Democrats in the Virginia House of Delegates were all smiles as they gathered Saturday morning with Gov. Mark R. Warner (D) to celebrate their latest campaign victory -- a 97-vote margin that elected former television reporter Paula Miller over Republican activist Michael Ball in a Norfolk special election.
To call them giddy would be an understatement. Not long ago, there were 34 House Democrats, barely enough to register on anyone's radar screen. Now, with Miller's win and three victories in 2003, they number 38. Still a long way from a majority in the 100-seat House, but growing.
PAULA MILLER
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"Pretty soon, we'll have to find a bigger phone booth," joked Del. J. Chapman Petersen (D-Fairfax).
Warner, who turned 50 last week, was elated. This week, he called Miller's election "the best birthday present I got." (Better, he said, than the gift from the head of AARP, who presented Warner with a membership card.)
Miller's election "was the affirmation that the kind of policies we set out earlier this year are the right policies for Virginians," Warner told the House Democrats at the weekend caucus meeting. He said the results represent a rejection of the anti-tax views that Ball embraced.
But for all the back-slapping among partisans Saturday, Miller and her fellow Democrats might owe their special election success to an unlikely group: Republican business executives.
Miller's campaign was partly financed by two $25,000 donations from Leadership for Virginia, a new political action committee whose mission is largely to support moderate Republican candidates. The PAC announced in November that it had raised $1 million, making it one of the largest political fundraising groups in the state.
Miller's was the first campaign it supported since its official launch last month.
Why would a group run by Republicans, designed to support Republicans and financed by many Republicans support a Democrat the first time out of the gate?
James Hazel, the group's co-chairman and a former member of Warner's policy staff, concedes that there was a fair bit of grumbling about that among some of the group's Republican donors.
As they saw it, the group was supposed to be helping the 17 House Republicans who broke ranks during the 2004 session to support a tax increase. Those lawmakers have been threatened by national anti-tax groups, which have said they will back primary opponents this summer.
But Hazel insists the group has always said its mission was to back candidates who understand the need for investment in the state and could include supporting a Democrat if -- and only if -- the Democrat were running for an open seat and not against an incumbent Republican.
That was the situation in Norfolk, where Miller and Ball were running to replace Thelma Drake, who was elected to Congress. Ball, a Republican activist and financial adviser, campaigned as a staunch anti-tax conservative and criticized Warner's push for a tax increase last session. Miller lauded the tax effort as a necessary budget-balancing move.
The contest represented the perfect test of those divergent viewpoints in an intense three-week election effort. Both campaigns raised and spent tens of thousands of dollars and sent out glossy mailings. Miller spent $54,000 to advertise on cable television in the district.
Luckily for Hazel's group, and for Warner, Miller won. Both sides are now trying to figure out what lessons they can learn from the short campaign as they approach the 2005 elections for all 100 members of the House.
Grover Norquist, the leader of Americans for Tax Reform, said that Ball lost because he wasn't anti-tax enough.
After the race, Norquist issued a news release accusing Ball of having run as a pro-tax Republican. "Ball refused to make the race a referendum on taxes by signing the Taxpayers Protection Pledge," Norquist said.
Democrats, meanwhile, say that Miller won because she seized the center of the political spectrum, much as Warner has been doing successfully for three years.
"We definitely got a chunk of those moderate voters," Doug Dodson, who helped run Miller's campaign, told Democrats at their caucus Saturday.
"There's a new math there," he predicted. "We can peel off moderate Republican voters if we have the right message. There's some math that works for us."
