Three things happened on Tuesday in Virginia.
First, Mark Warner sailed to election as Virginia’s new Senator after a campaign against Jim Gilmore that was never really a contest.
Second, Barack Obama became the first Democratic candidate for President since Lyndon Johnson to win Virginia’s Electoral Votes.
And, third, the political divide between Northern Virginia and the rest of the state became even more apparent:
It created quite a stir this fall when an adviser to John McCain made a distinction between Northern Virginia and “the real Virginia.” But she wasn’t mocking. She was expressing faith that the Arizona senator would carry the state, as every GOP presidential hopeful has since 1964, on the strength of his appeal in the rural reaches.
But on Election Day, the Virginia that prevailed was the one carved into cul-de-sacs, office parks and six-lane highways.
Barack Obama’s victory was rooted not only in the blue-hued suburbs of close-in Northern Virginia, but also in Loudoun and Prince William counties, Richmond and its typically Republican-leaning outskirts, the heavily populated and racially diverse area of Hampton Roads that is home to both parties’ core constituencies, traditionally black enclaves and college towns such as Charlottesville.
The divide, however, isn’t so much permanent as it is a temporary reflection of the slow-moving changes taking place in the Commonwealth:
The trend, experts say, is that the real Virginia is starting to look as much like Northern Virginia as rural Virginia. The state is suburbanizing rapidly, and voters in those suburbs are beginning to align themselves politically with Northern Virginians, eschewing some conservative social issues in favor of quality-of-life concerns that Democrats have tried to seize.
“The Republican base in Virginia is not big enough to deliver victory to a Republican,” said Mark J. Rozell, a public policy professor at George Mason University. “It may have worked in the past for George Allen and Jim Gilmore to ratchet up the Republican base and count on the fact that their base was bigger than the other side’s base. That is no longer the model for success in this state.”
In other words, what happened in 2008 is nothing more than the latest example, and most likely not the culmination, of something that has been taking place in Virginia since Mark Warner was Governor.
It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, really.
Three years ago, in the wake of Tim Kaine’s defeat of Jerry Kilgore in the Governor’s race, I said this:
[T]he inevitable question arises, what does this mean ? Is red-state Virginia turning blue, or at least purple ? There are several reasons for what happened this year. First of all, the results of the other two statewide races show that Republicans can win statewide in Virginia. The problem is that Jerry Kilgore did not run a good campaign and, in hindsight, may not have been the right candidate to go up against Kaine. Second, in order to win in Virginia, you have to win in Northern Virginia and, as this analysis in the Post discusses, there was an anti-GOP backlash in all of Northern Virginia this year. The Republicans need to figure out what went wrong here in Northern Virginia, and fix it fast or they could face this same problem in 2006, 2008, and beyond.
And boy, did they ever face problems.
In 2006, George Allen lost a Senate race that he should have one:
First of all, Allen ran an appallingly bad campaign. It started with the admittedly over-hyped macaca controversy and continued into the final weeks of the campaign with the exceedingly stupid obsession of the Allen campaign and its allies over certain explicit passages from Webb’s novels. In an ordinary year, things like this wouldn’t have amounted to anything; in a year when the President’s approval ratings are in the basement, it just served to reinforce negative feelings that the electorate already had.
Second, the Allen-Webb campaign just serves to reinforce an argument I made in the aftermath of last year’s Gubernatorial election; Virginia is no longer the solid-red state that it was assumed to be from 1964 onward. The most-populated and fastest-growing counties in the state (Fairfax, Arlington, Loudoun, Prince William) all went for Webb. All of these counties are in Northern Virginia and, combined, they gave Webb a total of nearly 340,000 votes. Judging by the map, Allen won more counties, but Webb won where it counted.
Then, in 2007, Republicans suffered fairly decisive defeats in the State Senate and saw their majority in the House of Delegates dwindle. Back then, the dangers for 2008 seemed readily apparent:
Given the results of elections over the past two or three years — particularly Tim Kaine’s win in 2005 and Jim Webb’s in 2006 — this certainly seems to be the case. The changes in Loudoun County are particularly interesting because they seem to put that County on the same slow-growth path as neighboring Fairfax and leave Prince William County as the only Northern Virginia County still in the hands of the Republican Party.
The big question, of course, is what this means for 2008.
And, well, we know the answer to that question.
Now, attention turns to 2009. We’ve got races for Governor, Lt. Governor, and Attorney General along with state legislative races that will be vitally important for the future of the Virginia Congressional delegation.
At the top of the ticket, Republicans seem to be in a much better position than they’ve been in past Gubernatorial cycles. Attorney General Bob McDonnell has already won a statewide race, albeit by a nailbittingly small margin, and stands unopposed for the Republican nomination for Governor. Lt. Governor Bill Bolling is similarly unopposed for the GOP’s Lt. Governor nomination. Additionally, the GOP seems to have a good stable of prospects for Attorney General.
And yet, still, there’s the problems that became apparent in 2005, obvious in 2006, manifest in 2007, and history-making in 2008. And, what I said a year ago remains true today:
The question is what the GOP needs to do to reverse what has quickly turned into a decline — and the answer to that lies in the state’s two fastest growing regions; Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads. Unless Virginia Republicans can find a way to stay competitive (or in some cases become competitive again) in these areas, they aren’t going to win statewide elections.
This doesn’t mean that Republicans need to become more like Democrats in order to win in places like Fairfax and Loudoun (if I were a Republican, I’d forget about Arlington and Alexandria for the time being — they’ll start voting Republican around the same time Massachusetts and San Francisco do), but it does mean they need to start convincing voters there that they have real solutions to the problems that voters in these areas care about — education, transportation, taxes.
The problem has been that Republicans in Richmond have behaved more like a Lite Beer version of the Democratic Party over the past several years. Rather than offering real alternative ideas, they’re just watering down traditionally Democratic “solutions” and passing them off as their own. Is it really any surprise that voters aren’t impressed ?
In other words, principles matter:
[F]iscal conservatism and limited government are ideas that still resonate with the public. The problem is that the public, quite rationally, no longer believed that the Republican Party really believed in these ideas.
I wrote that three years ago, and nothing that the Republican Party has done, either locally, statewide, or nationally, has changed its underlying truth.
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