Below The Beltway

Time Magazine calls Prince William County the key to the Presidential race in the Old Dominion:

Virginia has become a make-or-break state for McCain, and Prince William County is its red-hot center. The site of the first and second battles of Bull Run more than 140 years ago, it now marks a new Mason-Dixon Line on the electoral map: a midpoint between the largely blue-leaning industrialized North that stretches up to Maine and the agrarian, conservative South. The western part of Prince William is old Virginia, rural horse country dotted with estates and polo fields. This end of the county helps make it the ninth richest in the U.S.; if the whole region were so wealthy, McCain would have less to worry about. But as you head east toward Washington, the antebellum mansions turn into McMansions, then give way to middle-class row houses whose shiny blue roofs gleam through the trees from Prince William Highway like giant Lego plantations.

On the other side of the tracks — literally Amtrak’s line from Washington to Richmond — the county’s eastern corridor is one of the fastest-growing areas in the state, home to a Latino population that has swelled from about 5% of the population in 1990 to approximately 20% in 2007. Along the Occoquan and Potomac rivers, the state’s northern and eastern borders, historic black neighborhoods argue for space with new developments: golf courses, strip malls, gated communities, retirement villages — many that stand half finished, caught off guard by the subprime crisis. Such bedroom communities have been the worst hit in the state by the economic downturn; before the market plunge, high gas prices and highway congestion topped the list of concerns for those commuting to Washington or the northern Virginia cities of Arlington and Alexandria. This is the new face of Virginia — and the South — one where white working-class voters are being replaced by booming Hispanic and Asian populations and white college students outnumber white seniors 21% to 13%, according to a new Brookings Institution study.

All those new voters moving into Prince William have helped make the once reliably Republican district a swing county and the linchpin for Democratic statewide victories. The county voted 52% for President Bush in 2000 and 53% in 2004. But in 2005, Prince William residents helped elect Tim Kaine, a Democrat, governor with 50% of the ballots and the next year voted in nearly identical numbers to put Democrat Jim Webb in the Senate. “If Democrats split the vote in Prince William and win big in the northern counties, they win the state,” says Mike May, a Republican Prince William County supervisor.

Even Republicans who didn’t vote for Webb in 2006 are looking at Democrats this year. Karen Krivo, a 41-year-old mother of two who until now never considered voting for a Democrat for any office, is fed up. The high price of gasoline has made commuting the 30 miles into Washington impossible for some, and the housing crisis has glutted the once booming market. “It’s a vote against President Bush and the Republican Congress’s policies,” she says. “I know we need to change, and Barack Obama provides that change.”

And I don’t think Krivo is alone in the way she feels. Prince William County is primarily a county of middle-class homeowners and it’s been hard hit by the housing crisis; in the past year alone, housing prices have fallen a rather astounding 41 percent. That combined with the spike in gas prices over the summer, have left a lot of people in the county nervous about their financial situations, and upset with an Administration and Republican Party that has seemingly done nothing to address them.

More importantly, though, it seems that the McCain Campaign in Virginia had been ignoring the county while the Obama campaign was quietly organizing:

The national headquarters of John McCain’s campaign are in northern Virginia, near the condo where he stays when he is working across the river in Washington. But McCain didn’t get around to actually campaigning in the most pivotal part of this pivotal state — exurban Prince William County — until the weekend of Oct. 18. That’s when he realized he was running about 10 points behind in a state that hasn’t voted Democratic since 1964.

(…)

Obama — who, like McCain, has made only one appearance in the county, though Joe Biden has made three — spent all summer quietly registering thousands of new voters in Prince William, which had the second largest increase by county in a state that has seen its voter rolls swell by 436,000 since the beginning of the year. The Obama campaign has made a massive push to register blacks, who make up 20% of the population, as well as Latinos and students at the four colleges in the district.

Obama, it seems, has won the ground war in Prince William and, if that translates into votes then he will probably win Virginia quite handily.