11/06/2005

By SUE LINDSEY and KRISTEN GELINEAU  / Associated Press

The two leading candidates for governor, their parties' biggest names in tow, raced through a dizzying itinerary Saturday, exhorting ardent partisans to outdo their rivals in taking voters to the polls Tuesday.

With polls showing the most expensive statewide campaign in Virginia history deadlocked between Democrat Tim Kaine and Republican Jerry Kilgore, the more efficient get-out-the-vote operation likely wins.

Saturday's appeals to voters by the candidates and their proxies statewide reflected that urgency.

"All we want you to do is do without water, food or sleep for the next three days," Democratic U.S. Rep. Rick Boucher, only partly in jest, told a crowd at a Kaine rally in Pulaski.

Kaine zigzagged across rural, mountainous southwestern Virginia — Kilgore's home turf — with his political mentor, Gov. Mark R. Warner, Boucher, who represents the region, and his father-in-law, Linwood Holton, Virginia's first Republican governor and a native of the area.

"If an 82-year-old Republican can find 10 voters for Tim Kaine, that ought to be the minimum bar for all of you," Warner said in Christiansburg, acknowledging Holton, who was governor from 1970-74.

Four years ago, Warner won in conservative southwestern Virginia, has continued to steer development and tourism to the economically challenged area and remains enormously popular there. While Kaine is unlikely to upset Kilgore on his home turf, he's attempting to undercut some of Kilgore's support there.

"Jerry Kilgore has said his goal was to undo the damage of the Warner administration," Kaine said. "If someone can't look at success and recognize it, ... he doesn't need to be governor."

Kilgore, meanwhile, spent the day jetting across the state with both of Virginia's Republican U.S. senators, George Allen and John Warner and, for most of the day, Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman.

Before a rally of about 300 people at a trucking company in the northern Virginia suburb of Springfield, Kilgore repeated his campaign pledge to embark on several transportation projects critical to the traffic-choked region, including widening Interstate 66 within the Capital Beltway.

He also noted his endorsement by the Fairfax County Chamber of Commerce, a leading voice for business in the major Washington, D.C., suburb that is one of this election's battleground localities.

Kilgore also renewed his characterization of Kaine as a coddler of illegal immigrants, who have settled by the thousands in Fairfax and other northern Virginia localities. "What part of illegal does Tim Kaine not understand," Kilgore said, evoking boos and cat calls from the crowd each time he mentioned Kaine's name.

Kilgore has made the issue a key part of his northern Virginia strategy, promising to use state police to enforce federal laws against illegal immigration and block localities from using tax funds for work centers where undocumented immigrants looking for work as day laborers can congregate.

Other stops for Kilgore on Saturday included Hampton Roads and Bristol for the traditional Eliza Sprinkle pre-election Republican dinner.

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AP Political Writer Bob Lewis contributed to this report, with Kristen Gelineau reporting from Springfield.