Virginia Democrats look for a winner

By Jim Tankersley

FAIRFAX COUNTY, Va. -- In the summer of 2004, Virginia's then-Gov. Mark Warner was presented with a poll showing Sen. John Kerry running only two points behind President Bush in this, a state that hadn't given its electoral votes to a Democrat since 1964, according to Warner adviser Steve Jarding.

Kerry effectively abandoned Virginia soon after, when his campaign deemed it unlikely to go his way. Four years later, national Democrats are looking at the state with much hungrier eyes.

Another Democrat, Tim Kaine, won the race to succeed Warner in 2005. Democrat Jim Webb upset Republican Sen. George Allen in 2006. Now Warner is running for an open Senate seat, and party leaders are dreaming of their first presidential win here since Lyndon Johnson.

Fueling the Democratic optimism is an influx of left-leaning new voters in the Washington, D.C., suburbs and exurbs of Northern Virginia. The new bloc includes immigrants, young professionals and some of the wealthiest voters in the country. Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama need those voters to win the state's primary election on Tuesday. And perhaps no campaign pitch resonates more here than the ability to win in November.

In today's Tribune, I report on the bluing of Virginia - and how "electability" might prove the deciding factor in its Democratic primary.

Longtime GOP stronghold on a blue streak
By Jim Tankersley | TRIBUNE CORRESPONDENT
February 9, 2008

FAIRFAX COUNTY, Va. - Virginia shows its newer, bluer faces to Anna Pintauro every day at work. Sometimes they wait 12 hours for a doctor. Sometimes she tells them, in Urdu, "I'm going to take some blood."

Pintauro is a trauma nurse in sprawling Fairfax County, south of Washington, D.C., where immigrants have filled both McMansions and emergency rooms in recent years. More than half of Virginia's 633,000 new residents since 2000 have settled in northern Virginia's suburbs and exurbs. Some 315,000 are immigrants, drawn equally from other states and from foreign lands, including Latin America and Pakistan, according to University of Virginia demographers.

At the ballot box, the newcomers helped a string of Democrats win recent marquee races in a longtime Republican state. This fall, they could make Virginia a presidential battleground for the first time in 30 years -- but only, many political analysts say, if the right Democrat wins the party nomination.

And so Tuesday's primary contest between Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama may turn on this question: Who is the "right Democrat?"

Obama and Clinton are ramping up their electability pitches as their race shifts to Virginia, the biggest prize in the "Potomac Primary" that also includes Maryland and the District of Columbia. Clinton claims strength with rural and military voters. Obama boasts of appeal to moderates who elected Democratic Govs. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine and Sen. Jim Webb.

Pintauro, 27, backs Obama. She fears Clinton would mobilize Virginia conservatives like her husband, who is serving his second tour in Iraq. Obama can win Virginia, she said, because "he has the ability to get people excited again."

Ian Cooper, a 43-year-old hospital pharmacist, said Clinton's pitch to independent voters would trump Obama's. "The ability for her to pull female votes from conservative-leaning people, women -- she might be able to do that better," he said.

The question divides longtime Virginia political hands, including strategists Steve Jarding and David "Mudcat" Saunders, who teamed up on the Warner and Webb campaigns and for a book on how Democrats can win in the South.

Jarding, who isn't advising a presidential candidate, said Clinton's appeal to women and economic pitch to downtrodden rural Virginians would work better in a general election. Saunders, who advised former Sen. John Edwards' aborted Democratic bid, said only Obama has a shot. "I don't think Hillary can win Virginia" in November, he said. "I don't think she has a chance in hell."

The last Democratic nominee to carry Virginia was Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Jimmy Carter was the last to make it close; in 1976 the state dealt him, by one percentage point, his only loss in the South.

Back to McGovern

Historians trace the party's troubles here to another presidential candidate, the anti-war Sen. George McGovern. His 1972 nomination drove conservatives to become Republicans or independents and "put the Democratic Party out of the running for years" in Virginia, said George Gilliam, a University of Virginia historian formerly active in state Democratic politics.

The Democrats who did win statewide in the ensuing decades tended to be moderates, like L. Douglas Wilder, who in 1990 became the nation's first elected African-American governor. National Democrats rediscovered the state after Webb followed up on Warner and Kaine's back-to-back gubernatorial wins by upsetting Republican Sen. George Allen in 2006.

For Kaine and Webb in particular, northern Virginia made the difference. Seventy percent of the new voters there voted Democratic, Jarding said.

The trend is clear. In 2000, Fairfax County narrowly backed George W. Bush over Al Gore. In 2004, John Kerry narrowly defeated Bush. By 2005, the county went 60 percent for Kaine and, a year later, 59 percent for Webb.

While Democratic voters cluster in other parts of the state -- including a large African-American bloc in the harbor towns around Richmond and a liberal university community in Charlottesville -- strategists agree northern Virginia holds the key to the primary. Its demographics suggest pockets of strength for each candidate: affluent, educated voters for Obama in places like Fairfax, the nation's wealthiest county; Asian and Hispanic immigrants for Clinton, along with government workers who served in her husband's administration.

War and the economy are important here. But Webb's 2006 primary victory over a more liberal challenger shows that more than anything, northern Virginia Democrats "want to win," Jarding said. "It was the electability argument -- it wasn't even close -- that elected Jim Webb."

Clinton and Obama, and their surrogates, are hitting the electability theme hard now. Obama said his refusal to take lobbyist donations and his early opposition to the Iraq war make him a better contrast to Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the likely GOP nominee.

Electability

Kaine, who endorsed Obama a year ago, said Obama's problem-solving style makes him the better Virginia candidate. "Independent voters and disillusioned Republican voters will be much more likely to respond to him," Kaine said in an interview. Clinton, he added, "has a steeper hill to climb" with those voters.

Clinton said her Senate record of working for military families will resonate here, particularly in rural areas. Her spokesman Mo Elleithee, who worked for both Warner and Kaine's campaigns, said Virginians "want a candidate who has a history of getting results" and "a record that resonates from Arlington [in the north] down to Abingdon" near the North Carolina border.

Pat Szarek, a 50-year-old librarian, said she was voting for McCain in the primary but would consider Obama -- but never Clinton -- in November. "He gets along with people," she said of Obama. "That's not something Hillary can do."

Accountant Irene Mills, 37, was less sure. "With the primary so neck-and-neck," she said, "it's hard to say who's more electable."