote.
Likewise, Republican-turned-independent Marshall Coleman has signaled he'll be spending much of his time trying to rebuild his old "mountain-valley" base through the Shenandoah Valley into Southwest Virginia. "The rural areas are definitely back at the table," Coleman said. "You're not going to have people taking the rural vote for granted."
But one longtime Robb critic contends that's just what Robb - and other Democrats - have done, in this and other recent elections, by playing up liberal positions calculated to offend the sensibilities of conservative, rural voters.
"Effectively, the Democratic Party continues the effort to try to win with just the urban corridor in the fall," said former state party Chairman Paul Goldman, who masterminded former Gov. Douglas Wilder's statewide elections and advised Goode this spring. "They're effectively writing off the rural vote, everything south of Charlottesville, with the exception of the coalfields. They've decided they don't need it."
But, he contends, the Democrats do - not just in a crowded field this year, but for the party's long-term prospects.
After all, the Democrats' long winning streak in statewide elections in the 1980s rested on three bases: The Democrats ran strong in central cities where the votes of blacks and organized labor are concentrated; they held onto their traditional following of rural voters; and they wooed fickle suburbanites with a message that tempered fiscal conservatism with social moderation.
But in the past five years, that coalition has collapsed - and nowhere has that collapse been more spectacular than in rural Virginia. In the 1989 governor's race, Republican nominee Coleman won all but a handful of localities around the state; he lost the election by just 6,000 votes, only because Wilder managed to carry the Northern Virginia suburbs by landslide margins.
Last year, Republican George Allen duplicated that feat, but also managed to cut into Democrat Mary Sue Terry's margins in the suburbs.
In the aftermath, Goldman blasted Terry for running a "culturally liberal" campaign that ceded the symbols that resonate most deeply in rural regions - specifically, guns and faith. He tried to correct that with Goode's campaign, advising Goode to play up his "rural values."
Robb may have carried much of rural Virginia on Tuesday, but Goldman contends those were merely Democratic activists who were voting - not the ordinary voters the party will need in November.
"From the standpoint of rural areas, this is a plus for North and Coleman," Goldman said. "They got the candidate they wanted. This forces Robb and Wilder to compete even stronger for the urban corridor vote" - which he believes will be so splintered among four candidates that it will give whoever can run strongest in rural Virginia an advantage.
Tech's Denton doesn't buy that argument, though. Robb's biggest problem, Denton said, isn't that he ran too far to the left in the primary - it's that he still must persuade ordinary voters, wherever they live, that he can be trusted. "He's got to resell himself, and that's more difficult than first-time romancing."
Mary Washington College's Mark Rozell agrees. "The turnout was so pathetic that it's difficult for him to claim a broad-based mandate."
Keywords:
POLITICS
Memo: ***CORRECTION***