Anyone who has lived in Northern Virginia (that is, the Washington, D.C., Virginia suburbs) as NewMexiKen did for 14+ years, will appreciate this from Joel Achenbach:
Those of you who aren’t familiar with the domain of Lord Fairfax should understand that it used to be a lovely Piedmont region with cornfields and vineyards and the occasional horsey person in jodhpurs, but now has roughly 300 million residents, all of them currently stuck in a traffic jam. Main Street is something called Route 7, also known as the Leesburg Pike, and it has become 40 miles of uninterrupted retail shopping. This sprawling region is culturally more diverse than you’d think, thanks to the immigrant population, and it’s full of swing voters. The Commonwealth of Virginia went for Nixon in 1968, and has been a red state since, but the dramatic growth in population has been in NoVa. Anyone hoping to win the White House in 2008 will want to get out there on the Pike and work the entrances to the big box stores. Hint: Walking may be faster than driving.
NoVa went something like 60% for the Democratic candidate, Kaine, in yesterday’s gubernatorial election here. It swayed the election for the Democrats.
The suburban sprawl here continues to move west, into the until-recently sparsely populated Loudoun and Prince William counties. Both those counties also went for Kaine yesterday. This is big news here because these have always been considered big-time “red” counties.