Also, areas becoming more educated/cosmopolitan doesn't necessarily mean they will start voting Dem because of partisan realignment. While the GOP is attracting a lot more downscale voters, Romney is hardly someone who would've scared away the traditional high-class GOP voters. The underlying trends have more to do with gov't funding and immigration, IMO.
Most of the trending Dem areas like NoVA are becoming much more diverse, though some whites are jumping to the Democrats as well because of cultural issues. Of course, there are plenty of well-educated, wealthy born-again Christians, a hyper-GOP demographic, in the South, Interior West, and Midwest (Cincinnati, Houston, Milwaukee, Montgomery, Indianapolis 'burbs are all good examples) Whether they're cosmopolitan or not is really more of a question of definition more than anything. I consider them so, but I'm sure others would disagree.
Some places, like the Research Triangle, trend liberal because government grants are a huge part of scientific research. As long as the GOP remains more conservative on fiscal issues, non-military public sector employees, whether they be teachers or researchers, will tend to be Democrats (barring social conservatism). NoVA is also changing because of this.
Exactly. People WAY too often look at trends with the mindset of "Area X voted Republican in 2000. Area X now votes Democrat. --> The parties changed drastically." Just as 2015 Arkansas is not the same state that elected Clinton to the governorship and Vermont is not the same state today that voted for Reagan twice, NOVA is not the same place it was even ten years ago.
Ann Coulter had an interesting article on this:
http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2012-12-05.html
I hate citing her, but changing racial composition is a big, big factor, arguably moreso than whatever changes cosmopolitan whites are making in a lot of these places. The liberal cosmopolitan whites weren't voting for Bush in 2004.
I think this article is a little bit prejudiced against the Hispanics
Ann Coulter, who is a con artist, doesn't mention the fact that the Republican Party is dependent on the white vote, nationwide and in most of the 50 states, in order to prevail.
Just run the numbers: nationally it's about 90 percent of the Republican presidential candidates' U.S. Popular Vote are coming from whites. (They get more than that in their base states which are the Old Confederacy.)
A 2012 Mitt Romney, who lost, received 59 percent of the white vote, nationally, while whites were 72 percent of the share of the U.S. Popular Vote for U.S. President: 72 x 0.59 equals 42.48 percent. That 42.48 divided by Mitt Romney's national 47.16 is equal to 90.07 percent.
What a fraud like Ann Coulter doesn't point out, because it's partly how she makes her money, is that her party is going to fail to win the presidency if all they focus on, nationwide, are white voters. (She doesn't care about her party's success. Their failures help her.)
Bringing this topic to West Virginia: I look at this as gradual realignments and counter-realignments of the two parties, their base states, and some gradual shifts in states which weren't particularly "competitive" but went through enough change to emerge as such.
West Virginia has the 10th best state record historically in backing presidential winners. Virginia is at No. 32. That means West Virginia
looks better. But it was better because, from its first vote in 1864, leading up to 2004, West Virginia backed all two-term presidents at least once. (It carried all four times for Franklin Roosevelt.) And, also from 1864 to 2004, West Virginia backed every winning Democrat with exception of the 1916 re-election of Woodrow Wilson.
So what happened? The Democratic primary and caucus voters delivered their 2008 presidential nomination to a … black man. West Virginia was being polled as a pickup for Hillary Clinton, had
she been the 2008 Democratic nominee, during early-2008. The primary voters in West Virginia gave her approximately a 40-point margin in carrying the state (over Obama). For the general election, West Virginia became one of five states that actually shifted Republican in a year in which the Republican Party was the White House party and saw a near-10-point margin shift go against them and toward Democratic pickup winner Obama nationwide. Four years later, when the country re-elected Obama, albeit with reduced support (3.40 percent less support), West Virginia essentially doubled its 2008 margin, in which John McCain carried the state by over 13 points, and it voted for Mitt Romney by more than 26 points. West Virginia gave the losing 2008 and 2012 Republicans better margins than Core Republican states like Kansas and Nebraska. On top of that, every single county in West Virginia colored red for Romney…even the populous ones in Obama's 2008 Democratic column.
Bottom line: West Virginia
rejected Barack Obama. His being black helped the Republicans with that state.
With Virginia, the state showed, in 2004, that it was the least supportive of the re-election of Republican president George W. Bush than all the other Old Confederacy states which weren't, at the time, in the bellwether category. A 2004 Virginia was less Republican-supportive than Tennessee, which was a bellwether from 1912 to 2004 (when it carried for 22 of the 24 election winners). The fact that Virginia, in the Republican column for all the party's nominees from their realigning presidential period of 1968 to 2004, made the flip to the Democrats for the pickup win, and Democratic presidential realignment election, of 2008 may not have been a coincidence. In the Democratic victories of 1976, 1992, and 1996, Virginia was close to flipping. Close, meaning, that it was a Republican hold by five or less points each time, with those three elections. So, I think that what Virginia was doing was identifying with the Republicans of that period as more a reflection of where the nation was at. And I think Virginia is doing that now.
Getting back to West Virginia: I have seen plenty of nostalgic-like threads where there appears to be sentiment of wanting a winning Democrat to carry a state like West Virginia (and another like Arkansas), because they used to do that when the party prevailed. Barack Obama became the first winning Democrat to not carry Arkansas (as well as former bellwether state Missouri). With two prevailing elections, Obama became the first from his party to never once carry West Virginia (as well as Arkansas and Missouri). These three states would have become Democratic pickups for Hillary Clinton had she, not Barack Obama, been her party's nominee for Election 2008. It was, at least with West Virginia, attributed to Obama being black. (People know about the YouTube video.) With Arkansas, it was the state full of PUMAs. (Remember them? The state's women gave 2004's losing Democrat John Kerry 49 percent of their support. With Arkansas's men at 40 percent Democratic in both 2004 and the party-pickup-winning year of 2008. The 2008 Arkansas female voters dipped down to 39 percent.) And with Missouri, it was because the women there were more Republican than the nation (while the men were on par with the national numbers).
If a winning Democrat carries 40 states (meaning, an average of 80 percent of the nation's states), West Virginia will carry. But, at the same time, I would like to be wrong about that because I'd rather a winning Democrat, with 40 states in his/her column, re-route the map with plains states than with carrying West Virginia. Barack Obama's 2008 map was interesting. (He won Indiana, with 11 electoral votes, while he didn't also flip West Virginia, 5 electoral votes, or Arkansas, 6 electoral votes.) His path was a bit of a re-route. So, a revision: If a Democrat is winning at least 44 states … well, with that, I wouldn't mind West Virginia getting carried.
One last thing about West Virginia-vs.-Virginia: The former has participated in 38 election cycles and voted with the winner in 29. Its percentage is at 76.31. The latter has participated in 55 election cycles and voted with the winner in 38. Its percentage is at 69.09. The historical average is just under 70 percent. Given that Virginia has been the No. 1 state in most closely reflecting the percentage margin of the U.S. Popular Vote, while West Virginia buried its head up the GOPs *a* in both 2008 and 2012, the likely trend continuing to take shape will be that Virginia will become the better state with remaining in touch with where the national voting electorate is at in future presidential elections.
In other words: the stock for Virginia has gone up; the stock for West Virginia has gone down.
