In 2004, Virginia was surprisingly close. Sure, Mark Warner beat George Allen, Jr., but one could ascribe that to Allen running a dreadful campaign against an unusually-strong challenger. 2008? Obama might have simply been the ideal Democrat for winning Virginia. Just check my maps that compare Eisenhower to Obama... in the 1950s the Republicans won the vast majority of college-educated voters* and in 2008 and later Democrats won the college-educated vote. (OK, college was largely a WASP preserve as late as the 1950s for the middle-aged and older; it is not so now. Can anyone tell me what proportion of Ivy League admissions are Jewish? That has to be very high now). Although college-educated people are not as strongly D today than they were strongly R in the 1950s, they are a much larger and more important part of the electorate now.
Virginia was more R than the nation as a whole in Presidential elections from 1952 to 2012. That is over.
*Goldwater won the majority of college-educated voters in his blowout loss to LBJ in 1964!
According to this (
http://news.gallup.com/poll/9454/election-polls-vote-groups-19601964.aspx), Johnson won college-educated voters 52-48%.
