VIRGINIA – a county by county in-depth analysis

As was the case with INDIANA and OHIO, I have now completed a massive county-by-county study of the results of the GE 2008 for VIRGINIA.

President Obama, who won the Commonwealth of Virginia with a +6.30% margin, was the first Democratic candidate to win this state since 1964 and the second Democratic candidate to win since 1948. Of note: VIRGINIA and COLORADO, both Democratic pick-ups in 2008, are the no. 1 and 2 states that came closest to Obama’s national winning margin; VIRGINIA went „blue” for slightly less than the national margin while COLORADO went for President Obama with slightly more than the national margin. It is rare when an unexpected battleground state flips and also mirrors the national numbers, but even rarer when this happens with two such states. Note also that these two states are in completely different regions of the Union, more proof that the GE 2008 was a so-called “re-alignment election”.

In a nutshell:

1.) Obama set a new VIRGINIA raw vote record for a candidate of any party: 1,959,932 votes, 242,573 votes more than Bush’s record-breaking raw vote from 2004. This is also the largest increase in votes for one party from one cycle the the next in VA history; the Democratic party added 504,790 votes to it’s total over 2004. Incidentally, McCain also did better than Bush (2004) in VIRGINIA: he bested Bush’s PV take by 8,046 votes. However, the ratio of the democratic vote increase over the GOP vote increase was 63.74 to 1! The popular vote growth rate for VIRGINIA was 16.91%.

2.) Obama won VIRGINIA with the 11th largest winning percent, the 11th largest winning margin, the 4th largest state partisan shift and the 4th largest Partisan Value* in US history for a Democratic candidate. Of the 14 Democratic winning cycles in VIRGINIA, this puts Obama roughly in the middle of the standings. That 4th largest partisan-shift, by the way, is larger than Johnson’s from 1964. You have to go back to 1912 to find a Democratic partisan shift in VA larger than this one. The dynamics of President Obama’s win in VIRGINIA are very, very different than in the other two states (IN, OH); this information is critical and has far reaching ramifications for both the Democrats and the GOP in future elections. For this reason, I’ve done such an analysis.

*Partisan Value = the difference between the state partisan shift and the national partisan shift. For instance, the partisan shift in Virginia was +14.50%, while the national partisan shift was +9.73%, which means that Virginia was +4.77% stronger than the national pull toward the democratic party in 2008.

I’ve divided the information into three parts, and that data is in the extended text.  

In Part I, there is important background information on Virginia, including details on the 14 DEM election cycles where a democratic candidate won the state.  Also in Part I is the general overview of the county-wide results. You can link via Google Docs.

Part II contains a very large, detailed and enhanced (in comparison to the analyses of INDIANA and OHIO) table of the 134 counties/independent cities in Virginia, first by descending partisan shift and an analysis of the partisan shift ranges, and then by county size (% of the 2008 statewide popular vote), descending. Harrisburg (independent city), Fairfax and Buchanan counties are used as a prime examples of how Obama won Virginia, even through counties where he lost. We also see statistical proof of the “appalachian phenomenon” in the southwest part of the state. You can link via Google Docs.

Part III is an analysis of the democratic pick-up counties and also of the “tipping-point” counties, including some colorful maps. The conclusion draws pointed differences between Obama’s historic win in Virginia and his wins in Indiana and Ohio (quoted also below). You can link via Google Docs.

Auxiliary sources:

I took the county-wide raw data for the entire state for both 2008 and 2004 and plugged it into an excel spreadsheet, which you can find here. Subsidiary data for all 134 counties/independent cities in VIRGINIA can be found here. Should you have difficulty calling up the spreadsheet, if you email me, I can send you a copy.

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Here a full quote from the conclusion:

“In INDIANA, every single county trended more or less democratic, without exception – there was a blue shift that moved the entire state and those overwhelmingly white, rural counties contributed greatly to Obama’s narrow win here – yes, the counties that he still lost to McCain. This shows a large level of GOP defection to Obama in 2008. Here, Obama gained 405,028 raw votes over Kerry from 2004, while McCain lost 133,790 raw votes over Bush from 2004, an uneven shift. Indiana’s PV growth rate over 2004 was 11.47%. And Obama won by +1.03%.

However, in VIRGINIA, there was real resistance to Obama, but this resistance occured in counties that are „emptying out”, so to speak. We see a large poli-demographic shift in VA, with the north and the southeast gaining greatly in political strength for the democratic party. Here there were obviously far fewer GOP defections, if at all (McCain scored more raw votes in VA than Bush from 2004), but far more newly registered and democratic dedicated voters. This poses a far larger problem for the GOP than either Indiana or Ohio, for Obama’s +1.03% margin in Indiana can be overcome and Ohio is expected to be a battleground state in virtually every cycle, but the addition of more then 500,000 voters to the democratic rolls in just one cycle is much harder for the opposition to overcome. The best case scenario for the GOP is that VIRGINIA becomes a bitter battleground state. However, +6.30% is hardly a battleground margin. It is a better margin than Obama scored in OHIO, FLORIDA, INDIANA and NORTH CAROLINA. It is a lean winning margin, but a comfortable one and will require a minimum 12.60% shift back in order for the GOP to regain the state; I doubt that this shift will come from those 500,000 new voters. The worst case scenario for the GOP is that Obama cements VIRGINIA into the democratic column in his first term, adding the state to core democratic territory and thus making the electoral math for the GOP more difficult.”