Below The Beltway

If nothing else, last week’s election results made more clear than ever that there are big differences between Northern Virginia and the rest of Virginia:

Alexandria still has its Jefferson Davis Highway and Springfield its Robert E. Lee High School, but if last week’s election showed anything, it’s that Northern Virginia is not only different than the rest of the state, it is a different state. And it’s no longer in the South.

That line now starts at the Rappahannock River, where things change — the accents, the attitudes, the pace and a comfort with the way things are. It’s what some historians call the new “grits line.” To them, it’s no surprise that the state’s northernmost welcome center on Interstate 95 is in Fredericksburg.

State politics in Richmond is still controlled by leaders south of the Rappahannock. But as Northern Virginia continues to grow, both in population and influence, the profound difference between the two Virginias is likely to become not just an uneasy alliance but a full-blown identity crisis.

Already, the fault line runs deep.

Last Tuesday, Republican George Allen won by wide margins in 92 of the state’s 134 localities but lost the race because Democrat James Webb swept the densely populated Washington suburbs. At the same time, Northern Virginians voted against the amendment to define marriage as only between a man and a woman, but the measure passed largely because people south of the Rappahannock voted overwhelmingly for it.

The divide is more than just political, its cultural as well. Outside of NoVa, Virginia is still very much a Southern state, but in the area north of the Rappahannock, its hard to tell the difference between someone from Fairfax County, and someone from, say, suburban Maryland.

And people from the two Virginias don’t seem to understand each other too well:

In interviews with dozens of Virginians on both sides of the divide, each saw the other part of the state almost as a foreign country, with an alien culture. “How come they have the bad accents and we talk fine?” asked Casey Childress, a waitress at the Pigs R Us Bar-B-Que in Collinsville, a small town near Martinsville and the North Carolina border.

That’s something Dick Reed can’t answer. Although Reed, an economist for the federal government has lived in Fairfax County for 40 years, he has never ventured across the border of Northern Virginia. Except once or twice to see Luray Caverns.

And neither side really “gets” the other.

“We don’t have a lot of tolerance for people up there. But I think we’ve got more tolerance of y’all than y’all do of us,” said Dave “Mudcat” Saunders, a Roanoke-based Democratic consultant who helped Mark R. Warner, Timothy M. Kaine and now Webb get what he calls “the Bubba vote.” “There’s a certain air of intellectual superiority up there that comes with stereotyping us as being hillbillies.”

And, politically, the differences couldn’t be more apparent:

The North-South divide is apparent in state politics. Conservatives from the southern part of the state control the General Assembly and show more disdain than empathy when they hear Northern Virginia’s pleas for money to ease traffic congestion. Northern Virginia legislators complain about all the tax dollars the area sends to Richmond, never to be seen again.

“When I brought some downstate lawmakers to help me campaign last year, they couldn’t believe what they saw: the traffic, $650,000 townhomes in my district,” said Del. David B. Albo (R-Fairfax). “They just had no clue about what it’s like to live up here.”

Since Northern Virginia is the fastest growing part of the state, its hard to believe that its influence, both politically and culturally, won’t continue to grow as time goes on. And I suspect that the border between Northern Virginia and “the real Virginia” will soon start creeping south of the Rappahannock.