After having a discussion with one of my friends where I randomly started tossing out made-up ratios of Obama to McCain signs in the nearby areas, I decided to perform an experiment on my drive home today.  Other than some cities in the Hampton Roads area, parts of Richmond, and small communities around various colleges in the state, the vast majority of the rest of Virginia is traditionally Republican.  A generally rural state with a strong military presence, this has played to the Republican party and Virginia hasn’t voted for a Democratic president since LBJ in 1964.

I live in northern Virginia (Nova), an extremely dense metro area outside of Washington DC.  Northern Virginia is heavily populated by basically two types of people: those who work for the government and those in the high tech industry.  Not surprisingly, as both of these typically Democrat-leaning groups have grown (quite dramatically), the area has become more and more Democrat-leaning in general.  Four of the counties in the Northern Virginia area have been in the top 15 fastest growing counties each year for the past 5-10 years.  Since the growth in this area greatly exceeds the growth in the rest of Virginia, the state in turn has also turned more and more Democratic.  Five of the last seven governors have been Democrats and Mark Warner, a former Governor looks set to beat another former Governor, Jim Gilmore, for the Senate seat.  That would put both Senate seats in the Democrats hands.

That said, even though Virginia still hasn’t gone Republican for so long in the presidential race, many pundits are predicting Virginia to go for Obama.  This is highly dependent on how strongly he wins in Northern Virginia.  From this, I decided to perform my highly scientific and foolproof research experiment: I would simply count the number of signs, bumper stickers, etc, on my way home from work today to pick up Christina at the VRE, on my way out to dinner, and finally on the way home.

I only had one rule:  A single home only counts as one vote, regardless of how many signs they have out front.  One person, one vote.  I had a few interesting observations: Neighbors seemed to clump together and support a certain candidate.   One corner would have all McCain, the next all Obama.  Do these people move around together?  In McCain’s favor, I came across a house that had signs for all Democratic candidates for the state positions but surprisingly, a McCain For President sign.  He’s obviously convinced one Democrat to vote for him.  More humorously, Obama has at least one support who decided their whole house needed to be decorated in Obamania.  Banners hung out of every window while signs littered the lawn — that’s the kind of enthusiasm Obama has to love.  And the neighbors probably hate.  

All in all, I was actually a bit surprised at the results.  With all the talk about how Obama looks set to “turn Virginia blue”, the signs favored him by only 45 to 35.  I’ll be curious to see how my results stack up with the actual results from the election.