Word: campaigns
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Wilder on the ticket; the issue was whether they would risk his wrath to keep him off. Wilder cemented a successful alliance with Baliles, the underdog for the gubernatorial nomination, because he was in the weakest position to resist a black running mate. "There were people in the Baliles campaign," Wilder recalled afterward, "who didn't want me on the ticket either...
Wilder's statewide campaign in 1985 can best be understood as the test marketing of the candidate for the 1989 gubernatorial race. Strapped for campaign cash, Wilder made news by touring each of the state's 95 counties. He neutralized stereotypes by filming a TV ad trumpeting his endorsement by a prototypical rural policeman, who looked like an extra from Smokey and the Bandit. Even when his G.O.P. opponent attacked him for owning slum property and being reprimanded by the state supreme court for unduly delaying a client's case, the normally combative Wilder turned the other cheek. As Paul...
...silver-bullet issue even more powerful than race. The Wilder camp braced for a close contest, even after Coleman, perhaps their weakest Republican challenger, won a bruising three-way G.O.P. primary. Coleman immediately launched a fusillade of negative spots, dredging up the personal charges against Wilder from the 1985 campaign. Without a cutting issue to transform the debate, the internal calculus in the Wilder campaign was that its candidate was mired at around 45% support, partly because of Democratic defections stemming from a rancorous coal miners' strike in southwestern Virginia and a Labor Day riot among black college students...
...conservative rhetoric, the spot featured images of Thomas Jefferson as an announcer intoned, "Doug Wilder believes the government shouldn't interfere in your right to choose. He wants to keep politicians out of your personal life." It was the next sentence, perhaps the most important in the campaign, that provided the thematic subtext: "Don't let Marshall Coleman take us back...
...backwater Virginia, a sleepy Southern state dominated by the oligarchic Byrd machine. The implication was that not only abortion and race were at stake but even the state's economic prosperity. It is oversimplistic to attribute too much influence to a single TV ad in a media-glutted statewide campaign. But the abortion issue was framed in a way that allowed Wilder to make inroads among racially tolerant, upscale voters who might be tempted to vote Republican on economic grounds. In affluent northern Virginia, Wilder ran a crucial two percentage points ahead of his 1985 showing. "Abortion is the symbolic...