Column by Quentin Kidd

V.O. Key, the great scholar of Southern politics, once said of Virginia’s political class: “(It) demonstrates a sense of honor, an aversion to open venality, a degree of sensitivity to public opinion, a concern for efficiency in administration, and, so long as it does not cost much, a feeling of social responsibility.”

Key, of course was describing the Byrd organization, the oligarchy that ruled Virginia for half a century. Byrd’s political machine may be a thing of the past, but some of the values of its political philosophy - principally an aversion to taxes and little interest in government services - echo in Virginia to this day, and are at the heart of our current political debate. In fact, the transformation of Virginia politics from the 1950s to the present is a fascinating story of great political and social change within the context of amazing consistency in certain core political values.

However, even greater change may be in the offing: A divorce is in the works that might change Virginia’s political landscape even more, and finally spell the end of Byrd’s philosophical influence on Virginia politics. The suburbs, especially in Northern Virginia, are falling out of love with Republicans.

While the decade of the 1950s may be known in Virginia as the decade of Massive Resistance, it is also the decade when the first modern debate over taxes and services took place, a debate we are still having.

In 1953, Republican gubernatorial candidate and state senator Ted Dalton proposed a $100 million revenue bond to finance highway building in the Commonwealth. Prior to this proposal, Dalton’s candidacy for governor had not garnered much attention from the Byrd people, but as soon as he proposed such a radical thing as borrowing money to build highways, Byrd himself got involved and actively campaigned against Dalton.

At the beginning of the 1960s, the Democrats, although fractured and unstable, were still dominant in Virginia. There was plenty of evidence that change was in the air, but its shape hadn’t really become clear. In January 1960, there were about 1 million registered voters; the governor was a Democrat (there had never been a Republican governor in the 20th century); there were six Republicans in the 140-person General Assembly (and no African American had served in that body since 1891); and there were two Republicans in the 12-person congressional delegation.

Ten years later, in January 1970, Virginia had nearly 2 million registered voters; the governor-elect was a Republican; there were 31 Republicans and three African Americans in the 140-person General Assembly; and five of the 12-person congressional delegation were Republican.

In short, the 1960s marked a period of great instability in Virginia politics: instability caused by the dominant political order giving way to something new. But at the end of the 1960s, nobody really new for sure what was to come.

After a period of partisan fluidity, probably best represented by Harry F. Byrd’s re-election to the U.S. Senate as an independent in 1971, a new political order began to emerge. This new political order was reflected in the coalitions that made up the new Democratic and Republican parties, parties that were nearly totally different from what they had been just a decade earlier.

By the late 1970s …

Democrats were composed of four factions:

1) African American voters;

2) Progressive liberals who hoped to align the Virginia Democratic party more closely with the national Democratic Party;

3) Labor (small);

and 4) Central city voters (small and getting smaller).

Republicans were composed of three factions:

1) Social and economic conservatives from the old Byrd organization hoping to transplant those values into the Republican Party by packaging them as “conservative” in the context of national conservatism;

2) Long-time small government conservative Republicans who had traditionally made up the Republican Party in Virginia and simply stayed when the Byrd people came over;

and 3) Pro-business conservatives who had looked to the Byrd Democratic Party for its business friendly policies, and now turned to the Republican Party for the same thing.

Amidst all of this change, the realignment of the 1970s produced no major break with Virginia’s traditional social and economic conservatism. The majority of voters weren’t interested in either party moving too far from the moderate to conservative “mainstream.” Because of this, the parties traded control of the governor’s mansion, almost on the decade.

In the 1970s, Republicans rode the realignment wave and Southern reaction to the “anything goes” liberalism of the ’60s and ’70s and elected three governors: Linwood Holton, Mills Godwin and John Dalton.

In the 1980s, Democrats responded with a series of moderate candidates who focused on issues like highway construction, education and economic development and elect three governors: Chuck Robb, Gerald Baliles and Douglas Wilder.

In the 1990s, Republicans rode a social and religious conservative surge focusing on issues like crime, abortion and taxes, and elect George Allen and Jim Gilmore.

In the 2000s, Democrats again respond with a series of moderate candidates who focused on core service issues like highways, education and the role of government in providing services, and elected Mark Warner and Tim Kaine.

While the two parties were trading control of the governor’s mansion, however, Republicans were making slow but steady progress in the General Assembly.

- At the start of the 1970s, there were 24 Republicans in the House and seven in the Senate.

- At the start of the 1980s, there were 33 Republicans in the House and nine in the Senate.

- At the start of the 1990s, there were 41 Republicans in the House and 18 in the Senate.

- And by 1998, Republicans controlled the Senate with 21 seats, and by 2000 they controlled the House with 52 seats.

So, by 2000, the realignment of Virginia politics was complete. Virginia had gone from being a solidly conservative one-party Democratic state in the 1950s to a solidly conservative two-party state by 2000.

Virginia’s conservatives had successfully moved from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party and over the course of several decades came back into the majority.

The Democratic Party became the comfortable home of African Americans and the progressive liberal minority in Virginia. Together they had even figured out how to best Republicans in the race for governor about half of the time, even if they seemed unable to hold the General Assembly.

The small-government, low-taxes, low-services ideological heart of Virginia’s conservatism seemed still firmly rooted. Few of us could see how the suburbs would soon loosen those roots.

Virginia didn’t really have suburbs in the 1950s. Oh sure, what we now call Northern Virginia was just beginning to emerge as a coherence presence, but the suburban growth and sprawl that we have come to know simply didn’t exist. Virginia started experiencing this suburban growth in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and it accelerated rapidly in the 1970s and then went through another rapid acceleration in the 1990s, one that continues to this day.

While the conservative values of Byrd-era Virginia are rural values at their core, suburbs and suburban voters played an important role in the realignment of Virginia politics and in helping conservatism remain dominant in Virginia.

Suburban voters initially wanted:

- away from the problems of the cities

- good, clean, and safe schools

- safe streets and neighborhoods

Suburbs tended to be filled with:

- white people

- middle-class people

- and fiscally and socially conservative people

All of this tended to help Republicans. The most important plank of the GOP’s ideology during this time had its roots in the old conservative ideology of Byrd-era Virginia: low taxes and small government, and this worked well electorally for the GOP in both rural Virginia and suburban Virginia.

Why?

Because middle-class suburban Virginians liked low taxes, and because they lived in relatively new communities, with a relatively new infrastructure (such as schools and roads), and because they made good middle-class livings and were relatively young (middle-aged), they had little need for much government services. The problems of the inner cities were distant. They had good jobs that provided health-care benefits, and while they might have had to drive a little further than they would prefer to get to work, it wasn’t too unbearable.

Recently, however, those suburban voters look like they aren’t so interested anymore in low taxes and low levels of government services. As suburbanization rapidly increased in the 1990s and 2000s, some problems began to emerge that looked a lot like the problems cities have always had to deal with: Schools were increasingly overcrowded, and roads were increasingly congested. Suburban voters began to discover their desire for government and the services it provides.

Republicans have had a hard time responding to these new suburban realities. The low-tax, low-services legacy is still an active and powerful influence in the Republican Party. To some extent, it has merged with the social conservatism in the party, and is most prominently represented today in the House Republican Caucus.

The pro-business faction of the Republican Party is desperate to respond to the problems found in suburban Virginia, because if left unchecked, they threaten the state’s economy. This faction is most prominently represented in the Senate Republican Caucus. The battle in the Republican Party, then, is between these two factions, and the battle is costing Republicans seats in the General Assembly, and has also cost them the governor’s mansion in recent elections.

In 2000, Republicans took control of the House with a 52-seat majority. They upped that majority to 64 seats in the landslide election of 2001, but then started losing seats – they are down to 57 today. And this fall’s elections don’t look very promising for them, either.

In the Senate, by comparison, Republicans took the majority in 1998 with 21 seats and have increased that to 23 seats today. There are many reasons for why the Republican majority in the House has shrunk, but one of the reasons is surely that Republicans in the House have increasingly fallen out of favor with suburban voters who want government to provide the services it is supposed to provide, and they want government to do that as efficiently and quickly as possible.

Interestingly, the souring of suburban voters on the GOP began to happen in Virginia just as Democrats were coming around to their moderate cycle, and so they have been able to capitalize on it by attracting a growing number of suburban voters. Democrats have offered voters two gubernatorial candidates in a row who have spoken very coherently about the state’s need to invest in its infrastructure. Both Mark Warner and Tim Kaine avoided talk about divisive social issues and focused instead on basic bread-and-butter issues. This has played very well in suburbia.

In recent years, we have seen the interests of suburban voters converge with the interests of urban voters, and diverge somewhat from the offerings of the Republican Party. It is like a slow divorce, where one side realizes it is no longer attracted to the other, and simply wanders away looking for love in another place. The consequences of this slow divorce, if it is really happening, are profound.

It might represent a deathblow to the Byrd-era values of low taxes and small government, and it might cause the Republicans to lose their majority in the General Assembly.

Former attorney general Mary Sue Terry once said that where she grew up in Patrick Country, they never expected government to do much for them and were never disappointed. That, however, is not the attitude of suburban voters, and Virginia’s political landscape is likely to change because of it.

Quentin Kidd is a political-science professor at Christopher Newport University.

For further reading

Quentin Kidd on the Web - http://faculty.users.cnu.edu/qkidd

Filed under: 6-July 2007 Issue