By Bob Gibson
Charlottesville political blogger

  Virginia’s political traditions are changing faster than the late Sen. Harry Flood Byrd Sr. could have imagined or tolerated.

  Byrd ruled Virginia’s dominant political organization with a tight fist from the 1920s to the 1960s.

  The Old Dominion, once pregnant with presidents and barren since Woodrow Wilson left the state a few ticks before the Civil War, has its first Roman Catholic governor in Tim Kaine, who was elected nearly four years ago.

  Now three of the four men vying to succeed Kaine are Catholic: leaving only Creigh Deeds, a Presbyterian like Wilson, the only non-Catholic in the contest.

  What’s the big deal with that, a young Virginia voter might ask.

  Not that much these days, which is a bit of a change. Religion still matters to many voters, but not in the ways it did several decades back when Catholics and any number of other minorities could count more ways they were excluded than included in top political and social circles.

  Virginia each year more resembles a Mid-Atlantic state than a traditional Southern state. The political center of the state has moved north and east as population shifts have added relatively more voters to Northern Virginia and Tidewater.

  While Buckingham County remains the geographic center of Virginia, Fredericksburg is more like the population center.

  The issues of the old South appealing to racial, ethnic and religious prejudices sound foreign and contrived to increasing majorities of Virginians.

  The heavy suburbanization of Virginia has left Fairfax County and every locality touching it the political colossus of the state, while vast portions of the remainder of Virginia resemble the sprawling Lord Fairfax more and more.

  Voting patterns also begin to mimic Fairfax somewhat while more and more non-native Virginians seek and are accepted in meaningful community leadership roles.

  Half of Virginians were born outside the state, many in states from Maryland to New York and New England. They often bring partisan predispositions with them that reflect the region from which they moved.

  One in 10 Virginians was born outside the country, a fivefold increase in the proportion of immigrants since 1970.

  An impressive 40 percent of these foreign-born Virginians are from Asia now and 36 percent are from Latin America.

  This trend is especially strong in Northern Virginia and in Charlottesville, where the University of Virginia accepts thousands of out-of-state students and Asian and Hispanic students from around the country and across the world, many of whom stay on in Virginia.

  The Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star reported March 4 that UVa has surveyed the class of 2003 and found that up to one in five non-Virginians stays on to become a long-term resident.

  The university, which has about 31 percent of its students come from other states, found that 14 percent who graduated with baccalaureate degrees still lived in the state five years later.

  A full 20 percent of graduate-degreed non-Virginia natives made the state their home five years later.

  New Virginians have accelerated the state’s trend from Southern conservative to two-party competitive. 

  Now half of the voting population, Virginians born elsewhere are not as anti-immigration as the state once was, nor are they as interested in where someone goes to church or where they were born. Having three out of four Catholic candidates for governor means little to them, just as having the same three gubernatorial candidates running as men born in other states doesn’t bother them.

  One sure sign that Byrd would be lost in today’s Virginia is Gov. Timothy M. Kaine’s legislative victory allowing him March 9 to sign a bill banning smoking in Virginia’s restaurants on Dec. 1 unless they have an enclosed and separately ventilated room.

  Virginia, a former tobacco and agricultural state, is now one of the nation’s ten wealthiest states with a service and information-based economy.

  Virginia is the first Southern state to adopt a restaurant smoking ban. Tobacco no longer rules and can’t even get a seat at the lunch table.

  Virginians are growing more diverse than in previous decades.

  Political candidates at all levels are adopting new inclusiveness in their language as voters want to see government do what works, what is practical and what does not offend the newer voters of the Old Dominion.