Which way will America's voters go?

Tom Curry National affairs writer • Profile • E-mail

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Is the electorate moving to the left, to the right or just marching in place?

Some clues will arrive Tuesday night after polls close in Texas, California, and several other states where voters are casting their ballots on everything from same-sex marriage to abortion to the death penalty.

Among the notable contests:

• In the race for governor of Virginia, a staunch death penalty proponent, Republican Jerry Kilgore, the former state attorney general, vies with Democrat Tim Kaine, the state's lieutenant governor, who has said capital punishment is unnecessary. Virginia is second only to Texas in the number of executions it has carried out since 1976.
• A ban on same-sex marriage is on the Texas ballot.
• Californians will vote on an array of initiatives including a parental notification requirement for minors seeking abortions and a measure supported by Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger that would make it harder for public school teachers to be granted tenure.
• Voters in Democratic-leaning New Jersey choose a new governor, with Democratic Sen. Jon Corzine favored over Republican Doug Forrester.

Although these contests are not referendums on President Bush or his policies, some Democrats see the Virginia race as a chance to rebuke Bush.

Bush rallies for Kilgore
Bush, who carried Virginia last November with 54 percent of the vote, stopped on his way back for his Latin American trip Monday night to campaign for Kilgore at an election-eve rally in the state capitol, Richmond.

Before a crowd of Republican volunteers and activists Bush praised Kilgore as a man who grew up on a farm and "understands how the common man thinks." Kilgore, he said, "doesn’t have a lot of fancy airs.”

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Bush also in a veiled way referred to the issue of capital punishment. Kilgore, Bush said, "will enforce all the laws of the Commonwealth."

Kilgore has said Kaine can’t be trusted to carry out the death penalty "when he has spent his entire life and career opposing the death penalty.... What he says in his ads is that he’ll follow the law. Following the law in Virginia allows the governor for any reason or for no reason at all to commute the sentence of anyone on death row.”

Kaine who has denounced Kilgore’s ads as inaccurate and has said in his own ads, “I’ll enforce death sentences handed down by Virginia juries because that’s the law.” But he has also said he does not think the death penalty is necessary in order to have a safe society.

A chance to rebuke Bush?
Rep. Jim Moran, D- Va., who represents the solidly Democratic city of Alexandria and its environs, told a Kaine rally in Alexandria Monday that if Democrats allow Kilgore to win after he has campaigned Monday night with the president, "it will be an affirmation of where he [Bush] is taking this country… It is going to say that the American people in fact support us going into the Iraq war and that it doesn’t bother the American people so much that over 2,000 men and women have died in a needless war.... If the people of Virginia vote for Jerry Kilgore, that is the message that is sent around the world.”

Several days before Bush’s campaign appearance for Kilgore was announced, Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., who represents another northern Virginia suburban district that includes Fairfax County, said Kilgore needed to distance himself from a national mind-set that at the moment is not encouraging for Republicans.

“What you try to do is separate yourself from the national mood at this point  — which is not good. You try to put as much separation as you can and make it a state race,” Davis said. Bush’s trip to Richmond seems to defy this logic.

Asked to handicap the race, Davis said, “Fairfax County is likely to be Democratic this year in the governor’s race. It went for (Democrat John) Kerry last time (in 2004). The question is the size of margin here.”

If Kilgore falls below 46 percent in Fairfax County, “he would really have problems” winning, Davis said.

Davis and other Republicans predict that Kilgore will show strength in rural parts of the state that will allow him to overcome Kaine’s edge in suburbia.

While no Democratic presidential candidate has won the state since Lyndon Johnson did it 40 years ago, Virginia has elected four Democratic governors in the past 25 years: Chuck Robb, Gerald Baliles, Doug Wilder and the incumbent, Mark Warner.

Elected in 2001, Warner remains extremely popular in the state and has campaigned widely for Kaine.

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