Word: virginia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Wilder's wafer-thin win should have been all the more satisfying, for it underlines the extent of the racial barriers that he has surmounted. But in the topsy-turvy world of political analysis, this Virginia victory was measured against the unrealistically optimistic expectations raised by the pre-election surveys and as a result was somehow found wanting. According to the final CBS/New York Times exit polls, Wilder won an impressive 39% of the white vote. In 1988 Democratic primaries, Jackson never came close to this type of biracial mandate. Moreover, Wilder ran neck and neck with Coleman among...
Wilder's ascension inevitably prompted journalists to dust off their favorite Virginia cliches ranging from "Capital of the Confederacy" to political scientist V.O. Key's 1949 description of the state's old-family oligarchy as a "political museum piece." But, in truth, Virginia has changed almost beyond recognition in the past 20 years. A booming urban corridor, which includes two-thirds of the state's voters, curves south from the Washington suburbs of northern Virginia, crosses Richmond and heads east to the bustling Tidewater area around Norfolk. Although no Democratic presidential contender has carried Virginia since Lyndon Johnson...
...defer her own ambitions until 1993. There was grumbling in the Robb faction of the state party, but once again, no one wanted to risk an open schism by trying to deprive Wilder of his moment on the mountaintop. There was no chance of a racially divisive primary, since Virginia Democrats, unlike those in other Southern states, nominate by convention. In a sense, Wilder was the beneficiary of old- fashioned back-room politics, just as Irish, Italian and Jewish candidates were in the urban North decades ago. With the aid of the Robb and Baliles organization, plus his own ties...
...personal charges against Wilder from the 1985 campaign. Without a cutting issue to transform the debate, the internal calculus in the Wilder campaign was that its candidate was mired at around 45% support, partly because of Democratic defections stemming from a rancorous coal miners' strike in southwestern Virginia and a Labor Day riot among black college students in Virginia Beach...
That line was much more than just a reminder of the era before Roe v. Wade. It also consciously harked back to segregationist, backwater Virginia, a sleepy Southern state dominated by the oligarchic Byrd machine. The implication was that not only abortion and race were at stake but even the state's economic prosperity. It is oversimplistic to attribute too much influence to a single TV ad in a media-glutted statewide campaign. But the abortion issue was framed in a way that allowed Wilder to make inroads among racially tolerant, upscale voters who might be tempted to vote Republican...