By Bob Gibson
Charlottesville political blogger

    Nearly two weeks after the longest presidential campaign in history concluded, the results of this November’s elections in Virginia still leave questions about where this state is politically and where it might be going.

  Virginia is a purple state—no longer solid red nor blue—in statewide elections and may still be trending a little blue toward the Democrats, but only slightly.

  Republican Attorney General Bob McDonnell is the front-running candidate of the four men vying for governor next year.

  The other three—state Sen. R. Creigh Deeds of Bath County, Delegate Brian J. Moran of Alexandria and former Bill Clinton top political money man Terry McAuliffe—are raising gobs of cash to engage in the equivalent of a family feud: a June Democratic primary with few limits on excess.

  After all, relatively low-turnout party primaries are dysfunctional family affairs in which participants try to convince their party’s regular base voters that the other guys on the primary ballots are the family’s too-rich, too-poor or too-weird uncles who can’t be trusted with the family’s fortunes.

  Deeds, Moran and McAuliffe are likely to emerge from the primary poorer, bloodied and perhaps not too willing to kiss and make up.

  Deeds and Moran should have little trouble painting rich-man McAuliffe as “the unVirginian” to whom they will each gladly and laughingly keep sending copies of the map of Virginia. McDonnell’s communications director, Tucker Martin, already has suggested sending McAuliffe a map.

  McAuliffe is to Virginia politics what Deeds is to Alexandria and Moran is to Danville—slightly foreign sounding and mostly unknown.

  McDonnell can sit and wait as the Republican nominee apparent, unchallenged as he tailors political rhetoric safely toward the middle and acts as attorney general, a post he won over Deeds three years ago by 360 votes statewide after a recount.

  The only threat to McDonnell between now and June is President-elect Barack Obama, who might just pick his fellow Democrat and good friend Gov. Timothy M. Kaine for a post in Washington that Kaine would have a hard time saying “no” to, say U.S. Attorney General or Secretary of the Interior.

  Kaine says he has told the president-elect not to pick him and to let him finish his term as governor in January of 2010, but Obama has not named a cabinet yet. When a president calls, people listen.

  If Kaine were to leave office early for a federal appointment, Lt. Gov. William T. Bolling, a Hanover County Republican, would become governor.

  Bolling already has a handshake deal with McDonnell in his pocket that guarantees the attorney general would support him for governor in 2009 just as Bolling has pledged to back McDonnell for governor next year if Kaine finishes out his term.   

  Unable to succeed himself as governor for a second straight term, Kaine would be free in two Januaries either to go to Washington or, more likely perhaps, to become president of Virginia Commonwealth University.

  Virginia’s first Democratic presidential election victory in 44 years is no guarantee of a continuing trend.

  Both parties are changing and the state’s electorate is changing even faster.

  As Virginia’s population becomes more diverse, more foreign-born and full of new and expanding cultural identities, the politics of playing to the base becomes less and less a winning proposition.

  The top five countries of birth for foreign-born Virginians are El Salvador, Mexico, Korea, Philippines and India. As the demographics people at the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service like to point out, 40 percent of the 1 in 10 Virginians born abroad came from Asia, 36 percent from Latin America, 13 percent from Europe and 9 percent from Africa.

  Four in 10 Virginians were born in other states, and many moved to Virginia from New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, North Carolina and Florida.

  The parties and candidates seen by the five in 10 Virginians born outside the state as less than welcoming are failing to count the voters of the future.

  Political leaders are, after all, supposed to be able to count.