Virginia had voted Republican at all but one of the previous seven presidential elections, largely due to its large white Washington and Richmond suburbs that received large-scale in-migration from the traditionally Republican Northeast,[1] alongside the Shenandoah Valley,[2] being amongst the first traditionally Democratic areas of the former Confederacy to turn Republican at both the presidential level and in federal congressional elections.[3] After the collapse of the Byrd Organization and the expansion of the state’s formerly small electorate via the Voting Rights Act, these trends intensified except in the heavily unionized coalfield portions of Southwest Virginia, where unlike elsewhere in the former Confederacy, many newly registered poor and working-class whites voted Democratic. In addition to voting Republican in six of seven presidential elections, the state’s Congressional delegation would gain a Republican majority as early as the 91st Congress. Nevertheless, it was 1970 before significant GOP gains occurred in the state legislature, and it was generally acknowledged that President Nixon offered no support to down-ballot Republican candidates as he was carrying the state by a landslide margin against George McGovern,[4] who lost every county or city in the state except Charles City.
^Atkinson, Frank B. (2006). The Dynamic Dominion: Realignment and the Rise of Two-party Competition in Virginia, 1945-1980. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN9780742552098.
^Evans, Rowland; Novak, Robert (October 16, 1972). "Consider Virginia: McGovern, Nixon Creating a No-Party System in South". The Miami Herald. pp. 7-A.
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