Fire Jim Gilmore
Even if Earley wins.

By Ben Domenech
November 6, 2001 1:20 p.m.

here's only one opinion that's nearly universal here in the Virginia GOP: Fire Jim Gilmore.

The vast majority of Republican activists, from the top down, blame Gilmore for the state of the Virginia governor's race. Some are still angry about his mishandling of the budget squabble earlier this year, or his grousing about the state's economic troubles over the past six months, or his failure to inject former Attorney General Mark Earley's campaign with the money they needed early on to combat Democrat Mark Warner's $17 million-plus TV ad blitz.

"Jim Gilmore had all the tools he needed to help Mark Earley win this race — RNC coffers full to the brim, a party that reunited after a tough primary, and a candidate that's more attractive than Gilmore ever could be," says one GOP county chairman. "As he's done in so many other cases, Gilmore squandered away the tools he had, and it's conservatives who are going to suffer."

The other two Virginia races, for lieutenant governor and attorney general, were thought of as sure victories for the GOP in the summer. After the Democratic primary, Republican nominees Jay Katzen and Jerry Kilgore had the luck to face two of the most liberal Democrats to run in the state since the 1970's. Kilgore will cruise to victory over lawyer Don McEachin, but polls suggest that Katzen, a state senator with a penchant for star-spangled rhetoric, will lose to Tim Kaine, the former mayor of Richmond who has a soft spot for gun control, gay marriage, abortion, and rolling back the death penalty. Some GOPers privately hope that it's Kaine, not Warner, who becomes the face of the Democratic party in Virginia over the next four years.

As it stands today, Earley can still win in this race — but it'd have to be a Bret Schundler-style victory, a come-from-behind shocker. Of the six different sources for nonpartisan media polls conducted in the past three weeks, only those conducted by the Washington Post show Warner with a wide lead in the race. The other four, polls from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Mason-Dixon Polling & Research, and WJLA/ABC-7 TV show a much slimmer margin between the two candidates, frequently with percentage leads for Warner falling within the margin of error. The most recent poll, conducted by WJLA, showed typical results, with Warner receiving 50% of support from likely and registered voters, and Earley receiving 46%, with a 4.5% margin of error. The wisdom on the battleground holds that this is really a five-point race, despite the Post's repeated emphasis on their own double-digit Warner margins (an oddity noted this weekend by the Post's own unrepentantly clueless Old Dominion reporter, Robert Melton).

If Earley were to pull off a slim victory, it would probably come as a gift from Hampton Roads, the southeastern portion of the state. Earley is a Hampton Roads native who represented parts of Chesapeake and Virginia Beach in the state senate for a decade, and campaign adviser Chris LaCivita has said that the 1.5 million people on the peninsula and in South Hampton Roads are critical to Earley's success. While Earley may have recovered some ground in Southwest Virginia, where Warner made headway after an ongoing flirtation with the NRA and sportsmen groups, no GOP candidate can afford to have losses in the Tidewater region against a Northern Virginia Democrat like Warner. Earley's attacks on Warner's support for a $900 million tax-hike/transportation referendum in Northern Virginia also comes into play here, as Warner has said he would let Hampton Roads voters follow suit if the general assembly put the question on the ballot.

Mark Earley came into this race with the opportunity to become one of the most articulate, attractive, and outstandingly conservative governors in the nation. Many in the media labeled him as the second coming of George Allen — but Earley was never one to mimic Allen's aw-shucks style, and journalists are quick to forget that Governor Allen wasn't the close friend of conservatism in 1993 that he is today. Instead of the smashmouth tactics of Jim Gilmore, Earley's candidacy supplied a more unique persona — a missionary who challenged Ferdinand Marcos's regime in the Phillippines, Earley was frequently endorsed by NAACP chapters and local unions during his stay in the state senate, and in the 1997 elections, Earley won significantly more votes from women and minority populations than either Gilmore or Lieutenant Governor John Hager. An intellectual conservative who reaches out to the inner cities and has a lifetime of work in Virginia, Earley's campaign held all the promise of a great administration for the ideals of the right.

Throughout the campaign, Earley stayed proudly loyal to Gilmore's decidedly mixed legacy. While Hager blasted Gilmore's policies throughout his primary campaign, voted with the anti-Gilmore forces in the state senate, and split several moderate Republicans out of the party, Earley still didn't once criticize the Governor, for his policies or tactics. Republicans outside of the Old Dominion rained praise on Gilmore for his ingenious victory in Virginia's 4th District race, and rumors of internal bickering between the RNC and the White House were hushed. Earley even showed willingness to campaign with Gilmore throughout the state, despite the fact that the soon to be ex-governor's poll ratings are hardly a help on the campaign trail.

See how the loyal are repaid: In Sunday's Washington Post, Gilmore claimed that Warner simply "outdid" Earley, in his campaign's actions and strategy. Again, that's Chairman of the RNC Jim Gilmore, speaking before Election Day, admitting that maybe Terry McAuliffe and the Connecticut Yankee just ran a better campaign.

There must be some grand strategy to Gilmore's actions — why he allowed Democrats to completely control the spin surrounding the budget battle in the state this summer, why he forced Earley's campaign to run on fumes, getting outspent 2-1 despite the flush RNC coffers, why he made more dour pronouncements about the state's economic status just last week. It's probably the tactics of the truly politically adept, that make no logical sense to any other observer.

Everyone in Virginia remembers "No Car Tax," the campaign slogan that made many brand Gilmore a fount of political wisdom for discovering a real silver-bullet issue. After the polls close tonight, many Virginia Republicans will be left wondering if Gilmore can win anything without one.