Off-Year Races Have Potential To Deliver Blows To Democrats Republicans Poised To Move Into Southern Statehouses
The Republican resurgence in the South will be put to the test Tuesday as voters in Mississippi and Kentucky elect governors and Virginia decides whether to become the first Southern state since Reconstruction with a GOP-controlled legislature.
The balance of power in Maine’s legislature also is at stake in the offyear voting, which includes dozens of mayoral contests, including a close three-way race in San Francisco, and several ballot questions on legalized gambling.
In 1993, big GOP gains in gubernatorial and mayoral races foreshadowed last year’s Republican rout that left the GOP with control of 30 governorships and both chambers of Congress for the first time in 40 years.
Democrats entered this year hoping to use the contests as a stepping stone to a 1996 comeback, but it was the Republicans who entered the final weekend poised for gains.
In Mississippi, GOP Gov. Kirk Fordice, already the state’s first Republican chief executive since 1876, was favored to become Mississippi’s first governor to win back-to-back terms this century.
Still, late polls showed Democratic challenger Dick Molpus, the secretary of state, within striking distance at the close of an aggressive campaign in which he has called for halving the state’s 7 percent grocery sales tax. Fordice favors an income tax cut.
Republicans are counting on a strong Fordice win for coattails in legislative races long dominated in Mississippi, and across the South, by Democrats.
A nine-seat gain would put the Mississippi Senate in GOP hands. And while the state House is overwhelmingly Democratic, Republicans need to gain just nine seats for the power to sustain vetoes.
“It is going to be close,” said state GOP Chairman Billy Powell.
Alice Skelton, executive director of the Mississippi Democratic Party, labeled Republicans “dreamers.”
But Powell has a trump card if Republicans fall just short of their legislative goals: Several Democrats in each chamber are negotiating to switch parties, provided that Fordice wins re-election.
Perhaps the most colorful race was San Francisco’s battle for mayor, pitting incumbent Frank Jordan against two Democrats who made their names outside city politics: former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown Jr., and gay activist Roberta Achtenberg, who left a Clinton administration job to run for the post.
In Kentucky, Democrat Paul Patton and Republican Larry Forgy were locked in a close contest, although late polls showed Forgy leading among likely voters. With election officials predicting a record low turnout of 35 percent of eligible voters, Patton appeared sensitive to the abilities of conservative grass-roots groups to put Republicans over the top, as was often the case in 1994.
“I don’t want anyone messing with my right to have a gun,” said Patton, the state’s lieutenant governor, who has campaigned as a “different kind of Democrat.”
With the Christian Coalition prepared to distribute a half-million voting guides in Kentucky this weekend, Patton told one audience Thursday that he “has the same basic rural values you have. I’m a Christian.”
Republican Forgy campaigned on the theme that it was time to end a 24-year stretch of Democratic governors.
And in a state where tobacco remains a major crop, he said a Republican governor was needed to defend against President Clinton’s pledges to curtail smoking.
“Burley tobacco, in my judgment, has never had a more serious enemy than William Jefferson Clinton,” Forgy said.
Overall, Clinton wasn’t as big an issue this year as he was in 1994, or 1993 for that matter. He wasn’t much of a presence, either: Not once did he campaign with any of this year’s Democratic candidates, a reflection of his battered standing across the South.