AS HE watched Tim Kaine and Jerry Kilgore duke it out in last week's gubernatorial debate, Independent candidate Sen. Russell Potts, R-Winchester, couldn't have been in a good mood. For Potts, the debate marked what might have been his best and only chance to square off with and set himself apart from the major candidates and make himself a more than a footnote in this race. However, Potts was not allowed to participate in the debate hosted by the University's Center for Politics because he did not meet the Center's requirement for participation:a rating of at least 15 percent in two polls before Oct. 6. With numbers at five percent or less and falling in just about every major poll, Potts didn't even come close, and his candidacy is quickly moving towards the margins. Potts has failed at convincing the voters that they do not have a meaningful choice between the major party candidates, and as such his time for participation in this race has passed.
In a lawsuit filed over the requirement against the Center and its director, Politics Prof. Larry Sabato, Potts' lawyer, Daniel Carrell, argued, "the legitimacy of his campaign will be adversely affected" if Potts is seen as not being able to take his place among the other candidates. Carrell was absolutely right that being left out certainly didn't help Potts' image, but the fact of the matter is that Potts has no realistic chance of winning and at this point is merely drawing voters' attention away from the two men who actually might be governor of Virginia: Kaine and Kilgore. Recognizing this fact and saying the Center's requirement "serves as a reasonable cut-off," U.S. District Judge Norman Moon dismissed the case on Oct. 7.
Last Sunday's debate was the only time during the entire campaign that most Virginians were able to see the major candidates square off. In an interview, Sabato, who moderated the debate, stated, "You have no idea what we went through to get that debate." He said that both the Kaine and Kilgore campaigns were extremely hard to pin down when it came to committing to public debates. "All we got was one lousy hour that wasn't even broadcast in parts of Northern Virginia," he groused.
The decision to limit the debate to candidates polling above 15 percent was made back in August and was consistent with the Center's policy for debates it held during the 2000 and 2001 campaigns for the U.S. Senate and Virginia governorship, respectively. It is also the standard used by the Commission on Presidential Debates. In regard to Potts, Sabato commented, "If I put him on that stage, he gets a third of the time
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