Dale Eisman on Virginia Gubernatorial Rematch: Will 2009 reflect past trends or overturn them?
Barack Obama owes his presidency in part to his campaign’s mastery of the internet. A corps of online Obama enthusiasts helped him identify and mobilize previously-hidden groups of voters–particularly those under 30–and build an historic fundraising apparatus. In much of the country, Republicans were left with a clear majority only among older and rural voters, those least likely to have broadband service.
The Obama apparatus worked to near perfection in Virginia, where the tech boom of the 1990s brought thousands of new, internet-savvy voters to the suburbs south and west of Washington and helped complete a shift of the state’s political center of gravity to that region from Richmond.
Many of the newcomers work for the federal government or for private employers who do business with it; they tend to be more politically engaged and more inclined than voters downstate to view government at all levels as a force–at least potentially–for good.
Democratic bloggers from the region were influential in Gov. Tim Kaine’s 2005 election and Jim Webb’s 2006 Senate victory. Their work last year for Obama helped him become the first Democratic presidential candidate since Lyndon Johnson in 1964 to secure Virginia’s electoral votes.
Along with Obama, Virginians chose a Democrat (former Gov. Mark Warner) to fill a Senate seat held for three decades by the GOP, and gave the party as 6-5 majority of the state’s seats in the House of Representatives.
Whether Democrats can sustain or Republicans reverse the Old Dominion’s red-to-blue shift in this year’s gubernatorial election figures to be one of the main story lines in national politics during 2009. Only Virginia and New Jersey hold statewide contests this year, and national pundits already are casting the Virginia race as a referendum on the Obama administration.
So it was eye-opening, to put it mildly, earlier this month when state Democrats passed over a pair of gubernatorial candidates from their new stronghold in Northern Virginia in favor of a soft-spoken, country lawyer.