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By GEORGE BOWLES
Next year, for the first time since 1977, Virginia Democrats might ehooee their nominees for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general by primary elections.
The movement to return to the primary method of making nominations instead of the convention method is said to be picking up considerable support among moderate and conservative middle-level party leaders. It is a development which has disturbed the state’s top Democratic strategists and which is expected to be strongly contested by state Democratic Chairman Alan Diamonstein and others dose to Gov. Chuck Robb.
The growing sentiment for a primary is doubly astonishing because it is coming from an unlikely alliance of liberal leaders, mainly from Northern Virginia, and political pragmatists of the party’s right and center. The Northern Virginians have consistently supported the primary as a matter of principle. But in the past the pragmatists have always seen conventions as the least divisive as well as the least expensive way of choosing candidates.
The method which will be used will be decided by the Democratic State Central Committee at a meeting later this year or early in 1985.
The party’s liberal wing is badly split over the primary versus convention question. On the one hand, a primary opens the nominating process and involves a larger segment of the voters in choosing candidates. This, of course, is a cardinal precept of the liberal faith. On the other hand, however, liberals know they are likely to have a far stronger voice in a convention, the delegates to which are generally to the left of the party’s mainstream.
For the latter reason many liberals, and especially many blacks, are highly suspidous of the groundswell of support for a primary.
They see it as a lightly disguised effort to negate the impact of the large numbers of new black voters who signed on the voting rolls as a result of the massive registration drives conducted by the boosters of the Rev. Jesse Jackson. These new voters could exercise far more influence as convention delegates chosen at easily packed mass meetings than as voters in a primary election.
Beyond that, however, convention supporters see other reasons for not returning to the primary.
81.1%