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Houck's foe gets a leg up
Thousands of new voters will decide who'll be the next senator in Virginia's 17th District, since its lines have been redrawn.Date published: 7/28/2003
Edd Houck has represented Virginia's 17th Senate District for 19 years. But a lot of the people in the district have never seen his name on a ballot before. The 2001 post-census redistricting gave a whole new look to the state Senate's 17th District. Gone are the counties of Buckingham, Fluvanna, Goochland and Cumberland. In their place are Culpeper, Madison and Orange counties. The new territory alone includes about 30,000 voters who are new to Houck, who is running for the first time this year for re-election within the district's new lines. And that number doesn't count how many voters have moved to the district since Houck's last election in 1999. Spotsylvania County, for example, by far the most populous locality in the district, gained more than 7,700 voters between 1999 and 2001, although Houck's district no longer includes the entire county. The amount of new territory, and the number of new-to-Houck voters, in the 17th District are encouraging to Houck's opponent, Republican Robert Stuber. Stuber's campaign calculates that at least 40 percent of the voters in the district have never seen Houck's name on a ballot; Houck's campaign puts that percentage around 30 percent. "We're excited to have all these new counties and have people we can introduce Robert to at the same time Edd Houck does," said Stuber campaign manager Mark Johnson. The Stuber campaign is also happy that the new 17th District is more Republican than the old one--although the change is slight. The district consistently elects Republicans at the statewide and national levels, but not by an enormous margin. Percentages for Republican candidates hover in the mid- to upper 50s; percentages for Democratic candidates are in the low 40s. Republicans get about 2 percent more votes in the new 17th District than in the old. For example, in the 2000 presidential race, 56 percent of the voters in the old 17th District voted Republican, while 58 percent of voters in the new district voted Republican. Houck notes that he has won Republican-leaning districts before, a fact reiterated by Mary Washington College political analyst Stephen Farnsworth. "Houck was given a largely Republican district previously and he won in that district, and he's given a Republican-leaning district again with new people," Farnsworth said.
Date published: 7/28/2003
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