Here's an article from NationalReviewOnline that suggests the one thing Virginians may agree on is the lackluster performance of Jim Gilmore. Note that this article was written yesterday, even before the polls closed.
[size=4]Fire Jim Gilmore[/size=4]
[b]Even if Earley wins[/b].
By Ben Domenech, November 6, 2001 1:20 p.m.
There'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).
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