Post out of tune
As I write this, George Allen is holding onto a twelve thousand-vote lead in the Virginia Senate race. He might win, he might not. I’m sick of him either way, I just didn’t want to put the Democrats in control of the Senate.
The Washington Post needs a good kicking, though, for its treatment of Virginia regionalism in the final weeks of the campaign. Sunday’s inset under the front page banner headline, titled Md., Va. Challengers’ Fate May Depend on Inner Suburbs’ Muscle, was perhaps the most clear in its arrogant dismissal of downstate opinions as relevant to the national picture.
In the case of Northern Virginia, dramatic growth and changing political attitudes that set it more in tune with the rest of the country than the rest of Virginia are vital to Democrat James Webb’s challenge of Republican Sen. George Allen.
Let’s do a little bit of math here, starting from estimates of a basically even country and state (which seem obvious). I’m going to slightly overstate Northern Virginia’s size for the sake of estimation, and call it 1/3 of the state’s population. I’ll further estimate that downstate is roughly 60-40 Republican, which puts them 10% out of sway with an even country. If that’s the case, downstate Republicans are 40% (3/5 * 2/3 == 6/15) of the state, and downstate Dems are about 27% (2/5 * 2/3 == 4/15). To make up for this kind of a split and get it to even, Northern Virginia has to go 70/30 to the Democrats (NoVA R: 1.5/15 or 10% of the state; NoVA D 3.5/15 or 23%).
To boil that down: NoVA is considerably less than half the state’s population. If the state is even, and NoVA is to provide an even counterweight at a statewide level to the Republican downstate, NoVA has to be MUCH more disproportionately blue than the rest of the Commonwealth is red. The country would have to be 55% Democratic to make this kind of divergence even (15 points either way). It’s not.
So, Posties, give us a break with the superiority crap. NoVA isn’t more in tune with the rest of the country, it’s just more in tune with the rest of your country — which doesn’t appear to stretch much more than 100 miles or so from the tracks of the Northeast Corridor.
7 November 2006 / 1 Comment / Tags: politics, nova, media