Democrats Make Most Of Shifts in Va. Electorate

According to exit polls, Hispanics made up 5 percent of the statewide electorate this year, almost matching their overall share of the population. Hispanics in Virginia favored Obama over Arizona Sen. John McCain, the GOP nominee, by an almost 2 to 1 margin. If Republicans hope to recover from their losses in time for the 2009 races for governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and the House of Delegates, their candidates will have to find a way to overwhelmingly win the white vote and make inroads with blacks and Hispanics.

"I, as a Southerner, understand that for the Republican Party to win presidential elections in the future we can no longer be the party of the deep South and Prairie Midwest," said Trey Walker, a South Carolina native who oversaw McCain's Virginia campaign. "If we don't start appealing to [minorities], we are going to continue to lose."

Cox maintains that McDonnell will make an aggressive appeal for minority support next year, saying, "We are not going to cede any vote." Next year "is clearly going to be very different than 2008," Cox said. "You got different candidates, and you are going to have a different political and economic impact."

But Virginia's electorate has undergone a fundamental demographic shift in recent cycles.

In 1996, when Republican Bob Dole carried Virginia, white voters made up 81 percent of the electorate. Those same voters made up 70 percent of the electorate this year, with the decrease mostly coming from people without college degrees, a solidly Republican bloc.

Democrats have made major gains with white voters in wealthy, well-educated Northern Virginia. Four years ago, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) lost the white vote in Northern Virginia by 7 percentage points. This year, Obama won that demographic by 14 points.

Robert Lang, a demographer at the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech, said affluent whites in Northern Virginia, like other heavily populated areas in the Northeast and Midwest, "now seem to trust the Democrats with the economy and don't trust the Republicans with civil liberties."

Lang has concluded that Obama would have carried Virginia by about 30,000 votes this year because of Democratic strength in Northern Virginia even if he performed no better in other parts of the state than Kerry did four years ago.

"This is a sign to me the rest of the state is kind of just gravy for Democrats, and Northern Virginia's growth and the changing demographic alone would probably be enough to deliver the state to another Democrat," Lang said.

But Obama also made substantial gains compared with past Democratic statewide candidates in the southern part of the state, largely due to younger voters and blacks.

Although it might be hard for future Democratic candidates to replicate Obama's success downstate, blacks and younger voters proved they can be a formidable electoral demographic.

Downstate counties and cities boasting the largest increases in turnout this year were almost all college towns or home to large black populations.