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I’ve met are people who voted Republican in the last few presidential races. If they take a close look at some of the planks in the Democratic platform, they may find them hard to swallow since they are basically conservatives.
Yet one thing seems certain if anything can be said to seem certain in such volatile times. That is that the Bush campaign is going to have to work much harder than it expected to in Virginia. It will not be able to take Virginia for granted as it did four years ago.
I think Bush will carry Virginia, although not by the huge margin he carried it in 1988 when Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis made little impact here. Clinton and Gore with their southern backgrounds are likely to campaign in Virginia and other southern states, hoping to make the Bush forces spend resources below the Mason-Dixon line they had planned to spend in other regions. That is smart strategy.
Add to that the lingering Perot factor - he is gone but thousands who were willing to support him — still remain and can still vote, and no one can really accurately predict the outcome. I would be very surprised if Virginia did not go Republican again, but this has been a year when surprises are no longer surprises and the biggest constant in the political arena is instability.
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