Any independent candidate would have to file for the governor’s race by June 11. | REUTERS Some seek savior in Va. gov race

RICHMOND, Va. — A collection of prominent Virginia business leaders, dismayed by a 2013 governor’s race they view as a contest between a Democratic fixer and a Republican ideologue, are scrambling to draft a third contender into the race to run as an independent.

Republican Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling, who dropped out of the GOP nominating contest last year, has been the main subject of public speculation. Bolling has set a mid-March deadline for deciding on an independent campaign, and said Monday there’s a “50-50” chance he will enter the race.


Business leaders have also approached moderate former Rep. Tom Davis to gauge his interest in the race. The former Fairfax congressman has rebuffed their entreaties so far, at least in part because his wife is currently running for the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor.

But hope persists that Davis might be drawn into the race if former state legislator Jeannemarie Devolites Davis fails to win her party’s nomination at a May convention.

While power brokers in both parties have largely rallied behind their respective nominees — Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and former Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe — there remains an eclectic group of donors, based principally in Northern Virginia, who have yet to pick a side.

To them, Cuccinelli looks far too conservative and ideological; his opposition to a landmark compromise on transportation funding, backed by Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell, is a case in point. Two Virginia technology executives, Bobbie Kilberg and Gary Shapiro, confronted Cuccinelli at a Republican Governors Association last week about his strongly conservative message; both told POLITICO they would welcome an independent option in the 2013 race.

But the GOP-leaning executives are hardly rushing into McAuliffe’s arms, either. Though he is assiduously courting the business community, the longtime Democratic rainmaker is viewed by many as an ultra-partisan Washington insider.

“I think the business community clearly would like to see a candidate who’s more in the mainstream of the Republican Party and more in the mainstream of the Commonwealth,” Kilberg said. “I would welcome a run by Bill Bolling. I think that Bill Bolling is a strong, conservative Republican who is in the mainstream of Virginia policy and politics, and I think the business community would welcome his race.”

In an interview at his office in the state capital Monday, Bolling said he has been speaking to potential donors since the end of the legislative session this weekend to size up financial support for a possible campaign. He said he has also spoken with former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney while weighing his own options for the future, though he declined to share details of their conversations.

Last month, Bolling attended an event hosted by Kilberg — a top McDonnell fundraiser — where some four dozen CEOs talked over the prospect of an independent candidacy.

Bolling, for his part, is convinced there’s a path to viability for an independent campaign. He pointed to his support for McDonnell’s transportation proposals and for a compromise on Medicaid expansion as examples of stances that would cater to the moderate center and center-right of Virginia politics.

“There is clearly an opening in this race for a credible independent candidate, and I’m confident that we can run a credible, competitive independent campaign,” Bolling said.

The lieutenant governor said he has taken private polling that shows north of 60 percent of Virginians would be open to considering an independent candidate for governor in 2013. Bolling said he is convinced voters will be “drawn to the candidate that they feel will govern Virginia in a mainstream way.”

“You can be conservative, but you can’t be too extreme. You can’t be too ideological. You can’t be too combative and confrontational and you can’t be focused on controversial and divisive issues,” Bolling said. “Most of what I’ve seen Mr. McAuliffe do has been directed toward running a more mainstream campaign. Everything that Mr. Cuccinelli’s done would suggest to me that he intends to just double down on the far-right, conservative ideology.”

Bolling added, in an apparent reference to views Cuccinelli laid out in his new book, “The Last Line of Defense”: “Not everybody that receives a government benefit is a freeloader and a deadbeat.”

But Bolling also freely acknowledged that funding and organizing an independent campaign could be a steep challenge and that he may not be willing to abandon his lifelong affiliation with the Republican Party.

“This isn’t where I wanted to be,” Bolling acknowledged, musing wistfully: “Had Gov. Romney won the presidency, there was, I think, a pretty good chance that Gov. McDonnell would have gone to Washington and I would be governor today. And that could have changed, dramatically, the political dynamics in our state.”

Another elite wish-list candidate for governor, Davis, emphasized the same organizational obstacles as Bolling in boldfaced terms.

“It is very, very difficult for a third candidate. You can do it if one party has a weak candidate. But in the case of Cuccinelli, he caters very, very strongly to the Republican base,” the former congressman said. “McAuliffe has huge financial backing at this point. He’s going to have Obama and Clinton in for him. I don’t see any independent making inroads with the Democrats.”

Davis suggested it might be easier for Republicans to rally behind their nominee if the statewide GOP ticket is balanced overall — with, say, a female former state legislator from Northern Virginia.

“The party has some schisms, but so do the Democrats at this point. I think the question is, each party needs to be able to unite their coalition,” Davis said.

Still, a handful of deep-pocketed Virginians told POLITICO in interviews they will continue to pursue someone to run as an independent — Bolling, Davis or someone else.

Their motivations are both political and commercial. Not only are they turned off by Cuccinelli’s ideological views and McAuliffe’s biography, but they are increasingly disturbed by state-level policies on social issues — chiefly, abortion and gay rights – that they say make it harder to hire employees and attract investment.

Because Virginia has no limits on individual or corporate contributions, it would theoretically take only a few hyper-committed donors to make an outsider campaign a reality, at least on paper. But independent candidates have traditionally fared poorly statewide in Virginia: When state Sen. Russ Potts ran for governor as an independent in 2005, he won just over 2 percent of the vote.

“Tom Davis would be my guy, but I’m just one guy with an opinion,” said John Backus, a Northern Virginia donor who heads the investment firm New Atlantic Ventures. “I think electing Jeannemarie is his priority right now.”

Shapiro, president of the Consumer Electronics Association, said he’s committed to finding a candidate business leaders could support other than the “extraordinarily far right-wing, anti-gay, anti-woman social conservative running for governor.”

“We want an independent Republican to run. The obvious choice is Tom Davis. That’s the one I am aggressively pushing,” Shapiro said. “Bolling needs to step up his energy and passion if he wants to get in.”

Ivor Massey, a libertarian-leaning Richmond investor, said he’s utterly turned off by both major-party candidates. But he said he’s likely to back Cuccinelli in the fall, in part because the prospect of a serious, appealing independent candidacy seems so remote.

Massey called McAuliffe “a carpetbagger” who’s tainted by “a million Clinton fundraising scandals.” Cuccinelli, at least, is “a good attorney,” Massey added. “I like what he’s done on Obamacare and fighting some of the more burdensome federal regulations. The abortion stuff and the other social issues stuff just drives me and a lot of the other business folks insane.”

Massey said he and some other donors are “looking at putting together an organization that funds legislative candidates who don’t get involved in the social issues.” But trying to do that in the gubernatorial race this year, he said, would be a fool’s errand.

That’s certainly how Cuccinelli’s camp views it. Even if a portion of the traditional GOP donor base is stingy with the Republican nominee this year, Cuccinelli can count on vast out-of-state support from the Republican Governors Association. If McAuliffe is likely to outraise the attorney general this year, neither candidate is expected to win the race on the basis of money alone.

And Republicans more broadly are dismissive of the idea of an independent candidate running on a hazily defined platform of cooperation and compromise. At the end of the day, they expect the off-year Virginia voting population to look similar to the conservative 2009 electorate that made Cuccinelli attorney general — and McDonnell governor — in the first place.

“I think that a third-party candidacy is generally one that plays the role of a spoiler, unless there is widespread dissatisfaction with the candidates in both parties,” McDonnell told POLITICO at the National Governors Association meeting in Washington last weekend. “You look at the polls right now, it’s basically neck and neck between McAuliffe and Cuccinelli. The lieutenant governor’s on the radar screen but an independent candidate’s got to be able to raise $15 million or so to be viable, and that’s very hard to do if you’re not a Republican. It’s just very hard.”

Cuccinelli strategist Chris LaCivita predicted that Virginia donors would come home to his candidate when they focus on a choice he framed in these terms: a liberal Democrat with ties to organized labor against “a pro-growth conservative Republican who is as focused on keeping business in Virginia as he is wanting more.”

“Business leaders make investments every day — and it doesn’t require an M.B.A. to know that an investment in a third-party candidacy — regardless of the candidate, isn’t going anywhere anytime soon,” LaCivita said.

A McAuliffe spokesman declined to comment on the possibility of additional competitors joining the gubernatorial race.

Any independent candidate would have to file for the governor’s race by June 11, so there’s still time for a dark-horse outsider to emerge.

But Virginia requires candidates to gather 10,000 signatures from eligible voters in order to appear on the ballot — a significant organizational exercise that would make it impossible for a candidate to jump in at the proverbial last minute.

For now, hopeful eyes continue to look toward Bolling as perhaps the best vessel for a very possibly futile middle-of-the-road campaign effort.

“I think that Bill Bolling has become a metaphor for a moderate candidate who represents the mainstream views of most Virginians. If a moderate Democrat were to run as an independent, he or she would probably be receiving the same degree of enthusiasm from many Virginians,” said Virginia businessman Bill Crutchfield.

“An independent candidate like Bill Bolling could raise an enormous amount of money if he skillfully frames his candidacy around restoring moderation to politics,” Crutchfield added. “Virginia’s upcoming gubernatorial election could be cited as the battleground where this stand could be taken and won.”