There is a great deal of political media time devoted to the Virginia gubernatorial election that takes place next week. There is also a major disconnect in the analysis of Virginia politics and what takes place there, so it’s worth pausing and reminding everyone about its unique status.
When an event happens in New York City, the scale of media coverage is so disproportionate to the issue it has historically been laughable. The media are centered in NYC, so the media focus on events in NYC as if the rest of the country cares. We don’t. A waterline break in a NYC subway station gets the scale of national media coverage as if Hoover dam collapsed; most Americans just roll their eyes.
However, because of the proximity to Washington DC, and because of where almost all the federal workers inside the DC system live, that same scale of skewed emphasis is also evident in Virginia when it comes to anything political.
Virginia politics is where the UniParty swamp creatures argue among themselves. In Virginia the elites in the DNC club debate their high-brow outlooks with the elites in the RNC club. Virginia is where the traditional DC political establishment of both clubs gather socially to pontificate about their importance in the world of everything political.
Is the whole state like this? No. However, the DC beltway is so influential and so populous the other parts of the state are essentially irrelevant to election outcomes.
As the U.S. federal government grew, so too did the swamp physically expand to make room for all the high-minded bureaucrats who run the machine. Northern and Eastern Virginia were taken over and absorbed into the swamp, the rest of Virginia was cast into the role of Oliver asking for a bit more soup.
When Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were talking about smelly WalMart people, they were really just encapsulating the reality that exists in Virginia, elites -vs- proles, they were not lying; they just said the accepted quiet part out loud and a lot more people saw it, that’s all.
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