Even Republicans who are bullish on GOP gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin’s chances can’t see him winning the vote-rich region outright Nov. 2, when he faces former governor Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat. McDonnell sees “a very winnable race for Republicans” but does not expect Youngkin to match his own 2009 showing in the D.C. suburbs and exurbs.
“I do think Northern Virginia is a steeper climb now than it was for me,” McDonnell said in an interview.
The goal that Youngkin’s campaign has set for Northern Virginia sounds almost modest: It aims to hold McAuliffe’s totals there to no more than 60 percent, according to two people familiar with the campaign’s strategy who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share strategy details.
Even that could be a challenge after a dozen years of demographic shifts favoring Democrats, compounded by four years of intense opposition among suburban moderates to President Donald Trump.
In the governor’s race four years ago, Republican Ed Gillespie won 37 percent of the vote, according to the campaign’s expansive definition of the region — 24 cities and counties served by the Washington media market, reaching as far east as Westmoreland County, as far south as Spotsylvania County and as far west as Shenandoah County. Now-Gov. Ralph Northam (D) won 62 percent there.
For the purposes of this article, Northern Virginia is defined as 11 localities that are more commonly considered part of the region, that have undergone the most significant demographic change and that pose the most significant hurdle for Youngkin: Arlington, Fairfax, Fauquier, Loudoun, Prince William and Stafford counties, as well as the cities of Alexandria, Fairfax, Falls Church, Manassas and Manassas Park. By that definition of the region, Northam beat Gillespie 66 percent to 33 percent.
However it’s defined, Northern Virginia has been leaning ever more left — and the population is growing.
“Most political professionals acknowledge the suburbs continue to push out,” said Phil Cox, who was McDonnell’s campaign manager. “The commute [to Washington] now starts in Fredericksburg and moves up. Anybody who’s driven on [Interstate] 95 gets that.”
A gradual change
In every presidential election from 1968 to 1996, Virginia and its northern suburbs were more Republican than the country as a whole, according to elections analyst Geoffrey Skelley, who compared the national popular vote margin with the statewide and regional margins.
The Northern Virginia vote began to diverge from the rest of the state’s in 2000, when the region’s margin lined up with the national popular vote even though the statewide margin was nine points more Republican. Not until 2008 did the state’s margin mirror the nation’s, and by then, Northern Virginia’s was 13 points more Democratic.
By 2016, with Trump on the ballot, the state was three points more Democratic than the nation, the region 28 points bluer. Last year, Virginia leaned about six points more Democratic than the country, while the margin in Northern Virginia was 32 points, said Skelley, who did the bulk of that research at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics and now works at FiveThirtyEight.
Since statewide margins were in line with the nation’s before 2016, this fall’s governor’s race could reveal whether Virginia has undergone a lasting political realignment or merely experienced an anti-Trump spasm.
“I often describe Virginia as a purple state with a bluish hue,” Skelley said. “This will be an interesting test of just how purple it is.”
Northern Virginia was still swing territory in McDonnell’s day. The region handed Barack Obama 60 percent of its vote in the 2008 presidential election, then turned around the next year to give McDonnell 52 percent.
But Northern Virginia has gone blue ever since, with the Democrats’ hefty margins — 18 points in the 2012 presidential election; 19 points in the 2013 governor’s contest — expanding to blowouts under Trump: 30 points in the 2016 presidential; 32 points in the 2017 gubernatorial; and 36 points in last year’s presidential.
Greater sway over the state
As it has turned more Democratic, the region’s growth has given it greater sway over the state as a whole. The total number of votes cast in Northern Virginia rose from 1.1 million in the 2008 presidential race to 1.4 million last year, when it accounted for 32 percent of the statewide total.
Northern Virginia has long been the state’s fastest-growing region, increasing by 16 percent between 2009 and last year to reach a population of nearly 2.8 million, according to estimates produced by U-Va.’s Weldon Cooper Center. By comparison, the rest of the state grew by 5 percent during the same period.
New immigrants from Latin America and Asia drove Northern Virginia’s growth, with those two groups combining to make up nearly a third of the region’s population by 2019. The region has also seen a large influx of African immigrants. Immigrants, like other minority groups, have traditionally favored Democrats, although Trump made inroads with them in 2020.
Republicans missed a chance to cultivate those groups while they were newcomers to the exurbs during the late 1990s, said Mark J. Rozell, dean of George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government.
Back then, the conventional thinking was that the GOP would dominate those areas while the inner suburban communities would continue to trend blue.
But “Republicans just didn’t do a very good job in reaching out to those new voters and try to bring them into the Republican fold,” Rozell said. “They got a little complacent in thinking that the outer suburbs were going to be reliably Republican.”
Geary Higgins, chairman of the Republican Party’s 10th Congressional District committee in Northern Virginia, agreed that the party did not do enough initially to reach out to the South Asian, Asian, Middle Eastern and Latino families that now make up a significant portion of the region’s population.
“Some of the changes, people didn’t realize were happening and they happened so quickly,” he said.
Virginia Republicans say they are positioned to make gains with those groups given the diversity of its statewide ticket, which includes lieutenant governor candidate Winsome E. Sears, a Jamaican immigrant, and Jason S. Miyares, the son of a Cuban refugee, for attorney general. They also say Youngkin and his running mates, by opposing changes in admissions to an elite Fairfax County magnet school, might be appealing to Asians, whose numbers at school fell sharply as a result.
Coinciding with the increasing diversity has been a slow but steady spread in poverty across the region, with 159,994 area residents living below the federal poverty line in 2019, 20 percent more than in 2009. That shift could benefit Democrats in a region where the median income nevertheless remained nearly twice as high as in the rest of the country, since poorer voters lean blue and wealthier ones tilt red.
The percentage of people with at least a bachelor’s degree — another group that favors Democrats — steadily climbed in the region to 57 percent during that decade.
Hamilton Lombard, a demographer with the Weldon Cooper Center, said the Democratic Party’s gains in the region mirror what has happened in suburban areas across the country.
“Generally, suburban areas have shifted more toward the Democratic Party, particularly White suburban areas that are relatively well off,” Lombard said, adding that the phenomenon also exists outside the United States. “It’s a cultural shift you seem to be seeing at least in English-speaking countries, with generally middle-class, college-educated voters shifting away from conservative parties. I don’t know that there’s a really clear answer why.”
Making up the difference
Youngkin’s campaign figures he can prevail statewide as long as he can win at least 40 percent of the vote in Northern Virginia, making up the difference in redder parts of the state. The campaign initially put the goal at 44 percent but adjusted its target last month based on its latest internal polling.
“If you look at Youngkin’s path to victory — to the extent that he has one — it’s not winning Loudoun or Prince William. That ship has sailed,” said Kyle Kondik, who analyzes elections at U-Va’s Center for Politics. “But it’s keeping the margins down in those places.”
The Youngkin campaign’s math is premised on a return to a few pre-Trump norms, which is by no means a given. It bets on low turnout, which Virginia’s off-year contests typically generated before Trump was in the White House. And it assumes Youngkin can make up for Northern Virginia losses in other regions, including downstate suburban areas that have also undergone demographic changes and abandoned Republicans under Trump.
Youngkin’s campaign figures he would have to tie McAuliffe in the Richmond region, narrowly win Hampton Roads, capture 60 percent of the vote in the Roanoke-Lynchburg region and roll up a 70-point edge in the rest of the state, the two people familiar with the strategy said.
“Trump and demographics have made it tougher. The good news is, one of those is gone,” said Tucker Martin, McDonnell’s former communications director and an outspoken Trump critic. “I think the million-dollar question is: What is the state of the [GOP] brand post-Trump? And I don’t think anyone truly knows.”
Messaging will be key as Youngkin tries to make gains in Northern Virginia, according to several Republican strategists who have urged him to focus on “kitchen-table issues” such as jobs, public safety and education.
“Northern Virginia has certainly become more heavily Democratic in recent years, but there remains a sizable number of persuadable voters in the middle who are consistently up for grabs,” said Cox, McDonnell’s campaign manager.
McDonnell had been a conservative culture warrior as a state delegate, but he was less ideological during a four-year stint as the state’s attorney general. He won the Executive Mansion playing up economic issues, running on the slogan “Bob’s for Jobs.”
It didn’t hurt that McDonnell had roots in three critical suburban voting regions: He grew up in Fairfax County; raised his family in Virginia Beach; and then moved them, as attorney general, to the Richmond suburb of Henrico County.
“If you wanted to create a suburban candidate in a lab, that’s pretty much what Bob was in 2009,” said Martin, the former McDonnell spokesman, recalling campaign signs touting “Fairfax’s own Bob McDonnell,” “Virginia Beach’s own Bob McDonnell” and “Richmond’s own Bob McDonnell.”
Martin sees the same potential in Youngkin, who spent his early school years in the Richmond suburbs, lived in Virginia Beach during high school and is raising his family today in Northern Virginia’s Great Falls. (McAuliffe, a native of Upstate New York, lives and has raised his family in McLean.)
“If ever there was an opportunity, by virtue of biography, resources … to pull a Larry Hogan on this side of the river, he absolutely does,” Martin said, referring to the Republican governor of Maryland, the solidly blue state next door.
But Youngkin has trickier politics to navigate in Virginia, which has a larger conservative Republican base than Maryland. His campaign messaging has toggled between hard-right appeals to the party’s Trumpian base and feel-good biographical TV ads touting him as a post-partisan problem solver.
“Ambiguity may be his best friend,” said David I. Ramadan, a former Republican state delegate from Loudoun now teaching at George Mason’s Schar School of Policy and Government.
Youngkin spoke explicitly about how he was tailoring his message to the state’s suburban swing voters in Northern Virginia and elsewhere, according to a video that a liberal activist secretly recorded in June at a private event with supporters in Loudoun.
He said he would have to avoid discussing his opposition to abortion in the general election, explaining that the issue “won’t win my independent votes that I have to get.”
Youngkin also told the gathering that his internal polls showed him doing better than other recent Republicans have in Northern Virginia. To keep that going, he said he is grudgingly resigned to catering to the swing voters who will decide the election.
“We’re running this entire campaign ... focused on swing voters in Virginia, so if you’re not seeing me on TV or hearing me on the radio, it’s not because I don’t love you. It’s that we’ve got you,” he said. “We’re going after those middle 1 million voters who are, sadly, going to decide this and have decided elections for the last 10 to 12 years in Virginia. And they’ve moved a bit away from us. So we’re going to get them.”
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