Virginia is for lovers Democrats.

After Glenn Youngkin’s dramatic gubernatorial victory two years ago, Republicans looked to the commonwealth as a place that could bring good news on Tuesday by winning the upper chamber to give the party a clean sweep of both houses and the executive.

Instead, Democrats added two seats to their majority in the state Senate and regained control of the House of Delegates by adding at least three seats. The disappointment extended downballot, which helped Youngkin win in 2021 as a result of school-board overreach. As the Associated Press points out in an article on school boards, “In Spotsylvania County, in the far outer suburbs of the Washington, D.C. area, all four GOP-endorsed candidates lost to more liberal candidates.” Bob Anderson upsetting Loudon County commonwealth attorney Buta Biberaj (D-Soros) stands as the exception that proves the rule: This is not your father’s Virginia — it’s your grandfather’s.

“I think we can attribute this to the dominance of NoVa,” explains one of the state’s most knowledgeable political observers, Ross Mackenzie. “I can remember … when Fairfax was by far the dominant Republican locality in Virginia. It’s now solidly Democratic. Arlington’s Democratic, Alexandria’s Democratic — that’s where all the population is. I liken it a little bit to Illinois, where it’s Chicago and the rest of the state. Here it’s NoVa and the rest of the state with the exception of Tidewater, which is also going Democratic these days. Virgnia Beach is holding out. Primarily it’s the rise of the political strength of the urban areas in Virginia. Richmond is solidly Democratic, Northern Virginia has now become Democratic, and Hampton Roads is also going that way.”

Mackenzie succeeded James J. Kilpatrick as editor of the afternoon Richmond News Leader, and then when it merged in the 1990s with the Richmond Times-Dispatch, he became its editor. Since he arrived in Richmond in 1965, he has witnessed a Democrat state turn Republican and then Democrat again.

The political pirouettes recall Thomas Frank’s book from two decades ago, What’s the Matter with Kansas? Frank picked his home state, “a place where the political shift has been dramatic,” as his case study, calling it “a reliable hotbed of leftist reform movements a hundred years ago that today ranks among the nation’s most eager audiences for bearers of backlash buncombe.”

Just as Kansas went from the home of Appeal to Reason and Sockless Jerry Simpson to voting Republican in 14 straight presidential elections, Virgina transformed from home of the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition to electing a transgender state senator and witnessing a candidate who doubled as an online exhibitionist for tips coming within less than 1,000 votes of the House of Delegates (advice to Virginia Republican losers: mutilate your genitals or upload to Chaturbate if you want to win in 2025 — it’s not too early to start an OnlyFans). Latin American immigration hitting Virginia earlier and heavier than most states not on the southern border, government employees becoming more plentiful, and once middle-class counties becoming among the nation’s wealthiest contributed to this political shapeshifting.

Given that the political ground moved twice within six decades in Virgina rather than Kansas’ once in a century, the commonwealth takes the prize as the Schizoid Capital of American Politics.

“When I came here in ’65, the first big election that I participated in as editor was the ’69 Linwood Holton election,” Mackenzie recalls. “He was the first Republican to win the governorship ever. When we — the afternoon News Leader — endorsed Holton, it was the first time the paper had endorsed a Republican for governor in its history.”

The state voted Republican from 1968 through 2004. Shortly thereafter for the GOP, something Macaca their way came. Mackenzie calls the incident in which Sen. George Allen’s enemies invented a racial slur out of a word few had heard and fewer still regarded as hateful as an “early example of the way the Democrats are better at polarizing a campaign. They’re making the campaign not about the issues but about some bizarre thing that nobody else had ever heard of before. Suddenly there we are, and you’re defeating a very good candidate.”

It has gone blue for president ever since. Despite all the shifting, the longest-serving daily newspaper editor in Richmond history calls the trend likely irreversible. Democrat imposition of sideshow issues on the circus — abortion serving as a big one this time around — remains. Mackenzie concedes that recent Republican dysfunction in the House of Representatives and weariness of Donald Trump among suburbanites open to voting GOP also played a role in the recent local defeats.

Ironically, today’s Virginia Democrats, though jettisoning the Jefferson-Jackson-Lee Dinners and similar vestiges of their party, owe their current success partly to Harry Byrd and others of his ilk.

“One of the anomalies regarding Virginia are these off-year elections,” the longtime editor notes. “This is a hangover from the old Byrd machine days, when the Democrats at that time didn’t want to have the state elections held with the regular quadrennial elections when other states were voting and in-line with the national electoral calendar. In Virginia they took this exception to participating in the national political calendar so that you would not get these heavy turnouts you get in a national election.”

Democrats, he says, show a greater ability to turn out their voters and hijack the debate toward contrived issues or ones better suited to them during these elections isolated from federal races. Certainly the economic issues that in the past might motivate a state boasting four of the 10 wealthiest counties to vote Republican no longer hold such sway.

And that brings the conversation back to What’s the Matter with Kansas? Rich Virginia Democrats could tell you that blue-collar Kansas Republicans aren’t the only ones who no longer vote their economic interests.