1969 Virginia gubernatorial election

In the 1969 Virginia gubernatorial election, incumbent Governor Mills E. Godwin, Jr., a Democrat, was unable to seek re-election due to term limits. Godwin would later successfully run for election as a Republican in 1973.

A. Linwood Holton, Jr., an attorney from Roanoke, was nominated again by the Republican Party to run against former United States Ambassador to Australia, Democratic candidate William C. Battle.

Background

During the late 1960s, Virginia politics was being radically transformed by the numerical growth of an electorate that for six decades was relatively the smallest in the nation due to cumulative poll taxes and literacy tests excluding almost all blacks and poor whites. The Twenty-Fourth Amendment, aided by subsequent drives to register blacks, and the Voting Rights Act greatly expanded Virginia's electorate. Consequently, the statewide Democratic party was severely divided into conservative, moderate and liberal factions, despite Godwin having united those factions behind him in the 1965 gubernatorial election.

Intractable Democratic divisions

By the time of the 1969 primaries, however, the divisions within the party were becoming irreconcilable. Whereas the 1965 gubernatorial primary was the first uncontested one for over half a century, each of the three factions would nominate its own candidate in 1969. Incumbent Lieutenant Governor Fred G. Pollard would be the conservative nominee, whilst the liberals nominated Henry Howell of Norfolk – long a center of liberal opposition to the Byrd machine — and the moderates descended from the "Young Turks" of the 1950s backed William C. Battle, son of a former governor.

Primary campaigns

Howell, opposed even by the relatively liberal Senator Spong, would by the first to begin his campaign in the primary during June, relying on Hubert Humphrey's support base of blacks and members of the United Mine Workers.