U.S. Sen. George Allen will concede defeat Thursday in his re-election bid, a close adviser told The Associated Press, sealing the Democrats’ takeover of the Senate and concluding a dramatic fall for a man once considered a presidential contender.
The adviser spoke on condition of anonymity because Allen’s campaign had not yet publicly confirmed his intentions. Allen and Democrat Jim Webb both planned news conferences Thursday afternoon.
Webb, a former Republican and Navy secretary under President Reagan, claimed victory early Wednesday after election returns showed him with a narrow lead of about 7,200 votes out of 2.37 million ballots cast.
Allen chose not to demand a recount after initial canvassing of the results failed to significantly alter Webb’s lead, the adviser said. Virginia has had two statewide recounts in modern history, resulting in changes of only 37 votes last year and 113 votes in 1989.
The Virginia contest was the last undecided Senate race in the country, and Webb’s victory tipped the scales, giving the Democrats control of 51 Senate seats and majorities in both the House and Senate for the first time since 1994.
Allen, 54, son of a Hall of Fame football coach, served as governor in the 1990s and was popular for abolishing parole and instituting other conservative reforms. In 2000, he knocked off two-term Democratic Sen. Charles Robb and won plaudits in the GOP for what some considered a Reagan-like ability to tout a conservative message in an upbeat manner.
Allen had been expected to cruise to a second term this year and make a run for the White House in 2008.
In Webb, however, he faced an unconventional challenger. Supporters drafted Webb, a political neophyte, to run because of his early opposition to the Iraq war.
Allen was comfortably ahead in polls until August, when he mockingly referred to a Webb campaign volunteer of Indian descent as “Macaca,” regarded by some as a racial slur. The incident, caught on videotape, became international news. Some former football teammates from the University of Virginia also charged that Allen had commonly used a slur for blacks  something he denied.
Webb, a 60-year-old Naval Academy graduate and decorated Vietnam veteran, tried to tie Allen to President Bush and the war during the campaign. He also seized the Reagan edge, having served in the former president’s administration, and used a video in ads that showed Reagan praising him.
Moving swiftly to establish himself as the winner, Webb early Wednesday began assembling a transition team shortly after he proclaimed victory.
“The vote’s been counted and Jim won,” said Webb campaign spokeswoman Kristian Denny Todd. Some absentee ballots remained to be counted, she said, but Webb considered it “a formality more than anything else.”
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Associated Press writer Bob Lewis in Richmond contributed to this report.
