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from most of them. Many actually feel tha involvement in party politics is beneath their dignity. But the name of a respected neighbor or personally known local official on a “Virginians For” list is known to often bring them out on Election Day.
In a very real senese, the emergence of the “Virginians For” groups is a throw-back to the state’s Byrd Organization past. It also reflects the patterns of voter motivation which are, in large part, a legacy of that past.
In the heyday of the Byrd Organization, at a suitable time before each election the “word” would be quietly passed to the courthouse as to who had the organization’s “nod.” That word has then communicated to the voters in the hinterlands by the vast informal grapevine of known Byrd loyalists.
Those voters could then go to the polls and vote with complete confidence that whomever they were voting for was solidly committed to keeping the price of tobacco up, the blacks down and the state debt-free.
Much, although obivously not all, of this is involved in the use of the present-day “Virginians For” organizations.
There is general acceptance of the proposition that neither the Democratic nor the Republican party can draw out enough voters to assure victory on Election Day. There is also a belief that vast reservoirs of voters, left to their own devices, remain apathetic about the candidates and issues. As in the Byrd days, they want someone to tell them what to do.
And finally, there is the belief that those voters will go to the polls and vote if they get the “word” from someone whom they know, trust and whom they regard as “sound thinking.” Delivering that word is the job of the “Virginians For” organizations.
Thus we have the present scramble by each candidate for governor to put together the strongest possible “Virginians For” list, reaching as deeply as possible into each community in the Commonwealth.
Of course, the difference now is that, with everybody putting out the “word” through his own “Virginians For” group, each candidate must also work to convince the voters that the supporters on his list are “sounder thinking” than those on the other guy’s.
95.7%