Allen, although a favorite, may have a more serious challenger, in part because of the issues going on. The questions surrounding Iraq, the questions surrounding abortion, the hostility that many Democrats toward President Bush, could all generate high Democratic turnout. |
Although their ideologies are very different, the strategy Howard Dean employed could be the strategy Mark Warner employs. Basically camp out in Iowa and New Hampshire and go door to door, church supper to church supper, to make himself a household name in those states. |
His business experience and his connections to Mark Warner could put him in good stead with Democratic Party voters. |
I do not anticipate the religious left to become as big as the Christian-conservative movement. The reason is that the numbers of people who would describe themselves as members of the religious left is just not as large as the religious right. |
I think Allen has to be at the top of everyone's expectations right now. |
I think the future is going to look a lot like the past. Virginia muddles through with relatively short legislative sessions, and if lawmakers introduce too many bills for the legislature to consider, the ones that aren't going to pass anyway are thrown overboard. |
In many ways, it looks like the Democratic Party is trying to run the same play that propelled Mark Warner to prominence previously. |
In many ways, the Christian conservative element of the Republican Party is sufficiently large that they have an effective veto over the eventual nominee. They may not get their first choice, but candidates they're opposed to are not going to get through the system. |
In many ways, this could be a replay of 1996 - a businessman with substantial party support going up against a popular incumbent, who does well enough in losing that he will be able to run for the Senate in 2008 or the governor's mansion in 2009. |
It's also not clear where to draw the line of where the religious left is. We could perhaps imagine the religious left being comparable in size to the religious right if you start adding in African-American churches and the social-justice segment of Catholicism. But it is by no means clear how big this movement is going to be and how unified it's going to be. |
The Democratic Party has long thought that its success is dependent on some support in the South. |
The full-disclosure system has an advantage in that people have a sense of what their lawmakers are getting. But the wide-ranging ability of lawmakers to receive gifts from private interests is not something that goes in the direction of good government. |
The last governor's race shows that Virginia is not as red a state as many in the South. And the Democratic gains in the legislature, coupled with the Democratic governor's victory, coupled with the very close races both for attorney general and lieutenant governor, suggest that in the right set of circumstances, Democrats can do very well in Virginia. |
The presidential-nomination system favors the unemployed or the underemployed over the fully employed. |
The truth is that it is profitable for private interests to give things to lawmakers. And if it weren't, they wouldn't give them. If it were not profitable for them to put some of their resources in the pockets of lawmakers, they wouldn't do it. |