THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 23, 1994 TAG: 9410230036
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MARGARET EDDS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: SMITHFIELD LENGTH: Long : 127 lines
Retired farmer Buddy White grinned cagily as he weighed whether to disclose his preference in the U.S. Senate race.
He shifted his feet, smiled again, and then launched an analysis honed by the morning coffee klatch that meets at Twins Ole Towne Inn.
Political party shouldn't matter, White said, but independent candidate J. Marshall Coleman just doesn't have a shot at winning. As for Democrat Charles S. Robb and Republican Oliver L. North, ``the other two candidates just don't meet my criteria. I can't vote for North and I think a vote for Coleman would be a protest vote.''
Bottom line: ``I'm going to vote for Robb. I'm not happy about it.''
But that isn't White's last word on the subject.
Asked if he'd switch allegiance if he thought Coleman had a shot at winning, White didn't hesitate. ``Definitely,'' he said. ``I sure would.''
Therein lies the latest political dilemma for the onetime wunderkind of Virginia politics, a 52-year-old former Republican attorney general who in middle age has never quite made it into the winners' circle.
Running this year as an alternative to North and Robb, Coleman seems unable to break out of the mid-teens in percentile support in polls. But to trail him through a campaign day is to encounter a host of voters such as William E. ``Billy'' Byrd, a retired physician and member of the Sertoma Club of Norfolk.
``I would say half the people, maybe more, would vote for him if they thought he had a chance,'' said Byrd, as he sat munching peanuts before a club luncheon. ``It's a shame. He's a bright young man who deserves to be somewhere, and he isn't.''
With just over two weeks remaining before the Nov. 8 election, Coleman is in some ways precisely where he has said he hoped to be. North and Robb, both of whom have unusually high negative ratings in polls, have been savaging each other in TV advertisements.
Neither man is making substantial gains in polls, and Robb appears to be particularly stagnant. The incumbent senator's 33 percent showing in a poll released last week by Mason-Dixon Political/Media Research led Coleman on Wednesday to pronounce Robb ``dead in the water.''
Moreover, Coleman is promoting a private poll taken for his campaign that shows many voters looking for an alternative to Robb and North. Citing unfavorable ratings near 50 percent for both men, poll-taker Patrick Gonzales said that Robb has ``some of the highest negatives of any public official we've examined'' and North ``would be laughed out of the race were it not for Chuck Robb.''
The 826-voter survey, taken between Oct. 6 and 10, also found 64 percent of voters saying they did not believe Coleman has a chance of winning.
But when asked, ``If you thought Coleman could win would you be likely to vote for him?'' 29 percent said yes; 17 percent maybe; 44 percent, no; and 10 percent, not sure. That means he has a shot at capturing at least 46 percent of the electorate, Coleman says.
To persuade voters that he is worth the risk, the campaign intends to inject about $400,000 in television advertising in the final two weeks of the campaign, sources said last week. That figure - likely to be supplied partly from the candidate's own checkbook - is perhaps a third of what North and Robb will spend, but should give Coleman substantial visibility, media analysts said.
While ``not overpowering . . . it's significant,'' said one Washington-area media consultant who has worked in Virginia in past years.
Still, campaign-trail interviews suggest, the final frame of Coleman's election scenario - in which distraught, disillusioned voters turn to him - remains a distant hope. The obstacles blocking his path are the barriers facing most independent candidates: a cash shortage, a skeptical media, and a bevy of voters uttering the poison words, ``I don't want to throw away my vote.''
``Why doesn't he just say it's all over and give the other guys the vote?'' complained Lucinda Brackman, moments after Coleman passed by a booth she was operating at a Smithfield Chamber of Commerce barbecue.
Like Brackman, ``nobody wants to cast their vote frivolously,'' said Carolyn Barta, author of ``Perot and His People,'' an analysis of the 1992 independent presidential campaign of Texas billionaire Ross Perot. ``The whole political system in this country has been built around a two-party system.''
Unless Coleman somehow magnifies his exposure or finds that defining moments in the campaign break in his favor, what happens next month in Virginia is likely to duplicate what happened in the presidential race, said Barta, who is also a columnist for The Dallas Morning News.
Just as Perot won 19 percent of the vote and may have helped tip the election to Bill Clinton, Coleman ``could draw off enough votes to throw the election one way or the other,'' she said.
``The one thing he's got going for him,'' added Brad Coker of the Mason-Dixon research company, is the widespread distaste for both North and Robb. ``It opens the door for someone to run up the middle,'' Coker said.
Barring the unexpected, Coleman's hopes ride on his ad campaign and on free media attention. But Coleman supporters complain that he's being largely ignored by television and newspapers. Many days, his news conferences and statements rate little more than a few paragraphs at the end of stories in major newspapers, they note.
Barta says that's typical of independent candidates. Their major obstacle is ``the reluctance of the mainstream media to deal with an independent candidate as a viable choice.'' Not until Perot began to surge in polls did reporters from major newspapers take him seriously, she said.
``The public is ahead of the press in this area,'' she argued. ``The public is much more willing to look at an independent candidate than the press.''
According to Coleman's poll, his major obstacles are anonymity and the perception that he can't win. But the flip side is that he also has not been held to high scrutiny. Switches on abortion and complaints by some past acquaintances that Coleman is more guided by expediency than principle have barely surfaced in this election.
Instead, Coleman is left to speak mostly about his perceived strengths. He is running as a philosophical and political soul mate to U.S. Sen. John W. Warner, who backs Coleman; he is a Washington outsider compared to North and Robb; he urged ending parole and setting fixed sentences for crimes as attorney general 15 years ago, long before those ideas became popular; and he is the candidate who can best uphold ``the fair name of Virginia,'' Coleman says.
Coleman also reminds voters that he is no stranger to long odds. In 1989, when he won a three-way GOP primary for governor, his own poll showed him trailing by 12 percentage points two weeks before the election. In the general election, a Washington Post poll showed him trailing by 15 percentage points with nine days left in the campaign. He lost by fewer than 7,000 votes, three-tenths of 1 percent of the vote.
``Let's not accept the lesser of the evils,'' he told high school seniors at First Colonial High. ``Let's just vote for the person we think is the best candidate . . . I think I win.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
J. Marshall Coleman
KEYWORDS: U.S. SENATE RACE VIRGINIA CANDIDATES
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