With Rep. Rick Boucher’s endorsement of Creigh Deeds for governor today, I wonder if we’re seeing the beginnings of a major rural/urban split in the support of Democratic candidates?
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With Rep. Rick Boucher’s endorsement of Creigh Deeds for governor today, I wonder if we’re seeing the beginnings of a major rural/urban split in the support of Democratic candidates?
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I think it is more like “Virginia can’t afford this split any longer” mentality. We have a bunch of astonishingly stupid rural legislators trading on the fire’n’brimstone notion of “let urban Virginia tax themselves and we will live within our righteous means”. One day Fairfax may take them up on the deal and it will be ugly. Deeds has the bona fides to explain to rural Virginians that their representatives are legislating them straight into local tax hell.
Downstate Republicans overreached based on their party’s general election geographic splits and ran themselves straight into extremist hell. Triumphalism aside, I suspect upstate Democrats will try the same thing, which is why the endorsements Deeds collected in Fairfax very early on are so important to both him and the party.
Remember, Boucher went against the majority of his democratic constituents in SWVA and endorsed Obama prior to the primary. I don’t think that indicates a split. BTW: Has Boucher endorsed Bowerbank from Russell County? I don’t think that he has……
Also pushing against the “urban-rural split” theory is the raft of Richmond endorsements Deeds picked up fairly recently.
http://www.deedsforvirginia.com/node/121
If you want to call it a NoVa/downstate split, that is more plausible, but I don’t think Boucher’s endorsement goes much further than the general circumstances of the race in establishing that dynamic. I think the more interesting question, over time, will be whether NoVa and Hampton Roads form a policy axis, either within the parties or across them. If so we will increasingly see statewide candidates whose platforms cater to those heavily populated areas. It’s not clear to me, right now, that Deeds is locked out of either region; but it does seem intuitive that his support in SW and Southside will be stronger.