POLITICS : Virginia Races Help Put the Fate of Major Parties in Spotlight : Bourne-Puller state election is one of a handful that will be watched to gauge strength of Democrats, GOP in South.

In the less-than-glamorous world of state politics, this fall’s race between Sandy Liddy Bourne and Linda (Toddy) Puller for a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates has emerged as an obvious standout. Indeed, as a political potboiler, it almost writes itself.

Republican candidate Bourne is the daughter of G. Gordon Liddy, the Watergate burglar turned wildly successful conservative talk show host. Puller, the Democratic incumbent, is the widow of a severely disabled Vietnam veteran, Lewis B. Puller Jr., who wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography in 1992 before killing himself last year.

But even with a story like that, Bourne and Puller find themselves in supporting roles--part of a larger scenario that will play out in elections next Tuesday. In a handful of Virginia state legislative races and, to a lesser extent, gubernatorial contests in Kentucky and Mississippi, national political leaders and analysts will sift through the results for clues about the long-term fates of the two major parties.

A string of wins by GOP candidates not only would fuel the party’s hopes of winning the 1996 presidential campaign, but offer further proof that the so-called “Republican revolution” is just that: a fundamental political realignment, especially in the South.

Democrats, meanwhile, will be looking for signs that their future prospects in the South, where the party suffered an across-the-board battering in 1994, may not be so bad after all. At the least, a respectable Democratic showing would give the party a much needed boost heading into 1996.

“Both national parties are watching these races pretty closely, which just raises the hype and the stakes,” said Stuart Rothenberg, a Washington political analyst.

It is in this context that the Virginia legislative contests have assumed such importance. Republicans, who have not held a majority in either house of the Virginia General Assembly for more than a century, need to pick up just three seats in the 40-member Senate and four in the 100-member House of Delegates to capture both. If the party is successful, Virginia will become the first Southern state to have a GOP majority in both houses since the post-Civil War Reconstruction period.

The Republicans broke through a similar barrier last year, when they captured lower houses in North and South Carolina and state senates in Florida and Tennessee. Until that time, the GOP had never won a single chamber in the South since Reconstruction.

The Republican charge in Virginia is being led by ambitious Gov. George F. Allen, whose conservative agenda has mirrored that of national Republicans. And borrowing a tactic that worked so well for Republicans in 1994, this year’s state legislative candidates signed a seven-part “Pledge for Honest Change” similar to the national GOP’s “contract with America.”

Allen has much at stake in the upcoming elections. His attempts to cut state payrolls, education spending and other social programs while granting a tax break were stymied by the Democratic-controlled Legislature earlier this year. So on top of the election’s national implications, analysts are further burdening the Virginia electorate with the weight of Allen’s political future.

A Republican takeover of the Legislature “would really be a stunning ratification of the governor,” Rothenberg said.

“Allen is clearly on the line,” agreed Bill Wood, founder of the Virginia Institute of Political Leadership, a nonpartisan foundation that assists candidates for state office. Governing the first Southern state with an entirely GOP-controlled Legislature would heighten Allen’s national profile, making him a vice-presidential prospect for the 1996 ticket, Wood added.

Wood also said that even as the Virginia legislative races take on national significance, the battle in the state ultimately will be decided more at a district-by-district level. “The bottom line is that it is almost entirely a local race,” he said.

In the Northern Virginia race pitting Bourne against Puller, the GOP challenger is stressing a get-tough-on-crime platform that she hopes will score points with suburban voters in the traditionally Democratic district. And like her celebrity father, Bourne strongly opposes gun control. Her pro-choice stand on abortion, however, distinguishes her from her dad.

Puller, who supports gun-control measures, has focused her campaign on education, emphasizing the importance of school spending she fought hard to save from Allen’s budget ax last year.

“It would clearly be an upset if Bourne won,” Wood said. “If we knew early in the evening that Bourne had gotten that seat, it could be an indication that Republicans have taken the house.”

Virginia Democratic leaders have made much of the traditional Southern distinction between national and state offices, which kept lower levels of government squarely Democratic even as the South generally rejected the party’s candidates in presidential races since 1964. But that distinction may be a thing of the past, said Charles Bullock, an expert in Southern politics at the University of Georgia.

“There used to be a fire wall separating national offices from state offices,” Bullock said. “Whatever infection Southerners saw in the Democratic Party at the national level, it didn’t touch local races. You’d vote for good old Bob because he wasn’t like Mondale or Dukakis, you’d hunted and fished together.

“But voters are no longer making that kind of distinction,” he added. “They’re just seeing Democrats and they don’t like what they see.”

In the Kentucky gubernatorial race, both candidates are struggling to rebuild the fire wall between state and national party politics after disastrously linking themselves to national figures earlier in the race, Rothenberg said.

Democratic candidate Paul Patton, currently the lieutenant governor and a former ally of President Clinton, suffered from Clinton’s decision earlier this year to support regulation of tobacco as a drug. Tobacco is a mainstay of Kentucky’s economy.

Patton recovered marginally after stating that he will not endorse Clinton next year because of the tobacco issue. But Republican gubernatorial candidate Larry Forgy is still fond of referring to Clinton alliteratively as “Paul Patton’s President.”

Forgy is apparently having second thoughts of his own about making the race a referendum on larger political trends. In April, he told voters he would ensure that the national GOP revolution would continue in Kentucky. But as public support of the Republican agenda has weakened, so did Forgy’s emphasis on it. By June, he had conceded that he “might not agree” with everything the party is pushing for in Congress.

Rothenberg gives a slight edge to Forgy, who seeks to become Kentucky’s first Republican governor since 1971.

“Kentucky voters are discovering, after a very strong Democratic history, that you can vote for a Republican and you don’t get struck by lightning,” he said.

For all the influences of the larger political world, nothing can account for the idiosyncrasies of Southern politics--as evidenced by the Mississippi gubernatorial race.

Gov. Kirk Fordice, an outspoken Republican best remembered for his assessment of America as a “Christian nation” at the 1992 National Governors’ Conference, has maintained a healthy lead over Democratic challenger Dick Molpus.

But the race took a quirky turn a few weeks ago when Molpus’ wife, Sally, appeared in a television ad criticizing Fordice for cuts to public education funding. A few days later, a falsetto Fordice imitated Sally Molpus’ soft Southern drawl at a news conference, accusing Dick Molpus of hiding behind his wife. Fordice’s imitation angered many Mississippi women and some men, by many accounts tightening the race.

“You don’t want to underestimate the importance of things like respect for Southern womanhood in the Deep South,” Bullock said. “Nowhere is good breeding as important.”