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this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2023
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Politics
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Worth noting that Virginia is a blue state that took a chance and elected a Republican governor. Don't take chances.
Purple state is more accurate.
From Northern Virginia. Besides my region, Richmond and Virginia Beach the state is largely Republican. The reason we have Youngkin as governor isn't because we wanted to take a chance. It's because voter turnout for democratic areas wasn't what it was supposed to be combined with the fact that Democratic candidate ran a poor campaign.
I don't think that's true anymore. It's pretty much solidly blue at this point. VA has not voted for a Republican President since 2004 and haven't had a Republican Senator since 2006.
Sure you can take the presidential and senate elections as a data point but from someone who lives in Virginia and makes trips to see friends all over the state I can tell you it's not so black and white (or red/blue).
That’s true of any blue state though; WA, OR, CA, NY. Solidly “blue” but leave major metro areas and it’s a whole different story. It’s a shortcoming of brushing any state with a red or blue brush.
Only region where both the urban and rural populations are majority blue would be New England.
There are no areas where both urban and rural areas are red.
That's why Republicans have problems in any state with a large, dominant urban area.
Sooner or later they're going to figure out that growing urban centers are a threat to their power and start explicitly sabotaging them. If Atlanta wasn't doing so well, Georgia probably wouldn't have turned purple.
They thought they were getting a Charlie Baker and instead they got a mini-DeSantis. (and it's not the first time a Republican has pulled this stunt - Mike Pence for example famously ran as a non-boat-rocking moderate successor to Mitch Daniels before promptly going all cuckoo once elected)
I disagree with this take. I live in NOVA. What happened in the last gubernatorial race was that the democrats ran the worst campaign I have ever seen. It was so bad that democratic turnout wasn't high enough to beat the Republicans. That's it.
If they democrats had run a halfway competent campaign then they would have handily won.
This the key problem in the Democratic Party right now, the onboarding of new people into the functioning of the party usually comes in the form people working on campaigns. The problem is that the campaigns with the most money, and thus the most ability to onboard new people in to the party system, are those mediocre bland candidates that do nothing to threaten large companies and rich individuals, so the bulk of new people coming in to the party for the past 30 years have been people who think such candidates are a good choice.
So now all the people with meaningful influence with in the party structure are people adverse to actually popular candidates. People who think “despite the poor poll numbers, we should continue to run candidates that look pretty and do a little as possible, because the average voter doesn’t want change, and we should seek to undermine any candidate that suggest otherwise as they may hurt our standing with the key “moderate” voter base”