Real Virginia was Really Useless

[Lunar]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/29/AR2008112901698.html

Read the whole article, it's good.



Democrats have made major gains with white voters in wealthy, well-educated Northern Virginia. Four years ago, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) lost the white vote in Northern Virginia by 7 percentage points. This year, Obama won that demographic by 14 points.

Robert Lang, a demographer at the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech, said affluent whites in Northern Virginia, like other heavily populated areas in the Northeast and Midwest, "now seem to trust the Democrats with the economy and don't trust the Republicans with civil liberties."

Lang has concluded that Obama would have carried Virginia by about 30,000 votes this year because of Democratic strength in Northern Virginia even if he performed no better in other parts of the state than Kerry did four years ago.

[Lunar]

So.... anyone else find it amusing that Obama could have carried Virginia on NOVA alone (supposing he did as well as Kerry everywhere else -- not hard considering he won by 9.25% of a higher margin nationally than Kerry did)?

McCain made a big but underreported campaign decision to drop all ads from the D.C. media market late in the game and, while that might have been the right move, Obama was absolutely able to capitalize on it.

[Lunar]

Well, I mean...  it depends on sticky their support for Democrats are.  Obama did win by 7% nationally..

[Lunar]

And also McCain gave up on being competitive in D.C. after initially trying to match Obama ad-per-ad there.

It's just interesting that Obama would not necessarily have had to be more appealing than Kerry anywhere else.

[Lunar]

North still had the highest swings. Still why did the southeast and Richmond swing more than the national average? Are there liberal whites moving in?

Part of it could be that McCain's campaign gave up relatively early on the D.C. media market, finding it too expensive and reaching too few potential voters.

Only Obama was on the air

[Lunar]

I think, also, that 2008 will be the exception in terms of how the Democrats perform in southwestern Virginia.  At the same time Obama was losing badly, we saw Mark Warner rack up a huge margin the area.  The right Democrat will still do extremely well in that area, and, combined with the expected big victories in NOVA, the Democrats will continue to win Virginia for a long time.

Warner vs. Gilmore probably isn't a good model for how future competitive races will roll.

If Deeds wins (he's certainly the 3rd fav as of now) you might certainly be right for at least the next four years.