A New Gop Dominion?
Hume, Sandy
A New GOP Dominion? by Sandy Hume Warrenton, Virginia Even in dignified Virginia, it's the glitter races that get the attention and the money. In Charlottesville, Democrat Emily Couric, in an...
...His district altered by racial gerrymandering, Andrews is trailing Republican Marty Williams...
...today they have 18 and 47 respectively...
...What is new this year is the prospect that the GOP will knock off Allen's chief Democratic antagonist, Senate majority leader Hunter Andrews...
...Candidates who drove a school bus around the state to promote their "Good Schools=Good Jobs" plan denounced cuts of $92 million...
...In the past year alone, they've picked up one legislative chamber in North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, and Tennessee...
...It was Allen's ungentlemanly clash with Democrats in the General Assembly last winter that set the stage for this fall's campaign...
...A Virginia sweep would nicely further the trend...
...With the help of heavily disproportionate committee representation, Democrats repeatedly killed GOP bills before they reached the floor...
...But the folks with the most at stake in the Virginia legislative elections on November 7 are U.S...
...He has fervently backed GOP initiatives in Congress to turn federal programs over to the states...
...We're looking to make a breakthrough, but if we don't, Democrats will say that the Republican agenda has stalled...
...Expectations have risen so high that it's almost going to be disappointing if we don't take at least one if not two houses," says Scott Leake, executive director of the GOP legislative caucus...
...But they pounced in 1995, when Allen's poll rating tumbled to 50 percent...
...Allen served two House terms with Gingrich and now is one of the speaker's most ardent supporters among the governors...
...Virginia Republicans have duplicated Gingrich's strategy of coordinating campaigns statewide around a few conservative themes: tax cuts, spending cuts, prison funding...
...And near Mt...
...It would also vindicate Allen and his political model, Gingrich...
...The governor's failed program, so similar to Gingrich's, became the Republican campaign agenda...
...But the Republicans are more confident...
...House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Governor George Allen...
...Sandy Hume is a government reporter for the Fauquier Times-Democrat in Warrenton...
...The alleged magnitude of these reductions varies, depending on which Democrat is launching the attack...
...They unfurled a spray-painted banner that read: "Republican Contract with Fauquier County...
...Republicans already hold a majority of U.S...
...In Virginia they hold the governorship, too...
...Republicans need only three seats in the Senate and four in the House, well within the range of GOP gains in recent years...
...Should the education pitch succeed, averting further Republican inroads or even producing Democratic gains, it would reverse a two-decade trend of rising GOP strength in Virginia...
...This figure reflects Allen's proposal to give lottery funds to localities to spend on whatever they want, not just on schools...
...A few weeks ago GOP candidates for board of supervisors in Fauquier County, an hour west of Washington, appeared together on the steps of the courthouse...
...As a result, Viriginia may become the first southern state since Reconstruction where Republicans control both houses of the legislature...
...Indeed, the 1995 session began with Democrats breaking tradition by refusing to let Allen deliver his State of the Commonwealth address before the legislature...
...In 1970, Republicans held 7 of 40 Senate seats and 25 of 100 House seats...
...The press is treating both contests as major events...
...The Democrats, meanwhile, proclaimed themselves the saviors of sacred institutions, like public schools and universities, in grave peril from Allen's proposed cuts...
...All they need to secure control, they think, is to win in Republican-leaning districts...
...Democrats had scarcely challenged Allen in 1994, when his popularity approached 70 percent and the memory of his landslide election was fresh...
...They've made Virginia a test of the GOP realignment...
...Vernon in the Washington suburbs, Republican Sandra Liddy Bourne, daughter of Watergate trickster and talk show host G. Gordon Liddy, may unseat another celebrity relative: Democratic delegate Toddy Puller, widow of Pulitzer-prize winning author Lewis Puller...
...The governor was forced to give the speech in his office to television cameras...
...Their enthusiasm has spilled over into local races...
...The only significant legislation to survive was a modified version of Allen's welfare reform...
...House majority leader Richard Cranwell also faces a stiff challenge in a district Allen carried with 63 percent in 1993...
...House and Senate seats and governorships in the South...
...Polls give neither party a distinct advantage...
...Allen's proposals to cut taxes and spending, to sell bonds for new prisons, even to require the pledge of allegiance in schools and parental notification of minors' abortions, all died...
...Also, for the first time in Virginia, the Republican party has matched the Democrats in fundraising and is airing statewide TV spots linking opponents to unpopular Democrats like President Clinton and Senator Teddy Kennedy...
...The Joint Democratic Caucus upped the ante, charging Allen with an "assault on education" worth at least $1.1 billion...
...In Charlottesville, Democrat Emily Couric, in an uphill fight against GOP state senator Edgar Robb, had fund-raising help from sister Katie of Today show fame...
...The session quickly degenerated into Richmond's ugliest partisan showdown ever...
...They have their own version of the Contract with America, the Pledge for Honest Change...
Vol. 1 • November 1995 • No. 8
