By Robert Barnes
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 5, 2006; A01
Big, rich, filled with voters and slightly off-center, the Washington suburbs will either drive the election results in Virginia and Maryland on Tuesday or show once again that they are out of step with the rest of their states.
Maybe both.
This election marks the full emergence of Northern Virginia and the Maryland suburbs that border Washington as power centers in their states. In the case of Northern Virginia, dramatic growth and changing political attitudes that set it more in tune with the rest of the country than the rest of Virginia are vital to Democrat James Webb's challenge of Republican Sen. George Allen.
"The divide between Northern Virginia and the rest of the state continues to grow wider -- it's as if they are two different states," said George Mason University political scientist Mark J. Rozell. "If Jim Webb is to win, I really think the story the next day is how Northern Virginia put him over the top."
Likewise, Montgomery and Prince George's counties -- the largest jurisdictions in the state, accounting for about 30 percent of the total vote -- are the cornerstones for Democratic campaigns. But that doesn't mean the rest of the state always follows.
The counties stood out four years ago as the only jurisdictions besides Baltimore to back Democrat Kathleen Kennedy Townsend; Republican Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. won because of his margins elsewhere in the state. If this year's Democratic standard-bearers -- Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley for governor and Baltimore County Congressman Benjamin L. Cardin in the U.S. Senate race -- don't supplement their expected margins in the D.C. suburbs with more help from their own region, the pattern could repeat.
But this year, the Maryland suburbs are set to go from simply providing Democratic votes to supplying Democratic policymakers: If the party's ticket wins, it will be the first time three of the state's four elected constitutional officeholders will be from the Washington area.
"Both Doug Gansler's and my election will be a wake-up call to everybody in the state that the Washington suburbs are indispensable to anyone running for statewide office," said Montgomery Del. Peter Franchot, the Democratic nominee for comptroller. Montgomery State's Attorney Douglas F. Gansler is the nominee for attorney general, and both are in line to become the first from the county to be independently elected to statewide office since 1919.
In addition, O'Malley selected Prince George's Del. Anthony G. Brown to be his lieutenant governor running mate. Republican Senate nominee Michael S. Steele lives in Prince George's and grew up in the District.
Two more Baltimore-Washington showdowns were averted when Montgomery County Executive Douglas M. Duncan dropped out of the primary against O'Malley and U.S. Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Montgomery decided not to challenge Cardin for the Senate nomination.
Gansler and Franchot both beat opponents with bases in Baltimore.
"I think it signals, along with Parris N. Glendening's election as governor 12 years ago, that there is a shifting of population and power away from Baltimore and towards the Washington, D.C., suburbs," said Paul Herrnson, a politics professor at the University of Maryland at College Park. Glendening was Prince George's county executive before his two terms as governor.
Even so, both of this year's candidates for governor hail from the Baltimore area, and that region's issues have dominated the campaign; the candidates have had only two televised debates, and Montgomery and Prince George's were barely mentioned in either.
Both have campaigned extensively in the two counties, though, with O'Malley reminding voters that he was born and raised in Rockville and stressing a message of educational improvement, health-care reform and help for the middle class. He points to his selection of Brown to emphasize his commitment to what he almost never fails to call "Gorgeous Prince George's."
Ehrlich has made the long-delayed intercounty connector the centerpiece of his Montgomery campaign and sent at least two mailings to county residents showing him and Duncan (D) at one of three "groundbreaking" events he's had on the project.
In Prince George's, Ehrlich has promoted economic empowerment and used community grants and other support from the state to build relationships with county leaders and mayors of the small municipalities that dot the county.
At a recent marathon photo session where Ehrlich handed out checks to community groups and local governments, Seat Pleasant Mayor Eugene Grant circled through so many times that Ehrlich jokingly told him he'd gotten enough.
"It's only October," Grant responded. "There's still a lot of time left before November."
Prince George's, which has the largest pool of black voters in the state, is important in both the governor's and Senate campaigns.
Cardin has practically based his campaign out of the county in the final days, as he tries to stop defection to Steele, the state's first African American to have a legitimate shot at winning a Senate seat.
Steele received an important endorsement last week from Wayne K. Curry, Prince George's County's first black county executive, and a group of Democratic council members. They said the party had disrespected African Americans with a statewide ticket that featured only white men for the state's top offices, save O'Malley running mate Brown.
"The party acts as though when they want our opinion they'll give it to us. It will not be like that anymore," Curry said.
That brought a fiery response from County Executive Jack B. Johnson (D), who led a group of Democratic officeholders, most of them black, to rally behind Cardin in a bid to reclaim control of the U.S. Senate. "This race is not about race," Johnson said. "It's about fighting to restore the core values of African Americans and reminding them why they are registered as Democrats in the first place."
Somewhat lost in the controversy is Isiah Leggett's win in the Democratic primary for Montgomery county executive. His likely victory Tuesday in the heavily Democratic -- and majority-white -- county would mean that for the first time, the state's two largest jurisdictions would be headed by African Americans.
"It does seem to me something that Montgomery County will be recognized for when the dust settles," state Sen. Brian E. Frosh (D) said of Leggett's "remarkable triumph." "What it says about Montgomery County is that we're pretty colorblind."
Across the Potomac, the influence of Northern Virginia -- where about 30 percent of the state's voters reside -- is debated annually because of the commonwealth's uncommon political calendar.
In 2004, as Rozell pointed out, Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry showed that it was possible to win Northern Virginia and still lose the state. The next year, Timothy M. Kaine expanded Democratic gains into Loudoun and Prince William counties and combined support in other suburban areas to win the governorship by an even larger margin than fellow Democrat Mark R. Warner had seen four years earlier.
This year, polls consistently show strong support in the region for Webb -- and a growing distance from attitudes in the rest of the state.
In a Washington Post poll conducted last month, Webb led Allen 56 percent to 42 percent in Northern Virginia, defined as Alexandria and Arlington, Fairfax, Fauquier, Loudoun, Prince William and Stafford counties and all the cities contained within. Allen led by 10 points elsewhere in the state.
On a host of issues -- including President Bush's popularity, support for the war in Iraq and amending the state constitution to prohibit same-sex marriage -- there were wide disparities between the region and the rest of the state.
Those differences are likely to grow, demographers and political scientists say, and so is the area's influence.
"I think gone are the days when candidates can count on winning without winning Northern Virginia," Rozell said.
Robert E. Lang, director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech, said future statewide politicians will need to rethink how to fashion their campaigns.
"The first order of business is going to be, 'What are you going to do about Northern Virginia, how are you going to take care of those people?' " Lang said. "Because they're active, they're energetic, they vote, they're booming."
Robert D. Holsworth, director of the Center for Public Policy at Virginia Commonwealth University, said the region's changing politics threatens Allen and future GOP candidates. He called it a dilemma for the "tried-and-true way of trying to win a Republican campaign."
Allen's top consultant, Chris LaCivita, conceded that Northern Virginia has become a challenge.
"Clearly, it's tougher than it used to be," said LaCivita, who has run campaigns in Virginia for years and once directed the state's Republican Party. But LaCivita said that Allen has not given up on the area and believes that some of the most potent GOP messages can be tailored to be just as effective there as in other parts of the state.
"Northern Virginians have more to lose as it relates to taxation," he said. "It's bad enough that federal taxes are too high. But when the localities come on top of it, those are issues that have a particular resonance up here in Northern Virginia."
Lang agreed that new residents of what he calls the "new quasi-urban space of Northern Virginia" are not particularly liberal or even Democratic. "It's a moderate politics," he said, but with its large foreign-born population and growing number of single people, "it's becoming more like the North than the South."
By the middle of the next decade, Lang said, Virginia might more resemble Illinois -- with its urban upstate, rural downstate split -- than fellow Southern states. Lang said that if Allen survives this election, he might return to his Southern California roots for a campaign persona.
"The Southern California Allen would do better in 2012 than the cowboy one," Lang said.
Staff writers Matthew Mosk and Michael D. Shear and researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.
