! Continued from page 1 the state, won handily

Continued from page 1 the state, won handily in Rappahannock County, defeating W.R. “Buster” O’Brien, 1,011 to 649. » If was 1077 when Virginia and Rappahannock voted i )f tier" ' ' John Dalton for goverr nor> that tf.e county iasi . rom its Democratic > path. Dalton garnered 849 county votes to 779 of Henry \ Howell. In 1973, Rappahannock cast its lot for Mills Godwin, j a party turncoat who took the county as a Democrat eight '! years earlier. In no other gubernatorial election in recent political j history has Rappahannock voted for anyone but a Demo| crat. Even in 1969 when Virginia elected its first Republican governor since Reconstruction in Linwood Holton, Rappahannock cast its votes for Democrat William C. Battle. Holton’s election broke a Democratic winning streak of of 21 consecutive gubernatorial races. As expected, voter turnout in Rappahannock was light Tuesday. Roughly 50 percent of the county’s 3,265 i registered voters braved the rain and, in some cases, | flood conditions, to participate in what most Virginia political observers called a race in which most distinguisha| ble mark was apathy. Raymond “Andy” Guest, running as an unopposed incumbent for his seat in the House of Delegates representing the 31st District, got 1,372 votes. Some 1,673 votes were cast locally in the gubernatorial race, the highest total of the three contested races. Elsewhere, six write-in votes were cast. At Washington, county Democratic Chairman Doug Baumgardner got one vote for the House of Delegates. At Sperryville, former Washington Town Mayor Dorothy “Dotsy” Davis got one vote in the House race, as did James Fletcher III at Scrabble, where one write-in vote was cast in the attorney general race was cast for Perry Mason, the lead character in a television dramatic series about a defense attorney.