Campaign Dynamics: The Race for Governor

Chapter 5. Virginia’s 1993 Gubernatorial Campaign

CHAPTER 5 Virginia’s 1993 Gubernatorial Campaign “The campaign must talk about those issues that matter to people, but you can’t stray away from what the candidate has a background on. You must meld together the voters’ concerns and the candidate’s qualities. You need to be credible on the issues you discuss.” Terry campaign staff member “No candidate runs a campaign strictly based on the polls. We use the polls to tell us what to stress, or how to package things, but they don’t tell us whether or not we are for or against something.” Allen campaign staff member “You don’t pick issues based just on polls, but, rather, you blend candidate strengths with voter concerns.” Terry campaign staff member “Polls tell you how to sell a message, not what message to sell. Polls will tell on which issues you have an exploitable advantage. Candidates don’t move themselves around; they just try to shift the focus of the election and try to define the election in terms beneficial to themselves Allen campaign staff member “We will win or lose based on whose views get accepted by the voters.” Terry campaign staff member Campaigns are dynamic events that unfold over time. The themes candidates stress may shift and flow as the campaign unfolds, and all the while the elec torate learns more about the candidates. Chapters 7, 8, and 9 will demonstrate that this process culminates on election day with voters responding to the dominant themes stressed by candidates during their campaigns. But first, this chap ter and chapter 6 illustrate how the dynamics of campaigns unfold. This chapter focuses on the 1993 gubernatorial election in Virginia, while chapter 6 explores the 1993 gubernatorial election in New Jersey.1 55 These two case studies will show how voters respond to the choice candidates present. Evidence of candidates trying to alter the salience of dif ferent issues and/or cleavages in the electorate is presented. These two examples also show that voters and candidates learn about and respond to each other as the campaign unfolds. Overall, these two elections provide excellent opportunities to study campaign dynamics at the gubernatorial level. Gubernatorial elections have been competitive in New Jersey for most of the state’s history, and a truly competitive two-party system has emer ged inVirginia.2 Neither party in either state enjoys a significant advantage in party identifiers. Final , the office being sough is a powerful one in each state’s politics. These two elections obviously do not constitute a representative sample of gubernatorial elections. The specific opportunities and obstacles faced by can didates depend on who they are, who they run against, and in what state they are running. However, the dynamic process of developing campaign strategy over the course of an election in response to these factors and the way voters can be expected to respond are similar across contexts. Mary SueTerry, a Democrat, opposed George Allen, a Republican, for the governorship inVirginia in 1993. Both lawyers, each had served in the Virginia state legislature. Terry had also served seven years as the state’s attorney general , resigning to devote more time to her gubernatorial campaign. After winning a special election in the Seventh District,Allen spent one year in the U.S. House of Representatives. He decided to run for governor after redistricting placed him and popular GOPincumbent Thomas Bliley Jr. in the same district. It is said that military generals develop strategies based on the previous war, not the next. The theory guiding this book suggests that candidates begin campaigns using a similar approach.They look to what they believe has worked and not worked in the past.Terry and Allen began their campaigns in this way. Republican success in winningVirginia state races in the 1970s depended in part on raising the specter of liberal Democrats (Atkinson 1992). There is also strong precedent for Democratic presidential candidates to be unpopular in Virginia, at least since 1952, a situation that has provided Virginia Republicans with something to run against. Virginia Democrats, conversely, had success in statewide elections before the 1970s by maintaining a coalition of moderates and conservatives while char ging that Republican candidates like Ted Dalton were too liberal (Atkinson 1992). In the 1980s, Democrats recaptured the governorship by regaining the support of many white moderates and, in the latter part of the decade, by raising the specter of the radical Right in the GOP . Thus, history suggests that contemporary swing voters...