Most outsiders coming to Virginia find the byways that wind through the verdant hills and suburban sprawl an annoying maze. Whereas in Los Angeles, for example, the streets run on a grid, the streets of northern Virginia twist and double back, changing names a time or two along the way — explaining how I accidentally ended up at the Maryland border my first night in DC while trying to find a hotel in Virginia.
It’s the perfect metaphor for the twisting, turning, even treacherous route that both President Obama and Mitt Romney must take through the commonwealth on the road to the White House.
The wide, green medians of said streets will be littered with campaign signs well before the leaves begin to turn as the Republicans and the Democrats battle it out for the lucky 13 electoral votes here. Strategists are increasingly focused on this connector between the conservatism of the south and the liberalism of the East Coast as one state that Romney must take out of Obama’s 2008 “win” column to keep the president from a second term.
The left is still stinging from losing the governor’s mansion in 2009 when former attorney general Bob McDonnell defeated state senator Creigh Deeds by 17 points. In 2011 elections, Democrats took a beating in the state legislature. But questions linger about whether that momentum can turn around Obama’s performance in 2008.
Will the extremely popular McDonnell be snatched away to run for the vice presidency in Romney’s hopes that it could secure the state? The Virginia governor, who is already assisting the campaign, would likely help Romney get conservatives to the polls in the general election. It’s a threat serious enough that state Dems have taken to some kneecap-whacking over the budget to keep McDonnell at home.
First, both sides will be trying their hardest to get as many new registered voters as possible and ensure that they show up to the polls — one cog in Obama’s 2008 victory here.
In 2010 midterms, Virginia ranked 39th in the nation in voter turnout, with 38.6 percent of the estimated citizen voting age population casting ballots, according to the commonwealth, and 44.01 percent of registered voters showing up.
The lowest turnout rate was in the Shenandoah Valley region in the more rural western part of the state, where just 74 percent of those voting age are registered. The Eastern region, however, has 84.1 percent voter registration.
It’s this concentration of Washington commuters that Romney can’t cede to Obama if he wants to win the state. The suburbs are filled with DC workers who represent both sides of the aisle from Hill staff to lobbyists to federal employees. It’s open season in terms of wooing voters, but it’s also a population that hasn’t been smarting as much from the recession.
In 2008, 91.5 percent of Virginians were registered to vote out of the eligible population, a 10.5 percent jump from midterms two years before, for more than 5 million statewide. It was the first time the commonwealth had gone blue in a presidential election since picking Lyndon B. Johnson in his rout over Barry Goldwater in 1964.
Not only did Obama beat Sen. JohnMcCain (R-Ariz.) in 2008 by 6 percentage points, former governor Mark Warner (D) defeated another former governor, Jim Gilmore (R), with 65 percent of the vote to win his Senate seat. McCain’s campaign assumed the state was Republican for the taking, thus didn’t sink a lot of resources into winning Virginia.
This time around, it won’t just be the presidential race that will be watched in Virginia but the race to replace retiring senior Sen. Jim Webb (D) between former Sen. George Allen (R) (defeated by Webb in 2006) and former Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine (governor before McDonnell).
The GOP primaries weren’t exactly an indicator of how Romney will fare, considering that only two candidates were on the ballot. Romney won 59.5 percent, just 158,053 votes, while Ron Paul got 107,480 votes for 40.5 percent. Virginians don’t declare a party affiliation when they register and primaries are open.
Virginia’s population jumped 13 percent from the 2000 Census to the 2010 count. The commonwealth is just over 50 percent women (and they own more than 30 percent of businesses here), and more than two-thirds white. Blacks make up nearly 20 percent of the population, and Latinos comprise nearly 8 percent. More than 11 percent live below the poverty level, one of the lowest rates in the nation.
A University of Virginia report released last week showed that the black population has been gradually increasing, with consistent concentrations in the eastern and southern parts of the state. Obama won 92 percent of this voting bloc in 2008 with high turnout.
Obama also won 60 percent of all ballots cast in Virginia by voters under 30 years old. Virginia is one of the youngest states in the union, with just 12.2 percent of the population over 65 years of age.
Unlike its swing-state cousin Ohio, labor unions are not a significant political influence in Virginia with fewer than 200,000 union members.
The Romney camp seems intent on learning from McCain’s mistakes, as evidenced by the candidate’s pair of visits here last week alone. He’ll be back this weekend for the commencement at Liberty University, a private Evangelical school helmed by Jerry Falwell, Jr. in Lynchburg.
The campaign’s ground game, however, is lagging, with the campaign vowing to open an office in Virginia soon — a state director has just been selected — while Obama already has 13 open. Obama has launched three TV ads here, while a pro-Romney group has aired one. Romney’s campaign is banking on building off an infrastructure developed during the primaries to hit the ground running, including a volunteer database and voter contact information.
And the Obama camp is geared up for a shameless amount of pandering to the Old Dominion — the president’s campaign kickoff saw the word “Virginia” dropped 20 times during the president and first lady’s speeches.
“I love Virginia. Virginia, four years ago, you and I began a journey together,” Obama gushed on Saturday. “…And now, after a long and spirited primary, Republicans in Congress have found a champion. They have found a nominee for president who has promised to rubber-stamp this agenda if he gets a chance. But Virginia, I tell you what, we can’t give him the chance.”
With 5.7 percent unemployment, Virginia voters may not be placing as great of an emphasis on economic recovery as some harder-hit states. Education is traditionally a top issue in Virginia races, which could be one reason why Obama is hitting the nonissue of student-loan rates, an extension for which there is already consensus in Congress, with such vigor. Take, for instance, last Friday’s trip by Obama to a high school in Arlington to address juniors and seniors and then sit with some of the teens and their parents for a roundtable about higher-education costs.
“The Republicans in the House just voted to keep giving billions of taxpayer dollars every year to big oil companies raking in record profits,” Obama said, with the teens booing on cue at each talking point. “They just voted to let millionaires and billionaires keep paying lower tax rates than middle-class workers. They even voted to give an average tax cut of at least $150,000 to every millionaire in America. And they want you to pay an extra $1,000 a year for college.”
It was a demonstration of a turf advantage of which Obama is going to take full advantage in the coming months.
The president has an edge in the ground game here because of the proximity to Washington. Obama frequently dashes across the Potomac to give policy speeches and make announcements in appropriate education or manufacturing venues.
It’s a nice way of solving the campaign-or-official-business dilemma for the White House, especially as it is accusing the media of manufacturing battleground states to blur those lines.
“If you look at everyone in the news organizations and all their maps about what states are up for grabs and that kind of stuff, and say the president can’t go to those states, you’re basically saying he can’t go to half the country,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said last month.
Does being the incumbent, though, give one a natural home-field advantage here?
Since picking Richard Nixon in an open race in 1968, Virginia went for the incumbent in 1972, 1976, 1984, 1992, and 2004. It picked Ronald Reagan over Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter in 1980, along with most of the country on a very red electoral map. Virginia picked Bob Dole in the senator’s unsucessful attempt to oust President Clinton in 1996.
In the latest Real Clear Politics polling average, Obama is up 3.2 points over Romney in Virginia, with Obama leading by as much as 8 points in Quinnipiac and PPP polls and 7 points in the latest Washington Post poll, and Romney leading by 1 point in Rasmussen polling (reflecting a seesaw from when Obama was up by 9 points in March and 6 points in January, and Romney was up by 1 point in September).
“For Mitt Romney, this race has always been about defeating President Obama, and getting Americans back to work,” campaign spokeswoman Sarah Pompei told PJM. “From the time that Mitt Romney announced his candidacy, he has run his campaign with the message that President Obama has failed to fix the economy. Under President Obama, more people have lost their jobs than at any time since the Great Depression. We are confident that voters in Virginia and across the country are responding to Mitt Romney’s pro-jobs message and will make Barack Obama a one-term president.”
Bill Bolling, Virginia’s lieutenant governor, has begun adding blog postings to the campaign’s Virginia page.
“The night before Sen. Obama became President-elect Obama, he came to Manassas to hold his final campaign rally,” Bolling wrote last week. “Three and a half years later, with 23 million Americans struggling for work and an economy stuck in neutral, Virginia will have the chance to hold the president accountable for his broken promises.”
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