Sunday, July 15th, 2007...8:48 am
Cradle of Presidents?
Jim Gilmore dropped out of the Presidential race yesterday, did you notice? A few months back, former Virginia Governor Mark Warner dropped out as well. This means that both Virginians in the current race are out.
Four of the first five presidents were Virginians, but since then, not so much. Despite its large size (12th biggest), it hasn’t had a lot of success in producing candidates in the last century or so. In my lifetime, it has had three: Douglas Wilder, left the 1992 race early like Gilmore and Warner, Pat Buchanan, who made two runs at the nomination before abandoning the Republican party to run on the Reform Party ticket in 2000 and Pat Robertson, who made a noisy but ultimately unsuccessful run at the Republican nomination in 1988.
Searching through the vast R-Cubed historical archive, I can only find one other Virginian who ran this century. That would be Harry Flood Byrd Sr., who is the only one of these candidates to recieve any electoral votes. As the former Governor of Virginia, Byrd tried to ride his brother’s fame to the Democratic nomination in 1932. Later, he served in the Senate (for a time along side Robertson’s father) and despite not running for president in 1960, managed to recieve 15 electoral votes, mostly from “Unpledged” Democratic electors, which is what was listed on some southern states’ ballots instead of John Kennedy’s name because of the growing strength of the civil rights movement in the party.
2 Comments
July 16th, 2007 at 11:50 am
When do you define ‘this century’ to begin? Apparently it includes much of last century, so if we go back just under a hundred years:
Woodrow Wilson of Virginia won the Presidency in 1912 and 1916.
Also, the 1992 campaign was actually very interesting in terms of Virginia. In 1990, Wilder did indeed start to form a committee. So did his archrival and fellow Democrat, Sen. Chuck Robb. Robb then got caught illegally taping Wilder’s phone line, apparently for the purpose of finding stuff out he could use to force Wilder out of the running and not have to compete for his home turf.
In fact, it ended Robb’s career– he had to quit running for President and was forced by the voters to leave the Senate (in slow motion though– in 1990, Robb was in the second year of a six year Senate term, and in 1994 he got a break when the Republicans nominated about the only guy he could beat, convicted felon Ollie North.) As a political dead man walking (his approvals never got much above 30%), Robb finally met his end ten years after the Wilder incident, ironically beaten by George Allen, who was considered a likely GOP frontrunner until last year’s election, when he lost after teaching all of us a new word, ‘macaca.’
But Virginia is becoming a very important state politically. It hasn’t voted for a Democrat since the 1964 Johnson landslide, but it is now ground zero for a sort of a replay of the civil war– as the blue and getting bluer northeastern corridor, which has rapidly grown down the eastern seaboard, is colliding squarely with the solid south, and its miles of red.
As northern Virginia and the Tidewater area (not just Fairfax county, but now also Loudon county) is experiencing rapid– and leftward– growth, and as the Richmond area has moved much more towards the left as young urban northeasterners move there, the balance of the state has now swung towards the Norfolk/Hampton roads area– traditionally conservative and military, but it is where Webb came from the farthest down to catch Allen last year.
July 16th, 2007 at 5:59 pm
Wilson ran as Governor of New Jersey…does he count?
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