Talk Elections

or at least do poorly in the state?

Virginia has lots of upper income families, yes, but the state is unique in that many of those high earners work for federal agencies and departments. They are much less scared of the word "government" than private sector wealthy people, because taxes pay their salaries.

Where does this idea come from?

I guess a part of that assumption is that your typical business friendly democrat have had quite a lot of success in the state and people start to think that only those types of democrats can win an election in Virginia.

Also it's history of having one of the most conservative southern state Democratic Party also plays a role.

Well, I think its clear there would be a penalty.  But it depends on what, specifically, we're talking about.  If it's clear that Dems will control the legislature and the candidate clearly wants to impose CA/NY level state taxes, they would lose Loudoun, only win Henrico by 5 and only win Fairfax by 10 IMO.  I am not even sure they can make that up in the rest of the state, but if they could, the Sanders-style candidate would have to tack really far to the center on social issues.  Creigh Deeds had a lot of these characteristics back in 2009, and look how easily the VA GOP put it's 1990's statewide landslide coalition back together against him.  He actually lost Fairfax!  I would go so far as to say the Dem candidate would have to be pro-life to win enough of the rural vote with this kind of campaign.

There's a pervasive belief on this forum that the upper-middle class left is 100% on board with everything Sanders wants to do.  I think this is simply not the case.  A look at early 20th century history shows that the Progressive movement had a substantial following with the equivalent of the urban professional class back then, when the major social issues were women's suffrage, electoral reform and child labor (child labor probably had the same potency back then that abortion has today in getting people to vote against what looked like their obvious economic interests) and the income tax, anti-trust laws and the few business regulations that SCOTUS did allow were only set at nuisance levels.  Flash forward 25-35 years and with women's suffrage a settled issue and a federal child labor ban finally upheld at SCOTUS, they bailed at the sight of 70-90% marginal tax rates and mass unionization and voted 70%+ GOP for the next 50 years, with the one exception of 1964.  Even Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and the DC area were swing constituencies in the mid 20th century.

Even the Fairfax part of the Dem base has its limits.   

715,000 total VA govt workers vs. 4,301.6 total workers overall. Granted most of those are in NoVA/Tidewater (military focus) but NoVA has a varied private sector experience with high percentages or even higher than govt, esp in tech. Source BLS https://www.bls.gov/eag/eag.va.htm

As for the idea that upper income families aren't scared of govt, that is true to a certain extent but I would say a good percentage of upper income Virginians still would favor cuts but not extreme cuts. Its a fine balancing line esp in VA-8 and VA-11.

1) A high margin among government employees for Dems (and their family members/close friends, who might not work in government but have sympathy for that line of work and vote that way) could override a small majority for Republicans among private sector high earners, you know.

2) Upper income families vary widely across the United States.  Virginia's are naturally going to be very, very different than most, given the proximation to DC.