Today's today's Richmond Times Dispatch quotes "veteran politcal analyst Rhodes Cook" that Virginia is now a "purple state." In part, the reason is this:
Northern Virginia has become increasingly Democratic because it has gone from "white flight to sprawl crawl,"...[...]
He placed Northern Virginia at the end of the "Amtrak corridor," an area extending to Boston and a Northeastern region that is the heart of the Democratic Party.
In other words, Virginia is fast becoming part of the northeastern megalopolis that stretches from Boston through New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and northern Virginia. Put another way, Virginia is fast becoming an urban, suburban, and "exurban" state -- just like the rest of the "Northeast corridor." On the flip side, rural, traditional, "southern" Virginia is shrinking, both in absolute and proportional terms, relative to the "Amtrak corridor" parts of the state. This is politically significant because the rural parts of the state have been Republican strongholds, while the "Northeast corridor" is pretty much solid "blue."
Is that the inevitable future of Virginia, a move from "purple" to "blue?" It sure looks like it, especially if Republicans continue to focus on issues -- "guns, god and gays," as Howard Dean famously put it -- that resonate almost exclusively in rural areas, while Democrats focus on quality-of-life issues - transportation, education, health care, environment -- that urban, suburban, and increasingly exurban voters care about. If Republicans think the way to resist political change in Virginia is to stick to their guns -- literally, with some of these people -- I look forward to how that plays out at the ballot box in coming elections.