How the demographic wave turned Virginia blue. Useful little factoid: Loudon County population 1970 37,100, Loudon County population 2018 407,000. Additional anecdotal observation: I know quite a few older immigrants, some family members, who voted for chosen one in 2016. They are all embarrassed by him. They think he has been a disgrace and will definitely not be voting for him in 2020. Congrats to chosen one for delivering all these voters, who are naturally conservative in their politics, to the Dems on a silver platter.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/09/us/politics/virginia-elections-democrats-republicans.html
Not long ago, this rolling green stretch of Northern Virginia was farmland. Most people who could vote had grown up here. And when they did, they usually chose Republicans.
The fields of Loudoun County are disappearing. In their place is row upon row of cookie-cutter townhouses, clipped lawns and cul-de-sacs — a suburban landscape for as far as the eye can see. Unlike three decades ago, the residents are often from other places, like India and Korea. And when they vote, it is often for Democrats.
“Guns, that is the most pressing issue for me,” said Vijay Katkuri, 38, a software engineer from southern India, explaining why he voted for a Democratic challenger in Tuesday’s elections. He was shopping for chicken at the Indian Spice Food Market. “There are lots of other issues, but you can only fix them if you are alive.”
Mr. Katkuri’s vote — the first of his life — helped flip a longtime Republican State Senate district and deliver the Virginia statehouse to the Democratic Party for the first time in a generation. It was a stunning political realignment for a southern state, and prompted days of prognosticating about President Trump’s own standing with suburban voters nationally in 2020. But while political leaders come and go, the deeper, more lasting force at work is demographics.
In the 13th Senate district, where Mr. Katkuri lives, one in five residents are immigrants. The district had been Republican for longer than Mr. Katkuri had been in the United States. He came in 2006 at the age of 25 as a tech worker, and lived for a while in New Jersey. But it was congested and expensive, and crime was high. After visiting a friend in Virginia, he moved.
“You drive from the northeast and you fall in love,” he said of Virginia. The state felt more like what he had imagined America would be. “I like the wide roads and green trees. In India, we didn’t have this.”
He added, smiling: “It’s like a therapy.”
Today he works as an I.T. specialist for a company that contracts with the federal government, a job that has landed him in the upper middle class of American society. He drove to the Indian grocery in his silver Tesla. He has a house in the tidy suburb of Arcola a few miles away.
As Virginia’s population has grown it has also gotten wealthier. Households earning at least $150,000 have grown at three times the rate of the population over all.
Mr. Katkuri always thought he would be a Republican in America.
“Taxes, family values, these things are closer to our hearts,” he said. He likes Mitt Romney.
But when he got his citizenship in March and started talking with his friends about whom to vote for in the first election of his life, he realized it had to be Democrats. Mr. Trump helped him decide.
“People are just sick and appalled at this president,” said Dr. Charles Huh, a gastroenterologist, as he waited for takeout at the food court in Lotte Plaza Market, a Korean grocery store.
“He’s the best thing Republicans have done for Democrats in a long time.”
Still, that doesn’t mean people here love all Democrats. Dr. Huh usually votes for Democrats, but he hasn’t always. He voted for George W. Bush in 2000. He said Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are too far left for him and that he would vote third party if the Democrats nominated either one.
