After weeks of lurching about and tooting its horn in alarm, Harry Flood Byrd's sleek, well-oiled political machine rolled to victory last week in Virginia.
More than 315,000 poll-taxed Virginians—a record number, though still only a tenth of the state's population—turned out on Primary Day to choose the Democrat who will be the state's next governor. Their choice: plodding, poker-faced John S. Battle, the man U.S. Senator Byrd picked to keep his 25-year-old organization in the Richmond State House.
Candidate Battle, a state senator from Charlottesville, won by a comfortable 23,000 votes...