I haven’t written much about it, mostly becuase it quite honestly captured my attention, but there is an election here in Virginia. The biggest races on the ballot are for Governor, Lt. Governor, and Attorney General, and both the Republicans and Democrats are blanketing Northern Virginia. Over the weekend, we received three pre-recorded “get-out-the-vote” phone calls from Tom Davis (our Congressman), Rudy Guiliani, and Virginia Senator George Allen. Last night around 7, a campaign worker rang our door bell to hand out literature.
The GOP didn’t have this organized a GOTV effort during last years Presidential election, and it tells me that the race is close and, as this story in today’s Washington Post indicates, turnout will be the key to victory.
Recent surveys show Kaine and Kilgore in a virtual dead heat. With traditional supporters accounted for, the Republican and Democratic campaigns are hoping to lure new voters. Republican operatives call them “lazy voters”; Democrats have dubbed them “federal voters.” Tomorrow, they will almost surely decide who becomes the next governor.
Hundreds of thousands of Virginians line up at polling booths every four years to vote for president. And then they take four years off, ignoring city council, school board, legislative and governor’s races.
In 2004, 71 percent of the state’s registered voters cast ballots for president, far more than the 46 percent who voted in the 2001 governor’s race. Kilgore and Kaine have spent millions to find them — and then pester and cajole them into showing up to vote
Whether they will succeed is an open question. This race doesn’t seem to have inspired alot of interest in the general public, or even in a political junkie like me. I’ve largely tuned out the endless commercials and ignored the literature that has bombarded our mailbox in the past several weeks. My expectation is that, regardless of who wins tomorrow, total turnout will be about the same as it was in 2001.
As for who I will vote for, I will be casting a very unenthusiastic vote for Kilgore and the rest of the Republican ticket. Unenthusiastic because my 15 years in Virginia has led me to have very little confidence in Virginia Republicans. They are generally more fiscally conservative than the Democrats and more likely to cut my taxes, but they’ve also spent a good part of the last 4 years cutting deals with Mark Warner, including raising taxes that, it turns out, didn’t need to be raised.
As someone told me when I first moved here, politics in Virginia has gone far down hill since the days of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Mason.
Of course, it could be worse, I could be having to choose between these two losers.
