THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, June 7, 1996 TAG: 9606070473
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DAVID M. POOLE AND ROBERT LITTLE, STAFF WRITERS
DATELINE: DANVILLE LENGTH: 93 lines
Jim Miller bounded into the Main Street Coffee Emporium downtown and found the place brimming with supporters. Every hand in sight was connected to a Republican eager to vote for Miller in next week's GOP primary, to teach incumbent Sen. John Warner a lesson in party loyalty.
But there was a catch: The tiny shop could hold only 10 people, a typical turnout for a candidate whose campaign theme song is ``Friends in Little Places.''
John Warner, meanwhile, is angling for support in deeper waters. Around vote-rich Hampton Roads, he flaunts his ranking position on the Senate Armed Services Committee as if it were a license to build ships and save bases. He sits just one 93-year-old man away from leading the powerful military committee, and all the troop-moving, job-saving decisions it can control.
But there is a catch: While Warner's approval rating is high, the general public is largely oblivious to Tuesday's primary, which is open to all voters.
The contest between party loyalist Miller and party spoilist Warner is wildly unpredictable in its final week because nobody knows who will show up at the polls.
The Miller camp is hoping for a sparse turnout, to maximize the influence of conservative Republicans seething at Warner for his various flights of independence during his 18 years in Washington. His greatest sin, in the eyes of many activists, was recruiting a third candidate two years ago to campaign against conservative icon Oliver North.
The Warner campaign is pouring tens of thousands of dollars into eleventh-hour television ads, hoping a pumped turnout will increase the influence of moderate Republicans who share his unwillingness to walk lock-step with the party's zealous conservatives.
Some Warner appeals seem to reach beyond just Republicans. A Warner TV spot that began airing Wednesday begins with the admonition: ``Remember Virginia, not voting on Tuesday is a vote for Jim Miller.''
Because primary elections are so rare in Virginia, there is no reliable forecast of voter turnout. Some 15 percent showed up for the last statewide Republican primary, a three-way race for the gubernatorial nomination in 1989. Turnout was even lower - just more than 9 percent - for the 1994 Democratic primary between U.S. Sen. Charles S. Robb and challenger Virgil H. Goode Jr. of Rocky Mount.
``We can sit here and speculate all day, but it's just a bunch of punditry,'' said Trixie Averill, a GOP activist from Roanoke County who is backing Miller. ``The truth is nobody knows what will happen.''
One possible gauge of voter turnout, the number of requests for absentee ballots, reveals little. The voter registrars in Hampton Roads and the Roanoke Valley report no mad rush to the ballot boxes, with requests about equal to those in 1989.
Miller, a Ph.D.-economist-turned-populist, will work from membership lists of various conservative organizations, including the National Rifle Association and the Madison Project, a home-schooling advocacy group. The Chesapeake-based Christian Coalition will weigh in at church services this weekend with thousands of copies of a ``voters guide'' expected to put Miller in the most flattering light to evangelical conservatives.
Miller also will receive a get-out-the-vote boost from North, who signed an endorsement letter mailed to voters on his vast list of 1994 campaign contributors.
Warner, a horse-country Republican in his 18th year in the Senate, will call from a list of favorable voters his campaign assembled through an expensive polling operation. Warner also wields the advantage of incumbency, enabling him to call in favors from everyone from shipyard owners who received defense contracts to widows who asked his assistance in finding wayward Social Security checks.
Recently, the differences have been apparent in the geography. So far this week, Warner has split his time between Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads, hoping to cull supporters from the most populous regions of the state. In Hampton Roads Monday night, shipyard executives and Navy brass turned out for a fund-raiser to salute Warner's support of defense spending.
The next day, outside the Norshipco yard, that message seemed lost on the blue-collar voters whose livelihoods depend on the Navy. Of 25 workers interviewed during an afternoon shift change, only four said they planned to vote next Tuesday. Two were undecided. Two were for Warner.
One middle-aged man, in coveralls coated with a day's labor of grime, said he did not plan to vote even though he credited Warner with helping to keep the giant shipyard humming in the post-Cold War era.
``All I care about is going home and taking a shower,'' said the man, who climbed into his pickup without giving his name.
The same day in South Boston - where the population is smaller than the employee rolls at the shipyards - people covered their chests in buttons and stickers and waited in Faulkner's Drug Store just to shake Jim Miller's hand. Only about 15 showed up, but they all planned to vote. Most promised to take a friend, too.
``We can't pass up this opportunity to defeat John Warner,'' said Walter Bass, a retired tobacco worker waiting by the lunch counter for Miller to make the rounds. ``I know Warner's supposed to be powerful and have all this influence with the military, but he was disloyal to us. To the Republicans here in South Boston who helped him get elected, he turned his back.''
KEYWORDS: PRIMARY ELECTIONS REPUBLICAN PARTY
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