Wednesday, November 05, 2008
Virginia takes another step leftward with 2008 election
Wins by Obama and Warner show that the state is no longer a Republican safe bet.
Marcus Yam | The Roanoke Times
Harold Durham (left) and Eric Lotke help Lillie Johnson and her husband Joseph Johnson after voting in Roanoke.
Sam Dean | The Roanoke Times
Bryan Wender makes his selection Tuesday at the Raleigh Court No. 5 polling station at Wasena Elementary School.
Related
roanoke.com/politics
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Voters
- Virginia takes another step leftward
- Throughout Election Day, voters streamed to the polls
- First-time voters revel in democratic process
- Shuttles help get Tech students to polls
- Voters report sporadic problems
Individual races
- Presidential race: Jim Crow to Obama in one lifetime
- 5th District, U.S. House: 5th District race remains too close to call
- 6th District, U.S. House: Goodlatte cruises to win in contested House bid
- U.S. Senate: Warner enjoys overwhelming win
Sen. Barack Obama won Virginia's 13 electoral votes Tuesday, capping a remarkable shift in the state's politics. In barely two years, both Republican U.S. senators have been replaced by Democrats, and back-to-back Democrats have been elected governor.
When the new President Obama and the new Sen. Mark Warner take office in January, Virginia will no longer be considered a safe Republican state on the red and blue maps of Washington's political intelligentsia. Virginia went for a Democratic candidate for the first time since 1964.
"The fact that Obama has been able to break a 44-year losing streak just shows how purple Virginia has become," said Robert Holsworth, a political scientist at Virginia Commonwealth University.
To a large extent, Virginia today is a much different state than it was eight years ago. The population has ballooned by about 10 percent, or 700,000 people, since 2000, mostly driven by the explosion of the affluent, more liberal Washington, D.C., suburbs, according to census figures. An influx of immigration also has made the state more diverse, a trend that has benefited the Democrats.
This year, for the first time in recent memory, the Democratic presidential candidate took the outer suburbs of Loudoun and Prince William counties by wide margins. Obama's appeal to suburban residents also helped him carry Henrico County, near Richmond, which went for President Bush in 2004.
Obama also won in a few rural areas, such as Buckingham and Prince Edward counties, which Bush had carried.
And even though McCain drubbed Obama in Southwest Virginia, Obama's visits to Lebanon and Roanoke helped boost his statewide vote total, said state Democratic Party Chairman Richard Cranwell of Vinton.
"His message resonates in Southwest Virginia and Southside," particularly with voters who have been hard hit with layoffs and plant closings, Cranwell said.
But the state's demographic changes don't tell the whole story.
They don't explain the half-million new voter registrations that flooded registrars' offices across Virginia this year, suggesting an unheard-of interest in the election. Meanwhile, Obama's significant financial and organizational advantage made it possible for him to stoke that enthusiasm.
"I always felt like I fell between the cracks. I never felt I had anybody that represented me," said Cathy Turpin, an Obama supporter in Roanoke on Tuesday night. "He brought a certain enthusiasm and excitement to it."
"I get excited because this just flips me out," said Howard Childress, another Roanoke-area Obama supporter. "Forty-four years that no Democrat has won this state. That tells me a whole lot. Times have changed. Things are changing. That's the way it should be."
Fifty years ago, Virginians clashed bitterly over massive resistance to court-ordered desegregation. And until Tuesday, the state had voted Republican in 10 straight presidential elections. But in 1989, Virginia chose the country's first black elected governor, Doug Wilder, a Democrat. Now, Virginia voters, both white and black, have helped elect the nation's first black president.
"It says to me that black folks, white folks, have one thing in common: They love America and they want us to do better," said state Del. Onzlee Ware, D-Roanoke. "As hokey as it may sound, he made people have hope."
Virginia had been sliding toward the Democrats over the past few years. In the 2001 governor's race, Mark Warner beat Republican Mark Earley by about 5 percentage points. In 2005, another Democrat, Tim Kaine, beat Jerry Kilgore by almost 6 points. A year later, Jim Webb barely defeated George Allen, an incumbent Republican, for a seat in the U.S. Senate.
Virginians can now expect national political parties to lavish attention and advertising money on them in national elections.
Already, this election cycle brought more attention to Virginia than many Virginians were used to. Obama made at least 11 trips to Virginia, visiting 15 cities. He even closed his campaign with an 85,000-person rally in Manassas, which, until recently, had been a Republican stronghold. McCain visited at least five times, holding events in six cities. The vice presidential candidates also stumped in the region, with Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin packing Salem's football stadium and Delaware Sen. Joe Biden drawing a crowd in Martinsville.
In 2004, by contrast, Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic candidate, visited Virginia five times in an unsuccessful attempt to turn the state in his favor. President Bush was so confident in his chances in Virginia that he made only a single campaign visit.
Tuesday's election "really poses a challenge for the Republican Party to find a way they can regain their competitiveness in Northern Virginia," Holsworth said.
With a gubernatorial election on the horizon a year from now, Republicans don't have much time to regroup.
"Obviously we've got to do more outreach to the new voters in Virginia, the younger voters," said Attorney General Bob McDonnell, a Republican who will run for governor next year.
McDonnell said this was a "unique election."
"I've been in office 20 years and I've never seen an election like this one, where 80 percent of Virginians think the country is on the wrong track," he said.
But next year's governor's race was not on the minds of Virginia's exuberant Democrats Tuesday.
"I see the same electric feeling here that I saw in '89 when Doug Wilder was elected," Cranwell said. "There was a tremendous sense of pride in Virginia that we stepped beyond the past and embraced the future. Tonight we stepped beyond the past and embraced the future as a nation. We'll be better for it."
Staff writer Michael Sluss contributed to this report.
