Urban/rural divide in Virginia Gubernatorial election

Readers will recall that one of my pet themes here is the diverging interests of urban/suburban Americans who get richer when government gets bigger and rural Americans for whom a bigger government brings higher taxes and few benefits (since government buildings and programs tend to happen in cities).

The New York Times illustrates this nicely with a per-county map of the Virginia election results:

Virginians near the state capital (Richmond) or the Nation’s Capital (D.C.) just loved hearing about the Democrat’s promises to expand government. Virginians elsewhere were more enthusiastic about the Republican’s expressed dream of eliminating the state’s income tax. The rich folks in Fairfax County (median household income $125,000/year in 2019), bordering D.C., preferred Democrat to Republican by 65:35. Folks in Lee County, at the southwest corner of the state, have a household income of less than 1/3rd that of the government-affiliated people in Fairfax: $33,000/year in 2019. They voted 88:12 in favor of the Republican candidate.

A good illustration of my pet theory?

Related:

30 thoughts on “Urban/rural divide in Virginia Gubernatorial election

  1. Is the basic economic thesis true though? I was under the impression that the net transfers of the Federal Government favored rural states. This was in the form of things like farm aid, social welfare programs, military bases in rural areas, grant programs that are allocated by population but which have minimum population thresholds, etc…

    Or framed another way the 10 or so states that represent half the population have to bribe the senators of the other 40 to go along with them.

    • Daniel: Where did you arrive at this impression? From American media staffed and owned by the urban elite? And they’re feeding you a story about the urban elite being altruistic and charitable toward their benighted rural brothers, sisters, and binary resisters?

      You find this credible? That the people who have most of the political power in the U.S. would choose to reduce their own standard of living to enrich the politically powerless in rural areas? Your impression also requires voters to be altruistic. Urban voters just keep voting to make themselves poorer by voting for bigger government that will transfer their hard-earned dollars hundreds of miles away to some rural county. Democrats in urban counties keep pulling the lever to send money to the rural Republicans whom they accuse of destroying the United States, e.g., by supporting Donald Trump and other Nazis.

      In case you do still find this credible, let’s break down some of the things you mentioned. “Farm aid” sounds great… if you own a farm, which most people in rural areas do not. Social welfare programs? The biggest are Medicaid and Medicare (close to 10 percent of GDP). If a person in a rural area is prescribed a $2,000/year drug that works only slightly better than a $50/year generic, where does that money go? I am going to guess that it will be to a pharma company in an urban/suburban area. What if the rural-dweller gets $3 million in cancer treatment to prolong his/her/zir/their life by 6 months? There is no $3 million check written to the rural family. The rural-dweller must go to a hospital in a city to get the treatment, with the $3 million being spent in that city. Military bases in rural areas? I am going to guess that the typical rural voter does not live close enough to a military base to benefit from economic activity. Department of Defense contracts are disproportionately handed out in urban counties nationwide (see https://www.rural.palegislature.us/dod_spending_2010.pdf ; “On a per capita basis, rural counties through the U.S. received $789 less than urban counties”)

    • Philip is right about military bases. Most of the people who work there are typically commuting from closest urban areas, sometimes for well over an hour. But they tend to be conservatives, not all but it has been definitely a trend for conservatives to take military jobs that matter. It is probably changing now.

    • Anon: My main point about military bases was that there aren’t that many of them! I’m sure that they will boost the local economy, but there aren’t enough military bases to boost rural America in general. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_military_bases shows only three Army bases in all of Tennessee, for example, a 42,181 square-mile state. And, since no U.S. political party makes any serious attempt to cut military spending (everyone wants to support our troops, support our veterans, etc.!), a voter wouldn’t expect any change to military bases or spending by voting for one party or another.

    • I just find it interesting that our fine host Phil referred to Daniel Knighten as David in his reply.

    • Regarding military bases, virtually all very expensive US Navy bases are either in or near blue urban areas.

  2. The results I’m seeing and hearing about suggest that one of your other pet theories/questions has been at least as important: Without the Trumpenführer around every day to generate and focus their outrage, a lot of Democrats and others are not as motivated. That has certainly seemed to be the case in terms of the turnout in New Jersey. Meanwhile, looking at this administration and their plans for the future, and smarting from the losses in 2000, more Republicans are fired up.

    I call this the “Peggy Noonan” Theory of Trumpism: early on in his terms she speculated that Trump was causing more trouble for himself than anyone else. I think she was right.

    https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/11/02/us/elections/results-new-jersey.html

    With 80% of the vote counted, (R) Ciattarelli is leading! Unthinkable two weeks ago. It was a foregone conclusion that Murphy would win by double digits based on his more than 1 million voter registration advantage.

    • In fact Noonan talked about it more than once in her columns. The basic idea was that Trump himself, or rather the “epiphenomena of Trumpism” had provided a tremendous sense of motivation and urgency to the Left – much greater than they would have been able to muster otherwise – and I think that’s true. Trump did more to help the Left than he did the Right, particularly the Conservative movement. He was not a Conservative, either before he was elected or afterward. He was Chaos. But the Left (including the Democrats who had voted for Hillary Clinton) reacted every single day to him as though the country was being led by Satan himself, from the first tweet of the day to the last NPR sign off.

      I’ve lost family members over it. In their minds he is the incarnation of Evil, like Time Bandits.

      Now they don’t have him around everywhere, Biden is kind of a pooper, not exciting (to put it mildly) and apart from spending huge sums of money, they don’t really have much to be exited about except vaccinating 5-11 year olds.

      https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2cwc6

    • Remember: The “brains” behind Trump was Steve Bannon from Goldman Sachs, who began from his readings of Plato and observations of the disaffected bros playing World of Warcraft sitting at home mulling their anger, conjuring up ways to whip them into a movement of loosely-affiliated Moose-hat wearing Noble Savages. He didn’t care about Republicans as they existed in Washington: The Swamp was populated by almost equal numbers of Republican and Democrat alligator profiteers and carpet baggers. Trump was there to go in and wreck things. Well, in the process he pissed a lot of people off, including John Bolton, who is about as Conservative as they come. After he left the non-team in the White House, he had his famous interview a few months before the election when he said that Eisenhower himself would walk out of the Trump White House, throw up his hands and say: “This place is hopeless.”

      And what he did among the Left and the Democrats was turn them up to 11, or maybe 12. Trump and Trumpism took people who were left of center who normally wouldn’t sit together at the same table and made them partisan brothers in arms.

    • maybe trump’s presence was not beneficial to the conservative movement overall, – but as an outsider, it seems to me that his intentions of ‘America first’ were right.

      I remember, when he put on that ban from some (middle eastern?) countries – many of my friends here were like – ‘nice, that guy has guts to do what’s needed. but in the USA he was chastised for that decision.

    • John Bolton is a conservative, LOL. He showed his true self, he has no problem putting US and remains of civilized world through what it is going now because of deservingly hurt ego and few hundreds thousands of dollars for scandalous book published at the right moment. All that Bolton bleated about for decades was implemented by others he disliked in few months. Bolton showed himself to be a real douche.

    • @disevad: Oh, he wasn’t chastised. He was turned into Concentrated Evil. Now the Justice Department wants to pay each person separated by his zero tolerance policy $450,000.

      https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-administration-in-talks-to-pay-hundreds-of-millions-to-immigrant-families-separated-at-border-11635447591

      Trump would still be the President if he had taken just *one* piece of advice I offered repeatedly and sent to the White House in a letter:

      “Accept the fact that you are scaring the female suburban voters away with your apparent mask resistance, which is being grotesquely magnified and repeated by the media. You will not have the vaccines in time for the election. You do not have to mandate masks, but you should drop the apparent public resistance to them. The Democrats are murdering you with it, and it’s a zero-consequence decision: the masks probably do not help much, but they will serve a very important psychological function.”

      From what I can tell, nobody in the upper echelon of his ragged “inner circle” thought that was good advice. But I still believe that is why he lost in Georgia and a couple of other places: he scared away the independents and the WOMEN. He did not know how to play Realpolitik with that issue and it cost him the whole ballgame.

      [One way or another that wasn’t going to happen. Pfizer didn’t announce it’s efficacy results until a week after the election. The timing wasn’t a coincidence.]

    • @disevad: The timing of the vaccine efficacy announcements, and also the *almost total* lack of knowledge that the Moderna vaccine was already completely developed by February of 2020 and off the NIH in March of 2020 for clinical trials, was very important. ( https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/12/moderna-covid-19-vaccine-design.html )

      Up until October, I would listen to various commentators on NPR talking about how they couldn’t trust the vaccines because the Trump Administration *rushed them*. They were simultaneously roasting him over the coals for his “mask resistance.” The combination of these two things scared away what I estimate to be at least a million (and probably more) independent and women voters.

      Trump could have short-circuited that with some deft Realpolitik on masks. He could then have turned the time it was taking to get the vaccine efficacy results to his advantage. He did neither.

      And Trump did not lose the Georgia run-off elections because of fraud. He lost them because the Republican voter turnout there was suppressed by his own team members screaming from the rooftops that people’s votes wouldn’t MATTER. I believe Erick Erickson’s account of those runoff elections – he lives in Georgia, and he knows the place.

      For all the alleged “good policy choices” Trump may have advanced, he had a lot of missed opportunities and an almost uncanny ability to turn his own advantages into deficits in terms of Realpolitik. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. 🙂

    • Alex, Bolton was fighting for Trump administration job and visited all important talk radio shows to get it so I have heard him enough. I am done disregarding actions that do not pass a litmus test for heroic and misleading words. I overlooked many idiotic statements by Bolton and lack of real life implementations for his interface position as well as his les then conservative lifestyle. It was bright head of Trump State Department, both Harvard graduate and a military veteran and whom Bolton fought, who actually implemented some of what Bolton promised. Bolton screwed Venesuella opposition handling badly. And after he was through with Trump he did not go to talk to people who trusted him. Radio talk shows were full of questions about him while he was quietly working with his agent on timing his book for the upcoming election. Sorry listening to Bolton is time lost forever. I can overlook things for those who do but not for those who bullsh1t.

    • @Alex – interesting analysis.
      I wonder if the Chyna virus hadn’t happened, trump would have had 2nd term?

      I feel it’s a bit unfair that he never seems to have gotten any credit for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed but all the hate for the mask stuff.

      Another thing that was in my mind –
      The nationwide George Floyd protests must have had some negative impact on his chances?
      It was so weird that a single isolated incident led to riots all over the country in a short span of time, all the while the Chyna virus going around and during the election year at that!

    • @George A:

      > I wonder if the Chyna virus hadn’t happened, trump would have had 2nd term?

      I have wondered the same thing and I put the odds at less than 50%. In my opinion, the elites around the world and in Europe especially viewed him as such an unmitigated catastrophe for their various agendas that they may have had him assassinated.

      > I feel it’s a bit unfair that he never seems to have gotten any credit for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed but all the hate for the mask stuff.

      Of course it is “unfair.” From the moment Rachel Maddow started crying on MSNBC the night he was elected, there was never going to be anything “fair” that happened to him or anyone in his Administration. OWS was one of the things they got *RIGHT*. The concept of giving Trump or anyone in his administration credit for anything as late as the year 2020 after two impeachment trials and all the rest was simply unthinkable for anyone in the mainstream American media. Everything that he said and did had to be turned against him, regardless of what it was. The Categorical Imperative was that he was not going to be reelected. Period.

      It’s difficult for someone overseas to comprehend the level of hated that Donald Trump evoked among liberals here in America and the elites abroad that he had angered so deeply and profoundly by dint of his existence. I’m serious when I tell you: I think they would have had him killed if he had won.

    • Alex: Yes, in Europe the population viewed Trump as something of a curiosity. I don’t think he has ever been remotely as unpopular as George W. Bush (probably the most unpopular president in Europe).

      In general, the quality of politicians has decreased rapidly both in Europe and America since 2000 (in China it has gone up).

      The “elites” generally want clowns as politicians these days.

    • Some old style respectable Republicans not wise in getting real info out of ocean of influence media might have been persuaded by “do like I say do not do like I do ” Bolton. Which could matter in many up to grabs states that went to Biden by razor – thin margins.
      So Boltons of this world are probably one of the causes of current disaster, given that Trump is a force of nature and only can function the way he is.
      But then again, margin might be dynamic and would shift if Trump got more votes, it sure looks like it statistically and circumstantially.

    • @Anonymous: Yes, I know that GWB made Europeans, particularly the most of the leadership but a large number of the populations also, very very upset for the Iraq War. Crazy drunk American cowboy! They made their opinions known here through a variety of different channels, including sources like Harper’s Magazine, which I used to subscribe to when GWB was President. Harper’s has a circulation of around 100-150,000 people in America the last time I checked, so it represents elite opinion quite well. I used to joke with my boss the law school Dean: “I’ll keep the current month’s copy clearly visible on my desk so people walking up won’t get the wrong idea about me. That Lewis Lapham, he’s a real piece of work!”

      https://harpers.org/2007/07/impeachment/

  3. As of 2:01 a.m., less than 2000 votes separate Ciattarelli and Murphy, with the former’s lead dwindling as the rest of the *mail-in ballots* are counted and 87% of the vote in. I expect Murphy to win by a few percent once all they’re all counted as well as they can be counted, except for missing ones that never got there. And even Virginia is not completely sewn up yet. Less than 100,000 votes can flip it, and who knows if there are a couple of truckloads of ballots sitting in a truck stop somewhere, the driver taking a late nap.

  4. Not even the cities are that blue that is just a cover story because all the blue cheating apparatuses are in the urban areas.

  5. Republican won = fair election
    Democrat won = rigged election

    I see where this is headed.

    I’m 100% certain that by the end of the 2024 election cycle at least one Republican election official will vote/declare the winner of a state or national level election to be the opposite of the collective wish of the voters, with absolutely no proof of any irregularities in the process.

    • This^^^
      I am very disappointed in Democrat governance, but they are not batshit crazy insurrectionists. Do you believe Fox and the GOP (once my party) or your lying eyes?
      My take on January 6:
      The Willard Hotel posse wanted a loud, threatening crowd/mob at the Capitol to intimidate Congress into recessing before certification, whereupon the Supreme Court would relieve Congress of its duty and turn the election over to the House of Representatives. This was just another Trumpist fantasy/con but the mob took it seriously.
      The posse couldn’t calibrate the mob to just intimidate; the mob escalated to criminal violent insurrection and sedition, while the posse and Trump looked on. The posse was probably shaken but Trump with his juvenile intellect actually enjoyed it.
      Pelosi and Pence did the right thing by reconvening and completing the certification. Otherwise it could have ended like Bush v. Gore, hopefully but not guaranteed in favor of Biden.
      A competent prosecutor should be able to make a felony insurrection/sedition charge against Trump, his chief of staff, and every person who sat in a meeting at the Willard (and of course the actual mob). Let the juries sort them out, I think they will do more than the Senate in impeachment.
      If Garland is not competent, get another prosecutor. The DOJ has hundreds of them bullying people into plea agreements all over the country, get one of those.

    • Donald: Aren’t you dehumanizing people who disagree with you? A small business owner who votes for the GOP because he/she/ze/they wants lower taxes and less regulation… batshit crazy insurrectionist. The people I know who watch the most Fox News are passionate Democrats and they get super excited any time that someone on Fox News says something that they can later vent about and/or that confirms their notions of what a Republican might be like. Perhaps this is actually the main audience for Fox News!

    • Phil is never able to actually address negative points against his Republican party. He always pivots the conversation away to something unrelated as a distraction. Sure…the majority of Fox News viewers are Democrats….sure.

      Phil: Do you not agree with the premise? Do you really think that Republicans respect democracy more than the Dems? We know the Fox News worm has entered your brain — after all you spent two weeks on Dr Seuss nonsense on this blog, coinciding with the Fox News coverage. I notice you haven’t mentioned it since. The “outrage machine” has been plugged directly into your brain stem, bypassing all logic circuits. It’s truly sad to see after reading this blog for 15+ years. I’m here for you if you want help extracting yourself from the cult.

      To answer my own question: yes, the Republicans are truly a threat to democracy and the rule of law. What party do each and every one of these sheriffs belong to?

      https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/constitutional-sheriffs-elections-trump-pandemic/2021/11/01/4c14c764-368b-11ec-91dc-551d44733e2d_story.html

    • Mike: I would love to be able to watch Fox News, since that would mean that Senior Management had caved in to the kids’ demands for a TV. But, except for a few glances during trips through FBOs, I have no exposure to Fox News. My main news sources are nytimes.com, Apple News, emails/IMs from friends and readers, and Facebook posts from friends (nearly all Democrats). The Dr. Seuss non-banning of books that are no longer available was a great story, Foxed or not Foxed!

      [I do find it interesting that my Democrat friends back in Maskachusetts assume that nobody could possibly question the merits of bigger government unless he/she/ze/they has been subject to brainwashing by QAnon (does that even exist?) and/or Fox News. It is a scientifically proven fact that bigger government is better and therefore a rational person would not #DenyScience unless suffering from a mental takeover.]

      Your idea that someone you disagree with is mentally or medically ill is not a new one. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psikhushka for how the Soviets sent dissidents to mental hospitals.

      Why don’t I say more bad things about the Republican party? The New York Times is already doing it 24/7. What can I add? For example, the NYT writes about the events of January 6 almost daily. I wasn’t in Washington, D.C. on Jan 6. I don’t personally know anyone who was there at the Capitol.

      I’m not in sync with the Republicans on a lot of issues. I have written that the U.S. military budget should be dramatically cut, for example. I have written that ordinary police officers in low-crime areas of the U.S. shouldn’t carry guns (like their counterparts in the UK). I have also written against some of the anti-competitive corporate mergers that Republicans have generally favored. But, on the other hand, the Republican Party is the best current big party match for a lot of the values with which I grew up in the 1970s, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equality_feminism and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_opportunity .

      I can’t get too excited about the debates around elections and voting rules because I think that we should restrict voting to those who’ve worked for at least 8 years (a current college student wouldn’t be able to vote for student loan forgiveness under my scheme because he/she/ze/they wouldn’t start voting until approximately age 30). There is no political party in the U.S. that agrees with my perspective.

    • Mike, there is no single Republican president whose presidential election victory that Democrats did not challenge or accepted, unlawful rioting organized by American marxists who found new home in Democratic party started at least as early as against George W Bush.
      And first thing for Democrats after gaining office in 2020 to fix electoral process in their favor , unconstitutionally, first their bills in US House of Representatives and US Senate, along with making new fake states.
      That raises a lot of questions about what top Democrats really know about legitimacy of their recent victories.

      Donald,
      What your opinion on violent pro-Democrat rallies in Washington DC in 2020, enabled by its Democratic mayor, where actual Republican US Senators were attacked? Shouldn’t it be investigated first?

  6. If you ever are “Forced” back to a landing at the Montgomery Airpark, it would be a pleasure to meet you. I often travel to the airpark to watch/search FAA registry for the owners of the aircraft out there. I am not a pilot, but wished I had pursued it and now I am stuck on the sidelines and always excited to meet people that achieved a private pilot license.

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