My understanding is in 2004 Bush won Virginia by 8 points, then Obama won it by 7 in 2008, and currently polling by 1 ahead of Romney in 2012.
So why the shift in Virginia? I’m guessing based on the population there are about 3.4 million voters in the state of 8 million, so a 34,000 vote gap equals about 1 point difference.
I’ve heard it is because of all the liberals in DC moving to Northern Virginia. But was that big enough in the 2004-2008 period to turn the state blue? That would take hundreds of thousands of voters moving into the area.
Was it new voter registration? I heard Virginia registered about half a million voters for the 08 election.
2008 was more of an outlier because of the anti-Bush feeling, if Obama wins Virginia by 1 in 2012 that is still a 9 point shift from 2004 to 2012.
Edit: I know Virginia isn’t a ‘blue’ state the way California or Vermont are, but it wen’t from being a pretty solid red state to a slightly dem state. I don’t know how that happened.
You got it pretty much. Demographic shifts and huge attempts to register new voters in 2008.
You also have to remember that although a lot of southern states are reliably republican for presidential candidates, they often have mixed representation in congress, and several even have democratic governors and state legislators.
So people are used to voting for someone with a (D) next to their name, and it’s not as much of a stretch to get them to vote for a president.
As opposed to states like Wyoming, Idaho, Kansas, etc, where republicans dominate state legislature and congressional representation.
Plus, remember that a 9 point swing is 4.5 percent of voters changing their minds. Three rich old Republicans in the tidewater die and three liberals move to Alexandra, it doesn’t take long.
Evenso, that doesn’t explain why the shift didn’t happen in other states. Indiana shifted to the left in 2008 too, but most states really didn’t see the kind of 15+ point shifts between 2004 and 2008 that places like Indiana or Virginia had.
Obama’s top-notch ground game. His '08 campaign put an office in every town in Va. I’ve lived in NoVa since '89 at most POTUS campaigns open one office here in Fairfax County, usually shared with the local Dems. On top of that, Obama had 3 offices in Southern Fairfax County. I don’t know how many additional offices he had in the northern part of the county because I did not have to travel that far to find an OFA office. It was incredible and unprecedented. I think Obama put the same level of effort into NC. That’s how
you turn states Blue - one county at a time, one town at a time, one precinct at a time, one voter at a time. Will it work again? I hope so. Every day when I get off the Metro there’s a table with volunteers from Organizing For America registering voters. One voter at a time, five days a week.
Probably a bit of each from Columns a,b,c,d. The previous mentions voting efforts, Demographic change, a high-energy anomaly in 2008, plus the teabaggers are fucking crazy. While I know that there are batshit Virginians, my image of even the red parts of the state is more genteel and reasonable than that of the Carolinas or Georgia. I think that some classic Republicans in VA, while not supporting Obama, aren’t that enthused about how far into the crazy the GOP has gotten lately.
In 2004 about 2.5 million people voted in Indiana, 1.5 million GOP and 1 million dem for president giving a 60/40 split in this state. In 2008 it was about 1.3 million voters on each side, with Obama with a slight majority. So 2008 seems more about a few hundred thousand GOPers switching parties for an election. The total number of voters didn’t change much.
In 2012 Indiana will go red again, but 538 only has Romney willing this state by about 6%. So that is still good, the GOP spread dropped from 20 points in 2004 to 6 points in 2012 8 years. But I’m sure the candidates played a role in this. Maybe Bush went over better here than McCain or Romney.
That is still a bigger net change than Virginia from 2004 to 2012. Virginia (if current polls are right) shows an 8% change from -7 to +1. Indiana went from -20 to -6.
Northern Virginia is slowly becoming more typical of what Virginia now is and the rest of the state is becoming less typical of what it now is. This is happening in various ways. The businesses typical of Northern Virgina are spreading out slowly so that in effect more of the state should be considered Northern Virginia. The new emigrants typical of Northern Virginia types are emigrating from various other parts of the country. Even the rest of the state is becoming less like what it used to be and more like what Northern Virginia is like. Virginia was never the Deep South, but it’s slowly becoming less like it in any case.
Do you mean Virginia will continue to have a Republican Governor working with a Republican majority in the state House and a Republican majority (thanks to the Republican Lieutenant Governor) in the state Senate, while sending a majority-Republican slate of Congressmen up to Washington, as is the case at present?
I think having a healthy, successful party can overcome natural antipathy. The Democrats have had two successful Democratic governors in a row before McDonnell was elected and two popular Democratic Senators. Plus the Democratic Party in Virginia matches the ideology of the electorate well.
Virginia has gone more blue than red, but it doesn’t seem to me to have actually changed ideology much. The Republicans that represented that state, like John Warner, weren’t exactly raging ideologues either and the Democrats are solid moderate to conservative.
O.K., put it this way: The more liberal, more Northern feel of what Northern Virgina has been for a while as opposed how the rest of the state used to feel is becoming more typical of what all of Virginia now is like. This is partly because the area that we think of as Northern Virginia is actually increasing. The sorts of businesses that characterize Northern Virginia is spreading out further into the rest of the state. Northern Virginia is thus attracting emigrants from other parts of the U.S. Even the parts of Virginia that aren’t Northern Virginia are becoming more similar in attitude to the way that Northern Virginia has been for a while.
I was born here and it’s always been a divided State. I basically have come to the point of thinking anyone who believes in “red state” “blue state” stuff is stupid. You guys act like a few percentage point differences in a Presidential election redefine the entire state. Even in States that vote the same way every election I think it’s unfair and overly simplistic to label them with some color as though that defines the whole state. More people voted for McCain in California than in Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi combined. Likewise there are millions upon millions upon millions of Democrats in Texas. I’m not just trying to point out there are a lot more people in California than in those other states, I’m trying to point out even extremely stereotypically Democrat or Republican states really aren’t usually so much so as people seem to think. I feel like when someone calls a state red or blue they are basically saying all the people in that state are like that, and it just smacks of lazy stupidity. I think it’s because it’s “easy” to look at things on a state by state level, and to a degree that’s what matters for electoral college purposes, but the States aren’t homogeneous and really haven’t been for a century or more.
As long as we have an Electoral College with unit rule, then the appellations will remain real and significant. Until we get rid of that anachronism, the few points either way will be of outsized importance, and will be appropriate discussion material.
Despite popular misconceptions it’s actually rare for a state to be consistently for one party. I think Massachusetts is probably the most consistent, but I don’t have numbers on me, but most other states (even in the deep south) have strayed back and forth from time to time. I’m fine with people using the colors on election nights when results are coming in, but it’s dumb to say a state that voted for two democrats in a row is a blue state and then proclaim “wow!” if in the third election it votes Republican as if there has necessarily been a political shift from blue to red or vice versa.