With 2008’s Senate contests on the horizon, conservatives in Virginia anxiously await a decision by 80-year-old Republican senator John Warner as to whether he will seek reelection.
Speculation about Warner’s future picked up after recent Federal Election Commission reports revealed that the senator’s reelection committee had raised only $500 during the first quarter of this year.
John Ullyot, a spokesman for Warner, tells
National Review Online that the senator has indicated that he would like to run again. Ullyot added, though, that Warner will “announce his final decision in September, after consulting with a wide range of Virginians, from the man and woman on the street, to party leaders and his colleagues in the Congress.”
Many with knowledge of state politics express less certainty about Warner’s intentions. Kate Obenshain Griffin, the former chairwoman of the Virginia Republican party, paints a picture of uncertainty: “I think that is anybody’s guess right now. Senator Warner is playing it close to his vest,” she says. “There’s a sense of drama about the whole thing that perhaps the senator is enjoying.”
“I personally discussed it with him in private at length, and I don’t know what he’s going to do,” says Larry Sabato, the director of the
Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “I think he’s going back and forth on the matter.”
Ed Gillespie, the former head of the Republican National Committee and currently chairman of the Virginia GOP (who
expected to soon head over to the White House), says he hopes Warner will run for reelection. “He is clearly thinking about it. He’s got a lot of time,” says Gillespie.
While Warner’s initial fundraising was low — even senators like John Cornyn, who probably will not face a tough reelection, has raised over $900,000 this year — he probably would be able to raise money quickly. That said, Warner’s campaign already has upwards of $600,000 cash on hand. In 2002, when Warner was last reelected, he only spent $1.7, whereas former Warner colleague Sen. George Allen spent just more than $16 million in his unsuccessful reelection bid.
Warner has grumbled that the Republican leadership in the Senate has not utilized his expertise in the military and foreign affairs, and that he has been shuffled aside since the change in power earlier this year. While Warner was the chairman of the Armed Services Committee last session, he is now only the second-ranking minority committee member. Even on his other committee assignments — the Committee on Intelligence, and the Committee on the Environment and Public Works — Warner is still only the second-ranking Republican. Warner is also thought to be worried about Virginia having two younger, inexperienced senators in the tandem of Democrat Jim Webb and his own eventual successor.
In any case, conservatives in Virginia have complained about Warner for years — his lifetime American Conservative Union rating is a relatively low 81 percent. “I hope John Warner is not running, and I hope it’s a seat conservatives can finally claim,” says John Taylor, the president of the Virginia Institute for Public Policy. Morton Blackwell, a well-known conservative who heads the Leadership Institute and is also the national committeeman for the RNC from Virginia, echoes Taylor’s dissatisfaction with Warner: “Conservatives in Virginia have been upset many times with Warner.” He cites Warner’s recruitment of an independent candidate to run against Oliver North, the Republican nominee for Virginia’s other Senate seat in 1994, as a major offense. Warner also has voted to support funding for embryonic-stem-cell research, and voted for cloture on the current, controversial immigration bill. And for some there will always be the issue of a 1987 vote against a judge named Bork.
Yet conservatives may not be satisfied with a leading potential alternative to Warner: Tom Davis, a moderate congressman from the northern Virginia suburbs whose lifetime ACU rating is 70 percent. If the senator retires, many party insiders will consider Davis the presumptive frontrunner. Davis may not be the most rightward candidate, but conservative state senator Ken Cuccinelli notes, “He’s been a team player,” alluding to the favor within the Virginia GOP Davis has built by campaigning and raising funds for candidates across the state.
The prospect of a Davis candidacy certainly does not enthrall conservative activists, who see the congressman as too much of a moderate in the mold of John Warner himself. “Conservative activists throughout the state are not happy about Tom Davis’s performance,” says Blackwell. Davis voted, for instance, in favor of the Democratic resolution in the House against the surge of troops in Iraq and for funding embryonic-stem-cell research.
Nonetheless, Davis’s ability to win elections in the Democrat-leaning area of the state, along with ties to the business community that could help with fundraising, may make him a competitive candidate for Republicans. In the case of a Davis candidacy, notes Sabato, “Conservatives would have to realize the trade-off: They’d basically be getting another John Warner, or a Democrat.”
Other Virginia politicians are mentioned as candidates, though their aspirations seem to lie elsewhere. Lieutenant Governor Bill Bolling and Attorney General Bob McDonell reportedly have their sights fixed on the next governor’s race, in 2009. Congressman Eric Cantor, a favorite of many Washington conservatives, is thought to be more interested in maintaining or improving his position in the House leadership, where he is chief deputy whip for the Republicans.
Another prominent potential candidate is former governor and current presidential candidate Jim Gilmore. Kate Griffin notes, however, “There’s just not a warm and fuzzy feeling across Virginia about Gilmore.”
Former Senator George Allen is another potential candidate, though his botched campaign last fall may have ended his political career. Some say that if Allen returns to politics, he’s more likely to run for governor again in 2009 rather than the Senate.
The conditions may even be right for a currently unknown candidate to win a Republican primary. “If there’s a dark-horse candidate to emerge, this is the year to do it,” says Cuccinelli. “There’s a huge gap in the field where someone with a solidly conservative record could step in.” At this point in the 2006 cycle, few discussed Jim Webb as a Senate candidate — and he went on to upset George Allen.
A surprise GOP candidate might be Griffin, the former GOP chairwoman. When asked about a run, she refused to rule it out. “Take it as you will,” she said of such talk.
“Kate is solidly conservative, a terrific speaker, and her name is very powerful within the party,” says Blackwell. Griffin’s father, Dick Obenshain, was a Senate candidate in 1978 before a plane crash killed him; her brother is a state senator. For all of the speculation, though, John Warner may decide not to retire — to the chagrin of both conservatives and Republicans eyeballing a race to replace him.
— Michael O’Brien, a Collegiate Network intern at National Review, is editor of the Michigan Review . 
