Bob Rayner: Political Dispatches

Polls in the gubernatorial race don't mean

much at this stage, other than to confirm

that both candidates have a reasonably good chance of winning. Competitive campaigns don't always stay that way, as demonstrated by Republican Jim Gilmore in 1997, when what began as an even match with Don Beyer turned into a landslide for the GOP. Still, the odds are that we're in for a close contest in November.

If the polls are almost meaningless right now, how's a numbers junkie to spend the long, hot summer? Fortunately, we have oodles of figures from previous elections from which to divine clues about the next one. For instance, there's 43.4. That's the percentage of the vote Republican nominee Bob McDonnell captured in the three congressional districts that include most of Northern Virginia when he defeated this year's Democratic nominee, Creigh Deeds, in the 2005 election for attorney general. Everyone knows McDonnell won that race by only 360 votes, so 43.4 percent seems to be the absolute minimum he needs to garner in the combined results from the 8th, 10th, and 11th districts in his rematch with Deeds. A comfortable victory would likely require closer to 45 percent of the vote from precincts north of Fredericksburg.

John McCain was able to win just 40 percent in Northern Virginia last year on his way to losing Virginia to Barack Obama by 234,000 votes. George Allen, in his 9,000-vote loss to Jim Webb in the 2006 Senate race, managed to get 41.4 percent.

Recent elections show a couple of other trends that could affect the 2009 results. For instance, McDonnell carried the 2nd District, which includes his hometown of Virginia Beach, with more than 55 percent in 2005. That's better than 4 points ahead of Allen's pace and 7 points ahead of McCain's. McDonnell also ran much stronger than McCain and moderately better than Allen in the 1st and 4th districts, which both include rural areas as well as urban and suburban portions of Hampton Roads. The Republican, an Army veteran, will have to replicate his strong showing in a region with deep ties to the military -- but one where McCain, a Navy war hero, barely broke even.

In an interesting twist, McDonnell's percentages in both the 6th and the 9th districts in Western and Southwestern Virginia trailed those tallied by Allen and McCain. McDonnell carried both districts, but Deeds, a state senator from rural Western Virginia, managed to keep the Republican margin smaller than usual. Had McDonnell run even as well as McCain, his razor-thin victory in 2005 would have been considerably larger.

Will the Republican have better luck challenging Deeds on his home turf this year? If McDonnell can find a way to bring more Republican-leaning mountain and valley voters back into the fold, his path to victory becomes quite a bit clearer. And those are the parts of the state where President Obama could become a liability for anyone with a (D) behind his name, even a hometown boy from Bath County. -- Bob Rayner