Reply #10: the "south" is actually five different regions.

[msanger]

An interesting article on the national election can be seen at

<http://www.massinc.org/Commonwealth/new_map_exclusive/beyond_red_blue.html>

It divides the country into ten "voting regions," five or six of which are in "the south."

Here's what it says about Virginia!

Virginia may actually be the most promising state for Democrats in the Southern Lowlands - ironically so, since a few years ago Virginia was as reliably Republican as West Virginia was reliably Democratic. One sign of the changing politics here was Democrat Mark Warner's five-point victory in the 2001 governor's race - held just two months after the September 11 terrorist attacks and at the height of President Bush's popularity. Warner was helped by the state's large black population in Southern Lowland cities such as Richmond and Virginia Beach, but he cemented his win by carrying places that had not voted Democratic for president since 1964. One major example is Southern Lowlands' Fairfax County, a source of more than 400,000 votes just outside Washington, DC, that could almost be part of Northeast Corridor except that its homes and offices are more spread out and much more recently built. It gave Bush only a 6,000-vote margin in 2000, though his father won by 10,000 votes during his losing campaign in 1992. Still, a concentration on Southern Lowlands may not be enough to swing the state: Warner also won places like the Appalachian city of Lynchburg, thanks to his much-vaunted "NASCAR strategy."