Virginia Now, From Old Dominion to New Majority

For most of the twentieth century, Virginia was reliably conservative, reliably white, and reliably resistant to change. The Byrd Organization, the political machine built by Harry Flood Byrd Senior over the nineteen twenties and thirties, controlled state government with modest taxes, minimal public services, and aggressive management of the electorate through poll taxes and registration barriers that effectively excluded most Black Virginians from the ballot for decades.

The transformation that followed is one of the more striking state-level political shifts in modern American history. It began with the Voting Rights Act of nineteen sixty-five, which brought hundreds of thousands of Black Virginians onto the rolls. It continued in nineteen eighty-nine when Douglas Wilder became the first Black governor elected in the United States, a historic milestone in the state that had been the capital of the Confederacy. And it accelerated through the nineteen nineties and two thousands as the suburbs of Northern Virginia, tied to federal employment and the technology sector, drew an increasingly diverse population of workers from across the country and the world.

By twenty nineteen, Democrats controlled both chambers of the General Assembly for the first time since nineteen ninety-three. By twenty twenty, Virginia voted for a Democratic presidential candidate for the fourth consecutive time, a pattern that had not existed in the state since the nineteen forties.

Virginia today is simultaneously one of the most historically layered states in the nation and one of its fastest-changing. The plantation houses along the James River and the data centers along the Dulles Toll Road occupy the same geography, connected by the same rivers and the same insistence that what happens in Virginia tends to matter far beyond Virginia's borders.