How Virginia's Changing Demographics Allow Democrats to Ignore Rural Voters

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The last couple of statewide elections in Virginia have underscored the demographic change that has swept the state.  With the growth of the urban crescent from Northern Virginia down through Hampton Roads, increasingly Democrats can win statewide office without courting the rural - and I would say backward/reactionary - areas of the state.  While Virginia Beach remains an anomaly and was found to be one of the most conservative cities in America, most of the urban voters reject the God, guns, homophobia, anti-contraception and racism that are main themes of Republicanism  in Virginia nowadays.  The consequence is that while Republicans still hold sway in the General Assembly thanks to obscenely gerrymandered districts, statewide contests are increasingly theirs to lose for Democrats.  The current contest between Mark Warner and his GOP challenger who continues to embrace reactionary, anti-gay and anti-woman is a case in point.  Here are highlights from a piece in the Washington Post that looks at this new reality:

Turkey hunting, NASCAR and a bluegrass campaign ditty: not the most obvious path to the governor’s mansion for a multimillionaire raised in Connecticut. Yet it worked for Mark R. Warner, running in Virginia in 2001, and still looks like a stroke of genius to many an admiring Democrat.
It’s up to Steve Jarding, manager of that campaign, to set the record straight.

“We weren’t geniuses at all. We were desperate,” Jarding said. “We had to figure out how to get votes in Southside and all of rural Virginia or we weren’t going to win.”

Today, as Warner seeks a second term in the U.S. Senate in a deeply changed Virginia, rural voters are not nearly as receptive to Democrats as they used to be — and Democrats no longer need them.

Explosive population growth in the Washington suburbs and near-stagnant rural numbers have allowed other Democrats — President Obama, U.S. Sen. Timothy M. Kaine and Gov. Terry McAuliffe — to win with little support outside of Northern Virginia and other urban centers.

All of which helps explain how a man who long ago branded himself a “radical centrist” found himself on a debate stage this summer celebrating gay marriage, injecting abortion and birth control into the discussion, and pushing for a higher minimum wage. Warner even went after his opponent, former Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie, for avoiding taking a position on climate change.

In other words, Virginia has changed so much that Mark Warner has changed, too.

[W]hen Warner met Gillespie for their first debate at the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia late last month, the Democrat made his usual overtures toward rural Virginians, with lots of mentions of moderate positions on energy, federal spending and foreign affairs.

But with just three minutes left in the question-and-answer segment, in the middle of a discussion on same-sex marriage (which Gillespie opposes and Warner has publicly supported since early 2013), the Democrat sharply pivoted to abortion and birth control.

Warner said Gillespie, who opposes abortion in most cases, would seek to ban not only abortion but also “certain common forms of contraception.”  Warner’s campaign said those assertions were based on the fact that the Republican platform adopted in 2004, during Gillespie’s tenure as party chairman, called for both a personhood amendment and for overturning Roe v. Wade.

McAuliffe got clobbered last year in Southside and southwest, two regions Warner won 13 years ago. But because Northern Virginia had grown tremendously bigger and bluer, McAuliffe was able to more than make up ground there, winning the Washington area by more than twice the margin that Warner had in 2001.

Those trends might look like pure electoral gravy for Warner, who left the governor’s office with soaring approval ratings and remains the state’s most popular politician. But Warner has probably lost support in what is now bright-red rural Virginia.

What is happening in Virginia is also happening in states like Texas.  In Texas, the tide hasn't turned as much yet, but over time it will.  Does the GOP have a game plan other than trying to disenfranchise blacks and Hispanics?  If it does, it is not apparent.  As time goes by, pandering to aging, angry whites and religious extremists is not a prescription for long term survival of the GOP.