What If The Voters Don't Care?

Tuesday was a big day in Norton, Virginia's smallest city, an old mining town in the state's extreme southwest corner. Thousands of people -- more than half the population -- put aside their work and other obligations and came together to exercise their rights as free citizens.

Not to vote, though there was an election. Only 49 people in Norton bothered to cast a ballot for who will challenge Sen. George Allen this fall.

That was the lowest turnout of any jurisdiction in the commonwealth. Pretty much everyone else in this city of 4,000 was over at the Best Friend Festival, a week-long celebration featuring bubble-gum-blowing, watermelon-seed-spitting and limbo contests. That evening, the festival drew 2,000 people to express their fundamental right to karaoke.

Election? "I heard nobody mention it," says Joyce Payne, chief executive of the Chamber of Commerce, which organizes the annual festival. "I'm sure it was important to people who are very concerned about politics." If you can find such a person.

The search wouldn't be much easier outside Norton; statewide, only 3 percent of registered voters actually bestirred themselves to go to the polls.

People who don't condemn Washington as some faraway pestilence tend to believe that folks "out there" are all riled up about gas prices, the war and the economy. The Democrats and the Republicans both are in a lather about how the voters are preparing to express themselves this fall, demanding change or action or some horrifying thing like that.

People who get paid to attach meaning to these things will paint Tuesday's election -- in which the guy in the combat boots, Jim Webb, beat the Washington lobbyist, Harris Miller -- as a ringing call for change, a powerful statement of the public's dismay over the situation in Iraq and the competence of this administration.

But when 3 percent of voters turn out, there is no ringing call for anything but dinner. Or maybe some nice face painting: Norton's local paper, the Coalfield Progress, had not a word about the Senate race on its home page this week. Instead, there's a big photo of a little girl at the city park above the headline "It's festival time."

The Senate race drew a slightly better turnout on the two candidates' home turf of Fairfax County; in fact, Nothern Virginia accounted for more than 40 percent of the votes on Tuesday, which indicates the increasing influence of political bloggers in races with low turnouts. The only place on the planet where this election was a really exciting big deal was on the blogs that live and breathe Virginia politics, and their enthusiasm was a significant contributor to the somewhat better turnout in broadband-rich Northern Virginia.

"No question about it, the bloggers were driving this," says Dave "Mudcat" Saunders, the Roanoke-based backcountry strategist who is helping guide Webb's campaign and who was the mastermind behind Connecticut-born Mark Warner's embrace of NASCAR culture in his run for governor five years ago.

Saunders believes that even if Webb cannot match Allen's staggering $7 million campaign kitty, the challenger has shown that he can use old-fashioned grass-roots word of mouth and newfangled Internet campaigning to spread the word about this ex-Republican military man who wants to bring Reagan Democrats back to the party of their youth.

"We've got the perfect soldier to come out and campaign against George Allen," Saunders says. "In Virginia, combat boots beat cowboy boots every time. If we did it with a Connecticut Yankee, we sure as hell can do it with this guy."

But Webb's strategy is based on the notion that there's a deep well of discontent that need only be tapped to dislodge Allen from his seat.

And in places such as Norton, it's hard to see much in the way of the anger and frustration that lead people to engage in politics.

When I reeled off the big issues in the Senate race to Joyce Payne, she was quick to say, "None of that is what's on people's minds here this week. This is just a time of fun and relaxation. Sometimes you have to just chill and relax; people in Washington should try that. Really, it'll lengthen your life."

Join me at noon today for "Potomac Confidential" athttp://www.washingtonpost.com/liveonline.