Historically, there has been a longstanding divide in Virginia:(i) the generally more affluent and more educated Tidewater region that for the most part now encompass the so-called urban crescent that extends from the Washington, D.C. suburbs in Northern Virginia southward through Richmond (located at the Fall Line) and then eastward to Hampton Roads, and (ii) portions of Appalachia that encompass mush of the Southwest Virginia up through the Shenandoah Valley. An article in Washington Monthly makes the case that the recent gubernatorial election results reflect this historic divide just as much as the urban v. rural divide in the state. In many ways, the divide comes down to a divide between an acceptance of modernity in the Tidewater versus the embrace of the past and ignorance in Appalachia. True, there are exceptions to this rule such as Charlottesville and other cities dominated by large universities (Lynchburg and Liberty University excluded), but for the most part the analysis holds true. Here are excerpts:
For two years now, I’ve been arguing in this space, in the pages of the Monthly, and elsewhere, that the Tea Party was doomed on the national stage because it’s agenda is anathema to the cultural traditions of vast swaths of the country. Instead, it would become isolated in the South and interior West, the only parts of the country where its agenda would find fertile soil.
If subsequent events - including the sharp regional divisions exposed by the actions of the shutdown caucus last month - haven’t provided enough evidence for you, here’s some more: In Virginia this week, voters narrowly elected the (flawed) Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe over Tea Party firebrand Ken Cuccinelli. The surprise wasn’t that McAuliffe won, but that the result was far closer than pollsters had predicted.
What went wrong?
As in the Alabama and Mississippi GOP presidential primaries last year, pollsters failed to weight their samples to ensure they properly represented not just the racial, gender, and economic profile of the electorate, but the state’s two, centuries-old, rival regional cultures. I’m not talking about “NoVa” versus the Old Dominion, but something much older that suburban Washington: the massive schism between the state’s Tidewater and Greater Appalachian sections.
I asked one of my research collaborators - Miami University of Ohio geography masters student Nicollette Staton - to run the results of Tuesday’s election through the American Nations model. The regional differences were stark:
McAuliffe won Virginia’s Tidewater by 11 points, 52 to 41. Cuccinelli won Greater Appalachia by an even wider margin, 57 to 36.
McAuliffe’s overall margin of victory is owed entirely to the relative size of Tidewater’s electorate (over 1.6 million cast ballots in Tidewater on Tuesday, under 600,000 in Appalachia.)
The lesson, once again, is that Tea Party ideas are embraced as strongly as ever in the Greater Appalachian sections of our federation - and the Deep South and Far West - even as they have become repellant to a majority of voters everyplace else. Given that everyplace else comprises two thirds of the U.S. population, that’s a recipe for national isolation.
I’m not saying urban/rural electoral divides don’t exist - they do in every nation, from France to India - but their predictive power is often greatly exaggerated. And in the case of this week’s election in Virginia, they are an inadequate means to interpret the results.
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