On December 30, Markos posted Daily Kos' traffic through the years.  The numbers indicate a peak in October 2005 of 27,360,982 page views, falling to 16,729,269 page views in October 2007.  I don't have page view stats for RK going back to its start in January 2006, but "visits" have been steadily increasing to both RK and NLS, as Ben points out.

That would be a Jan 2005 start for RK.

...we were busy "drafting" James Webb.  Eric and I started RK after John Kerry lost to George W. Bush in November 2004 and we felt like we had to do something.  My attitude then was, "think globally, act locally," and it still is today.

There used to be a sense of community - you would run across the same people all over the place, and I felt like I could get to know them in a way.

These days the place is so big that isn't easy any more.  Plus these days the primary wars are so bad that I don't even open candidate diaries any more.

I suspect part of what is helping RK is that the Democratic party is awakening from a long slumber and reasserting itself.  Our success in helping to get Webb elected has energized the whole party, I think - you would be hard pressed to find a Democrat in VA who regrets voting for Webb.

I stop going to DK and started visiting RK a lot more because it is a lot more meaningful for me to read RK. RK provides a summary of Virginian and national politics that would take me a lot of time to gather.

Also, the political conversations are written in the context of Virginian politicians, either local or federal, and one can act on the information a lot faster, i.e., get in contact with  senators, representatives, etc.

the growth of the state and local blogs vis-a-vis the national blogs.  "Think globally, act locally" and all that. :)

1. Virginia, Maryland and DC are home for the heavy concentration of political junkies inside the Beltway.  Even those who hail from elsewhere and watch state politics back where they came from have an incidental interest in their back yards.

2. Virginia is almost alone in running state office and legislative elections in odd-numbered years.  We weren't the only game around in 2007, but we were the biggest.  Other states' blogs should play catchup in 2008

Most states only have elections every other year, so online communities form and then sort of fall apart in the long stretch between elections and have to be put back together. Not so in Virginia. It's ALWAYS campaign season here. Every year is an election year for something and the minute a federal election is over, jockeying for state level primaries begins.

It's not just the beltway political junkies.  We've probably got more major league professionals reading and contributing to our blogs one way or another than most states do on account of the fact that half of the DC pros live in Virginia. Senators, Congressmen, their staff members, and national journalists and pundits all maintain residences in Virginia and naturally have some interest in what happens here.

And that's how we're all so awesome here in VA.

I think its because the left in Virginia is really getting pumped up. We are one of the few states in the union thats really changing in a big way politically, and we can see that staying active in politics has made a difference (giving us Kaine and Webb).  

Isn't anyone going to say it's because of the consistently high quality of the writing and analysis found here at RK?  I'll say it.

has something to do with it, too, I believe. Daily Kos became so outrageous and intemperate, it lost its sense of community, and a dismaying number of other political blogs (of whatever persuasion) are likewise so filled with unreasoning rancor and vituperation that they are worthless, read only by those having the same extreme, rude diction. Lowell has never permitted such a degeneration into high school level nastiness. Thank heavens.