D.C. area crucial in win over rural-rooted Allen

By DAle Eisman
The Virginian-Pilot

SPRINGFIELD -- Jim Webb's apparent victory in Tuesday's U.S. Senate election underscores the growing power of the Washington suburbs and a critical divide between that region and the rest of Virginia, political analysts suggested Wednesday.

Incumbent Republican George Allen "was just blown away in Northern Virginia," said Robert Holsworth, a political scientist at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.

Unofficial returns gave Democratic nominee Webb a 120,000-vote advantage over Allen in Northern Virginia's eight localities. But Webb trailed badly across most of the rest of the state and would have decisively lost the election without his Northern Virginia support.

Just more than 674,000 votes were cast in Northern Virginia, slightly less than 30 percent of the statewide total. Webb drew 58 percent of those ballots, compared to just more than 40 percent for Allen.

Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads were the only major areas of the state where Webb ran ahead of Allen. T he Democrat's advantage in the state's southeast corner was far smaller than in Northern Virginia. Webb got just more than 51 percent of the vote in the five cities of South Hampton Roads, compared with 47 percent for Allen.

The results demonstrate that Republicans "can no longer count on winning statewide without doing well in Northern Virginia or at least without holding down their losses," said Mark Rozell, a political scientist at George Mason University in Fairfax.

"The old-line, rock-solid conservative types just don't play here as well as they used to," Rozell added.

Allen, a 51-year-old former governor who had designs on a 2008 presidential race as recently as August, followed a campaign formula that served the state GOP well in the 1990s.

But his unswerving stands against tax increases at every level and his anti-government rhetoric were less effective in Northern Virginia, where traffic congestion has created a powerful constituency for new highway taxes, and government is the linchpin of the local economy.

The sprawling suburbs are "a company town, and government is the company," observed Ron Rapaport, chairman of the government department at t he College of William and Mary.

Allen, who lives in Fairfax County, also found himself somewhat estranged from his adopted home in his aggressive conservatism on social issues. He campaigned strongly in favor of a state constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage; it was easily approved statewide but lost by more than 45,000 votes in Northern Virginia.

Rapaport said Allen also was particularly wounded in Northern Virginia by the string of verbal miscues that began with his mid-August "Macaca" moment. The senator was caught on tape referring to a Webb campaign volunteer, an Indian American born in Fairfax, as "Macaca," a word that is a racial slur in some cultures. Publicity about the incident sparked Webb's rise in opinion polls.

"Allen had to work very hard to make this a competitive race, much less one he could lose," Rapaport said.

Holsworth said a comparison of Tuesday's voting with that in 2000, when Allen defeated then-Sen. Chuck Robb, shows Northern Virginia's shift toward the Democrats.

While Allen performed in other areas pretty much as he had in the Robb race, he went from a 16,000 vote loss to a 64,000 vote loss in Fairfax County, the state's most populous locale, Holsworth said. Allen also narrowly lost on Tuesday in both Loudoun and Prince William counties, outlying but fast-growing suburbs he had carried in 2000.

"This just shows you the changing nature of Virginia," Holsworth said. "The whole notion that a political campaign in Virginia ends with Bill Clinton mobilizing the vote would have been unheard of six years ago," he said.

The former president, who didn't seriously campaign in Virginia in his two national campaigns, headlined a rally for Webb on the eve of Election Day that drew more than 2,000 wildly cheering Democrats and almost certainly energized party activists across the region, Holsworth said.

While published returns showed a clear geographic divide in support for Webb and Allen, an exit poll taken for The Associated Press and five TV networks indicated splits in the electorate along gender, racial and generational lines.

The survey's interviews with more than 2,000 Virginians as they left the polls found Allen favored by men, 55 percent to 45 percent, while women preferred Webb by the same margin.

Black voters went for Webb, 85 percent to 15 percent, while whites supported Allen, 58 percent to 42 percent.

The poll also gave Webb a four-point edge, 52 to 48, among voters younger than 30, while Allen had the same advantage among those ages 30 to 44. Webb had a two-point lead among voters 45 to 59 and the two men were tied among those older than 60.