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Dems' primary appears lackluster

May 11, 2009 12:36 am

BY CHELYEN DAVIS

In a month, Virginia Democrats will go to the polls to choose their gubernatorial candidate.

Will it be the smooth-talking businessman and national party operative who counts the likes of Bill and Hillary Clinton among his friends?

Or maybe the Massachusetts-born, and still Massachusetts-accented, lawyer and former state delegate from Alexandria?

Or perhaps the slow-talking country lawyer from rural Bath County who nearly beat the Republican gubernatorial candidate in a race four years ago?

It's a choice that will be made by only a handful of the party's most hard-core believers, because it's rare that a primary--coming, as this June 9 one does, at a time of high school graduations, summer vacations and so on--attracts much attention.

Just a fraction of the state's roughly 5 million voters are expected to vote.

But the candidates are trying their hardest.

Terry McAuliffe, a businessman turned national Democratic Party chairman, has already been running television ads in several parts of the state, paid for by his strong lead in fundraising.

Creigh Deeds, a state senator from Bath County, followed suit this week.

They and former House of Delegates member Brian Moran of Alexandria have held four debates, with a fifth to come, and have developed campaign machines that churn out e-mailed press releases to counter every questionable statement, every murky past association, every potential gotcha.

And they're just getting started.

"In a primary, you always put your money at the end of the calendar, not the beginning, so most of the expenditures and most of the advertising, especially the negative advertising, will be aired after Memorial Day," said University of Virginia political analyst Larry Sabato. "I think you're going to see a backlog of attacks in the last two weeks."

Already the tone of the race is increasingly negative. There are relatively few deep policy differences among the three--apart from disparities over things such as offshore drilling and coal plants--which makes character and experience the main battleground.

"You aren't looking at huge differences among the candidates on issue matters. That's the way it often is in primaries," said George Mason University political analyst Stephen Farnsworth. "Personality and character matters will come to the fore, particularly in campaign advertising, as the candidates try to explain why they're a better choice than the other two."

For McAuliffe, whom polls show as a front-runner, the sell to voters is that he's a businessman in the Mark Warner mold, someone who has created jobs and so can help create them again in Virginia, someone from outside the state government who can come in with fresh ideas.

Sabato said McAuliffe is casting himself as "an energetic but generic Democrat, someone who's going to be the next great Democratic governor."

The downside for McAuliffe is that he lacks the state experience Moran and Deeds possess. While he has lived in Northern Virginia for years, McAuliffe's involvement in Virginia politics and government has been far less than Moran's or Deeds', both of whom don't hesitate to point it out.

For Moran and Deeds, the sell is their experience. Both men have spent years in the General Assembly, and know more than McAuliffe about how the state is run.

Moran has not only experience but a deep connection to vote-rich Northern Virginia.

Deeds' play is a bit different: He has the experience but hails from a less populated part of the state. His pitch is that he's the moderate, the one who could attract more voters outside Northern Virginia and possibly outside the Democratic Party come November.

For each of them, the challenge is to present himself as the candidate who's best suited to beating Republican Bob McDonnell in November.

And doing that is bound to come at a cost, the analysts say.

"There's a tug-of-war in a primary electorate," Farnsworth said. "They want to win in November, but they're also troubled by deviations from party [principles] they hold dear. The hard core wants to win, but they also don't want to soften the definition of what the party means. And that's a tough balancing act."

It may be toughest for Deeds, whose appeal to moderates may not endear him to hard-core activists, Farnsworth said.

Yet appeals to the activists, who want promises of party-line unity, could hurt the primary winner with moderates and independents, who'll be the ones deciding who wins in November.

"The Democratic candidates in this election cycle face the worst of both worlds," Farnsworth said. "They have to spend a huge amount of money to win the nomination, and they have to make promises to the left and those things will hurt them in a general election."

Chelyen Davis: 540/368-5028
Email: cdavis@freelancestar.com