I’m teaming up with Aimee Fausser and Johnny Camacho to create the New Dominion Project. None of us have the time to maintain our own blogs anymore, and hope that having help means we can focus more on quality than quantity. NDP is based on SoapBlox, which will allow you, the reader, to post diaries!

We’re honestly making this up as we go along, and hope that you’ll join us there.

Thanks so much for reading over the last four years, and please follow me to NDP. See you there!

Of course, just because 90% is now the magic A mark for all of the state’s classes doesn’t mean that each 90% is the same. Colleges will ignore whatever aid this gives students and will continue to use SAT/ACT scores to equalize between students competing under wildly different grading scales. And while it’s likely a good idea to have a uniform grading scale, I suspect teachers in Fairfax County, where 94% is an A, will simply recalibrate their work to bump off four points from all of their students. Call me crazy, but if teachers really wanted to bump up their students’ GPAs to get around a grading scale, they’d be a little less grouchy when grading papers already, regardless of what Delegate Poisson things.

They don’t make it easy.

After all, according to Dave Albo, the state’s been flooded with food stamp recipients, which are apparently Democrats. His district voted 57% to 43% for Barack Obama. Click below to embiggen the map:

Unfortunately, the hopeless enthusiasm gap this year means that the McCain campaign has had trouble putting clipboards into hands, and so they’ve contracted out canvassing to paid staff. Still standard campaign practice.

It’s too bad they’ve gotten so desperate they called on Obama voters who needed a buck.

Two women walk out of John McCain’s Mid-West headquarters carrying a pile of voter canvassing sheets, one sports a baseball hat declaring her a “team leader” of the Republican campaign. And both are black — an unusual sight in an election where Barack Obama’s support among African Americans is almost monolithic.

Are they volunteers? They look at each other sheepishly. “Not exactly,” replies one. “We work for an employment agency,” says the other. Who are they voting for? “I don’t want to say,” says the first woman. “Obama — of course!” whispers the braver of the pair.

That, my friends, is a Field FAIL.

[h/t Loudoun Democrats]

Democratic Congressional candidate Judy Feder at a Joe Biden Rally in Loudoun County, Virginia

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

This is the story of a Republican district gone wrong. This is the story of Virginia’s 10th Congressional District, which may very well flip to Obama next week, and could carry a Democrat to Congress.

Virginia’s 10th Congressional District was supposed to be a Republican’s paradise. Stretching from the upper Shenandoah Valley where Democrats are as sparse as three dollar bills into exurban Loudoun County, the Republican majority in VA-10 was a carefully crafted blend of rural social conservatives, and SUV-driving exurbanites who left their huge homes every Sunday for their evangelical church. It was the archetypal exurban district in which Karl Rove and the Bush Republicans planted their flag and sailed to victory.

In the east was Fairfax County, a behemoth standing at over a million souls total, whose western part and Potomac River shoreline was placed in the 10th, making up around a third of the district. To the west, Loudoun County, containing John Foster Dulles International Airport, vast acres of farms, and small towns like Purcellville and Leesburg beckoned Republicans. And further to the west, rural Virginia, “real Virginia” in their eyes, stretched until the elevation signaled the beginning of the Mountaineer State.

George Bush carried the district in 2004 with 55% of the vote. Times were good. Sellers were able to get more than their asking price as buyers trampled over any lot with a fresh “For Sale” sign, eager to sign their kids up for great schools and a quiet suburban life. Home equity sloshed around like water in an ocean, and developers had a field day plowing under fields of suddenly valuable land. Up sprouted subdivisions, vinyl-sided mushrooms proliferating across the hills. Incumbent Rep. Frank Wolf, a Republican, burnished himself as a moderate to appeal to suburbanites pleased with President Bush. Fairfax County became fabulously wealthy as lucrative high-tech jobs and cushy government work, combined with defense contractors galore, pushed the county’s median income even past fabled Orange County, California. Soon, Loudoun County would even outpace Fairfax. Kids were sent to some of the best schools in the nation as their parents raked in the dough.

Good times, unfortunately, don’t last forever. With development came traffic jams of epic proportions, and the specter of illegal immigration began to scare voters into whispers that soon grew thunderous. Gang activity was on the uptick. The war in Iraq dragged on, and gas prices took a toll on car-dependent voters. Housing values seemed almost to wobble in their inexorable rise.

Meanwhile for the Republicans, the flood of new residents into their paradise was nothing short of alarming. What started as a wave of like-minded exurbanites became a flood of diverse, less socially conservative, well-educated voters that were predisposed against typical Republican politics. Corruption on Capitol Hill might have manifested itself as a blurry vision of Jack Abramoff and his fedora, but for 10th District voters, the mess in Washington was just a quick (or, during rush hour, aggravatingly slow) ride down the Dulles Toll Road. Judy Feder, dean of the school of public policy at nearby Georgetown University, took on the challenge of unseating longtime incumbent Frank Wolf, who had represented the 10th even since the days when the district included liberal oasis Arlington County. Jim Webb carried the district by a razor-thin margin.

It wasn’t to be–Feder was to fall well short, even if she was well-funded, but the march of demographics went on.

Demography, as it is said, is destiny.

You see, the demographic winds that had created modern Loudoun County–torrid growth, the rapid exurbanization, a white-hot real estate market attracting the right kind of people–began to undo the Republican majority it helped create.

Any county is bound to be in flux if it grew by double-digits every year in population. Meanwhile, years of freewheeling dealing with developers led to an FBI probe leading up to the Board of Supervisors. Local Republicans descended into a civil war, retreating to firebomb issues like gay marriage and especially illegal immigration (in all this talk of Loudoun, don’t forget that Manassas, the epicenter of the anti-immigration backlash, is included in the 10th too).

Gas prices rising to dizzying heights pinched the pockets of even the most well-off suburbanites, who were exclusively dependent on their gas guzzlers. Then the roof began to come down, as foreclosures proliferated, taking out house after house in an epidemic of bad mortgages. No longer concerned with the politics of the Religious Rights, voters tired of corruption and wary of the economic house crashing down, suburban and exurban voters were hungry for change.

Then came Barack Obama.

Barack Obama pleased the suburban families who were hungry for change–but not just any change. Barack Obama was immensely popular in Fairfax and Loudoun counties, and as the Republicans in the 10th District became engulfed in scandal, Democrats looked increasingly good. Obama is rolling up huge leads in Fairfax and Loudoun, and Democrats are nearly certain to win Virginia’s 11th District to the southeast, a similar district with a similar congressman.

Like Frank Wolf, Tom Davis styled himself a moderate who represented well-off, government-savvy voters. Davis saw the writing on the wall, and announced that he was not seeking re-election in 2008. Since then, Davis has been engaging with a nasty breakup with the Republican Party, lambasting them for their treatment of moderates.

All that population growth translated into surges of new voters that don’t remember how long Frank Wolf has been in Congress. Since 2004, voter registrations are up an astonishing 25% in Loudoun County. With Republicans in full-fledged retreat, Judy Feder stands an outside chance of wresting away what once was the safest of seats. Below is the astonishing pace of voter registration growth, by county:

Let’s approximate what Judy Feder will need. Cut the district in half–Fairfax and Loudoun counties as the East, the rest as the West. With the East making up about 65% of the district, below is a rough approximation of what she needs to make a winning combination:

She will need massive coattails from Barack Obama. With roughly 65% of the district in Fairfax and Loudoun Counties, she absolutely must win there. Barack Obama is likely to win in that area with with double-digit margins, and new voters may be less likely to vote for the guy who’s always been there, because they’ haven’t been. Feder carried only 43% of the vote in the East two years ago with Webb at the top of the ticket, running about 10 points behind his performance. With Obama running up the score, she can and has a good shot at racking up the needed margins here. In the rest of the district, Judy Feder must stem the bleeding, and at least match her 2006 performance, where she garnered 36% of the vote. If Feder can follow the massive suburban wave for Obama and win the East with 55% of the vote, she will only need to hold down 40% in the rest of the district.

It will be tough–but if Barack Obama can pull off the massive wave in suburban counties, Judy Feder may very well sneak into office.

Earlier today, John McCain sent senior adviser Nancy Pfotenhauer on MSNBC, where she was asked about Virginia. In fit of pique, Pfotenhauer assailed Northern Virginia where John McCain’s campaign headquarters are located, and spoke of “the rest of the state, ‘real Virginia.” Given a chance to dig herself out of the hole she had just climbed in, she soldiered on, saying “I did say outside of north – well, I mean real Virginia, because northern Virginia is where I’ve always been, but real Virginia I take to be the – this part of the state that is more southern in nature, if you will.”

This isn’t the first time some tone-deaf Republican claimed the “Real Virginia” was south of the Rappahanock. The last guy I could think of who did it also took a shot at anywhere inside the beltway after pledging to run a positive, constructive campaign. (He also loved to say “My friends!”)

His name was George Allen.

I have a confession. My name is Kenton Ngo, I’m an Asian-American in Northern Virginia. I’ve been “welcomed to America” by clueless white folks, mistaken for a Chinese food delivery boy while canvassing, but I’m still a Real American in the Real Politics of Real America. But according to Sarah Palin, I don’t live in a pro-America part of the country. According to John McCain’s brother, I live dangerously close to “Communist country”. Democratic success in my county, according to local Delegate Dave Albo, is because Fairfax County, a county with a median income roughly equivalent to that of Orange County, was beset by a wave of food stamp holders.

I’ve worked for Democrats because I believe in one Virginia, and in one America. I’ve watched the Virginia Republican party implode as it stakes its claim on smaller and smaller groups they claim to be real, true Americans. Virginia Republicans specialize in the politics of the outsider, scoring political points against gays and immigrants, Northern Virginians and anyone who dares utter multisyllable words. If anything, my experience as a blogger crashing the gate of the political establishment shows why the Democrats are the party of the future, while Republicans remain wedded to the past.

This was no gaffe. This is a pattern. The entire Republican electoral strategy relies on a loosely defined, nebulous group of real Americans fighting against the unknowns and defending the way things used to be. To Republican eyes, the Real Virginia is more “Southern” or rural in nature, where effete elites are nowhere to be seen, scary immigrants relegated to dicey urban neighborhoods, and where the Christian faith dominates political discourse.

They hold on to a romanticized view of the South, disconnected with the 21st century engine driving the economies of Northern Virginia, North Carolina’s Research Triangle, and Atlanta. They mythologize rural, white America as the true representation of patriotism, and have convinced our country that our urban and suburban areas are somehow fake, and less real.

They’ve lost touch with the rest of Virginia. They’ve lost touch with reality. They’ve lost touch with the future.

I don’t live in the fake Virginia or the real Virginia, the fake America or the real America. Democrats will win this election because we believe in one Virginia, and one America. Smashing the mythology of a Real Virginia where liberals are not to be found on November 4 will be only too sweet.

Do you feel screwed now?

2003 was when I worked my first political campaign. I find it seriously wrong that the entire time I’ve been working in politics, the stock market has made zero progress. Just saying.

With barely days to go until the voter registration deadline for what promises to be a record-breaking year, thousands of voter registration and absentee ballot form pile up on registrar desks. However, the spike in voter registration has not been equally distributed statewide. Unsurprisingly, fast-growing localities are bursting at the seams with voter gains, and localities with flagging or negative population growth have actually seen their voter rolls shrink.

This map, however, is misleading. Even though most localities recorded an increase in their voter rolls, since November 2004, statewide voter rolls have grown by 5.94%. What this means for many localities is, even though their voter rolls have grown, because the growth was slower than the statewide growth they lost out as a percentage of the statewide electorate. Localities that do not grow as fast as the state also are relative losers, seeing their piece of the state pie shrink. To that end, I have mapped out below each locality’s change in its percentage of the electorate.

Counties like Loudon and King George saw their share of the statewide electorate grow by over 10% in less than four years, while almost all of Southwest Virginia saw their share of the electorate shrink. Similarly, Hampton Roads and Fairfax County were unable to match the torrid pace of growth in Washington’s outlying suburbs, while Central Virginia kept pace with the statewide average. Fairfax County, even though it still remains the 800-pound gorilla in Virginia politics, saw below-average growth, a symptom of its demographic maturation. The influx of inbound migration that caused Fairfax County’s boom has ended, giving way to a net loss in migration while sustaining its growth with births (a topic previously covered here). Likewise, the city of Virginia Beach grows organically as opposed to with migration like in Loudon County, resulting in a more steady pool of voters.

Notice how nearly all the counties west of the Hillary Line, counties in Southwest that Hillary Clinton won in February’s presidential primary, grow less and less powerful relative to the rest of the state. This is indicative both of the voter influx brought on by Barack Obama, but also by a long-term stagnation and decline in population. Arlington County in the far north of the state, while relatively stable in terms of population growth, shows a marked increase in voter registration due to heightened interest and intensive efforts in that heavily Democratic county.

Ranking 2nd, incidentally, in voter roll growth was the City of Williamsburg, which saw its share of the electorate jump 12.6%. This can most likely be explained by a change in leadership at the city registrar’s office–the new voter registrar finally allowed students at the College of William and Mary to register to vote. Coupled with the Obama campaign’s obvious interest, Williamsburg’s voter rolls have bulged at roughly the pace of Loudoun’s without corresponding population growth.

Looking ahead, these maps give a little insight into the next redistricting cycle. Expect district lines to lurch northeastward as districts in the south and west of the state grow larger physically as populations shrink.

Now, let’s be clear. If someone invoked “Allah” while praying at the courthouse for a government-sanctioned meting in this state, they most certainly would be run out of town by an angry mob. Nobody dares blur the line between government and Islam. However, take Jesus out of a chaplain’s prayer, and Del. Morgan Griffith of Salem gets mad.

Griffith heard this news, and brought out his hellfire and brimstone cannon to blast in the general direction of the source of all this trouble. Was it the 4th Circuit? Was it Bob McDonnell? Was it the State Police? No. Griffith, with his assistant Del. Bill Carrrico (R-Grayson County), aimed invective in the general direction of the Executive Mansion on Grace Street.

Religion in America is even more of a stumbling block than race. While most in this country have moved past racial discrimination and segregation, and are comfortable with potentially electing the first black president, to not believe in the Christian God amounts to political suicide, especially in evangelical-heavy states like Virginia. How could one justify the separation of church and state and specific, Christian prayers by government chaplains at government events?

Governor Kaine, to his credit, stuck to his guns, defending the state police for following the spirit of the 4th Circuit decision. I, for one, am proud to see a governor who can maintain his personal faith and uphold this state’s secular government.

What does Morgan Griffith know? Is it up to Morgan Griffith to decide what faith a chaplain prays in at a government function? The single most important factor on the strength of American religion is the lack of a government-established and supported church. Look at Europe, where state churches are not nearly the political force that churches in America are.

If Delegate Griffith is perfectly okay with chaplains praying to Jesus Christ, let’s ask if he is okay with extending the privilege to Muslims, Pagans, or Pastafarians. I await the answer.

RAmen.

I snickered as I was driving through a subdivision of White Oaks precinct in Burke, which is in the heart of Virginia’s 11th Congressional District, as I had spotted an orange Mark Ellmore for Congress sign standing proudly on the lawn. Ellmore has the unenviable task of challenging Congressman Jim Moran, who represents the 8th district, which doesn’t actually begin for another several miles to the east. I was much less entertained when I noticed that some enterprising chap had put up Obama-Warner-Moran signs in my neighborhood, which also is miles away from the 8th district.

(Side note: If this Ellmore design looks familiar, it’s the exact same design ill-fated gubernatorial candidate Jerry Kilgore used in 2005. It’s one thing to be a longshot candidate, it’s another to be a longshot and reuse the same design scheme a previous loser had used.)

Seriously, people, get it together. Signs for the 8th Congressional District stay out of the 11th Congressional District. There’s only one legitimate reason to put signs where they don’t belong, and that’s to use your geographical illiteracy to greatly annoy this blogger.