Virginia: Byrd’s Nest

In a surprising Democratic primary election in Virginia last week, Albertis Sydney Harrison Jr., the state’s personable, 54-year-old attorney general, won the party’s gubernatorial nomination with ease as he whipped Lieutenant Governor A.E.S. Stephens, 60, by some 45,000 votes. Harrison will face only token Republican opposition in the general election next November.

What was surprising was that Harrison was the hand-picked candidate of aging Democratic Senator Harry Flood Byrd, 74, and the rumormongers were saying that the political nest, feathered so faithfully by Byrd over three decades, was falling apart. All of Byrd’s oldtime cronies had either died or retired; the party was still scarred by a split over the methods of combating school integration; population was shifting away from Byrd’s rural strongholds. The campaign itself was a bit fuzzy, since both candidates are solidly conservative. Stephens, a former Byrd disciple, had even written to the Senator last December seeking the support of his onetime boss. But the primary did make one thing clear: if Harry Byrd is losing his grip, no one has told the voters of Virginia.