Virginia Seeing Widening Political Divide Between Southwest, Northern Regions Of State

If state boundaries were drawn by voter attitudes, Southwest Virginia would now be part of Northeast Tennessee.

Perhaps it is not surprising that the political distance from one side of State Street to the other would be closer than the growing gulf between this region and the increasingly vote-rich suburbs south of Washington, D.C. Bristolians, it turns out, vote alike, regardless of who is casting their electoral votes.

This election, the first since 1964 that saw Virginia turn blue for a presidential candidate, raises questions about how Southwest Virginia fits within the newly redrawn political map, and the role it will play in future statewide campaigns.

Analysts expect it will continue to be a main battleground, as Republicans try to run up their margins here and Democrats try to hold down their losses.

But for all of the bright political lights who courted votes here in recent months – Gov. Mike Huckabee, former President Bill Clinton and presidential nominees Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama – and for all the expectations of record voter turnout, little changed Nov. 4.

McCain and his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, carried virtually every locality in the southwest region of Virginia, including the bastions of Democratic support in the coalfields. They won by margins that ranged from less than 1 percent in Dickenson County, to more than 40 percentage points in Scott County.

In Bristol, the GOP presidential ticket prevailed by 62 percent to 36 percent – a result almost identical to the 2004 presidential race.

South of the state line, the Sullivan County, Tenn., precincts that touch the Virginia border split on average with 68 percent voting for McCain and 30 percent for Obama, according to a Herald Courier analysis.

Of registered voters in Bristol, Va., 62 percent turned out – a rate within a percentage point of the turnout levels in the general elections of 2004 and 2000. And if anything, the city’s voters have shifted to the right over the past eight years: Bristol voters in 2000 gave George W. Bush a narrower victory over Al Gore, by 57 percent to 42 percent.

Cloaked within these numbers are a few signs of change: Bristol registered some 900 new voters – a sizeable increase over previous years, an assistant registrar said. An almost equal number voted absentee, which the registrar credited to the saturation of election coverage in the media. And although the city’s overall voting numbers were consistent with previous years, voters in the Highland View precinct gave McCain a razor thin edge of 24 votes.

Highland View has long been among the poorest areas in Bristol, according to interviews with residents and U.S. Census data. It also has been the most politically competitive, said Joyce Kistner, chairwoman of the Bristol Republican Party.

“We don’t know why the number climbed for McCain,” Kistner said in a recent interview. “[The precinct] used to be strongly Democratic.”

The precinct is full of fickle – or independent-minded – voters. Highland View residents preferred Bush to Sen. John Kerry in 2004 by 10 percentage points; in 2000, they favored Gore over Bush by 6 points. It is the only precinct of the city’s four that is susceptible to such fluctuation.

Anecdotally, Kistner said she has heard of lots of Democrats crossing over to vote Republican. “But that’s not scientific,” she said.

Patsy Moore, a longtime Highland View resident, eschews partisan affiliations but voted for Obama.

Moore, who is 55 and disabled, lives a baseball throw away from the Tennessee line. In general, she said in an interview last week, she votes for “whichever fool I think can do the least harm. Whichever is the least dangerous.”

“That don’t mean I’m a Democrat,” she said, adding that she voted for former President Ronald Reagan. She does not recall who she voted for in the last two elections, but said it was not Bush.

“I wouldn’t have voted for Bush for dogcatcher,” she said.

Down the street from Moore, another Highland View resident voiced discontent with the outgoing president. Carol Vanhoose, who works as a caretaker, is a Republican who did not vote in this year’s presidential election. She was sick that day, she said, but would have voted for McCain. If the precinct was competitive, Vanhoose said, “I think it was probably because of Bush.”

But the evenly divided electorate in Highland View is a notable deviation from a widening political divide between Southwest Virginia and the state’s most densely populated region in the northern part of the state. What this means for future campaigns is an open question.

The conflict, said one analyst, is “between urban and rural Virginia, not Democrats and Republicans.”

Toni-Michelle Travis, an associate professor at George Mason University, condenses the conflict into two rhyming acronyms: NOVA (Northern Virginia) and ROVA, the “rest of Virginia.”

On the surface, there is little common policy ground between the ethnically diverse, traffic-choked suburbs in Northern Virginia and the largely white, middle class constituency in the southwestern corner of the state.

In a region where people plan their days around traffic patterns, many are willing to pay more in taxes for new roads, Travis said. But residents here would not be likely to support higher taxes for roads they don’t need – an issue that has stalemated state legislators on transportation reform.

The gulf is likely to grow, Travis believes, unless the next governor can broker a compromise that gives Southwest Virginia residents “something tangible ... something really important” to placate legislators who object to funding roads in Northern Virginia.

Failing that, voters whose political views lose ascendancy might “disconnect from politics,” said Cordel Faulk, an analyst at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.

“Everyone expected turnout this year to be massively higher than in 2004,” Faulk said in a phone interview last week. “Some Republicans didn’t feel motivated to come out and vote.”

Southwest Virginia, both Faulk and Travis predict, will remain a battleground area in a now-competitive state, though neither predicted any sweeping change.

“I don’t think Republicans there have too much to worry about,” said Faulk, adding that Attorney General Bob McDonnell, a Republican, will likely run well in this region during the next gubernatorial race.
“I don’t think [Democratic U.S. Rep. Rick] Boucher is in trouble.”

At the same time, Faulk said, “Democrats will come here as many times as possible” as Obama did to staunch his losses.

But in light of Obama’s heavy losses in the region and his narrow triumph in Virginia, did the strategy really work?

“It worked enough,” Faulk said.

dgilbert@bristolnews.com | (276) 645-2558