National Journal - August 12, 2007

Is North Carolina the New Virginia?

By Patrick Ottenhoff

nyone looking for a meal in Wake County, N.C., will get a taste of how quickly the community is changing. In western Raleigh, a joint called Ole Time serves traditional Carolina-style barbecue, made with what proprietor Jerry Hart calls the two most important ingredients: "time and patience." Ole Time is a symbol of what Wake used to be. Five miles away, in Cary, is a symbol of what Wake is becoming: California-based grocery chain Trader Joe's sells sushi and organic snacks to the throngs of new Wake residents who have neither the time nor the taste for slow Southern cooking.

Wake is a county in transition. In the past 20 years, it has evolved from a sleepy bedroom community to a national biotech hub and a magnet for health research. Across the county, farms are being replaced by clusters of town houses, and woods are being cleared for office parks. Wake's current population of 755,000 is expected to grow 50 percent in the next 15 years, according to Ferrel Guillory, director of the Program on Public Life at the University of North Carolina's Center for the Study of the American South.

This rapid sprawl probably would seem familiar to anyone who knows Fairfax County, Va., another mid-Atlantic tech haven. As recently as the 1970s, large swaths of Fairfax County were still pasture. "Tysons Corner was fields and farms," AOL Vice Chairman Ted Leonsis recalls. "Today, there's more office space in Tysons Corner than in Miami."

Fairfax has become the economic engine of Virginia, but it has also emerged as the commonwealth's most pivotal voting bloc. It now provides one of every seven votes cast in Virginia. And a once reliably Republican electorate in the county has trended away from the GOP, and tipped the state into the Democratic column in last year's U.S. Senate contest.

In the 1990s, at the height of its tech frenzy, Fairfax was still considered a Republican-leaning county, but hints of its changing politics were emerging. And now Wake seems to be in much the same phase -- politically as well as economically -- that Fairfax was in 10 to 15 years ago. Like Fairfax, Wake will almost certainly play an increasingly important statewide role as its population continues growing faster than that of the state as a whole. And, 10 to 15 years from now, its voters could tip North Carolina into the Democrats' column in presidential elections.

Already, Wake is following Fairfax's pattern. North Carolina's recent Senate elections illustrate the point. In 2002, Republican Elizabeth Dole beat Democrat Erskine Bowles by 10 percentage points in Wake County as she rolled to a 9-point victory statewide. Two years later, Bowles, in a second try, added 76,953 votes to his tally in Wake and won the county by 4 points over Republican Richard Burr, who won statewide by only 5 points.

In Fairfax, the process has gone further, as Virginia's 2006 Senate race showed. To be sure, it was a tough year for Republicans. But Republican incumbent George Allen still managed to carry all of non-Fairfax by 55,394 votes. It was Fairfax County, which he lost by 66,723 votes, that threw him into the losing column. The county essentially delivered the election -- and control of the Senate -- to the Democrats.

When Allen ran for governor in 1993, he carried a Fairfax County that was far friendlier to Republicans. "A fair characterization of Fairfax at that time was a moderate, competitive political jurisdiction, but the default was Republican," recalls Democrat Gerry Connolly, now chairman of the county Board of Supervisors. Fairfax was mostly wooded, white, and conservative. Wake was even less developed. "On the fringes of Raleigh, there were a lot of tobacco-growing farms," Guillory says. "All of that is long gone, overshadowed by construction, new housing, new office buildings."

What happened was that both communities struck gold in the form of government funding and a burgeoning technology sector. "During the Reagan years, and accelerating in the Clinton years," Connolly says, "the practice of the federal government to outsource more and more, especially of its technology work, helped create an industry in Fairfax that has just blossomed."

Major federal contractors like Booz Allen Hamilton, General Dynamics, and SAIC set up their headquarters in Fairfax. They, in turn, subcontracted work to what Connolly calls "technology specialty" firms, which then hired professionals such as lawyers and accountants. A snowball effect ensued. Fairfax welcomed 103,925 new jobs "over a 15-year period ending in 2005," according to a December 2006 report by Monthly Labor Review. "No other county in the Washington area came close."

Wake's growth was less directly sparked by government. In 1959, North Carolina founded the Triangle Research Park on the border of Wake and Durham counties to harness the brainpower and resources of the three major research universities in the area. That helped lure multinational tech firms. Pharmaceutical companies such as GlaxoSmithKline, telecom giants such as IBM, and software powerhouses such as SAS all employ thousands of workers in Wake today.

High-tech workers are transforming Wake. Subdivisions are replacing tobacco fields in towns like Cary, which natives joke is an acronym for "Containment Area for Relocated Yankees." The ex-Yankees, like new voters in Wake and Fairfax in general, come in three varieties. First are the office workers and their young families, people who moved from the Midwest and Northeast to freshly built outer suburbs. Many identify as Republicans. But, as Wake County GOP Chairman David Robinson points out, "it's not a socially conservative Republican, generally, that is relocating here."

Second are what AOL's Leonsis calls members of the "creative class," young techies who write computer programs or research health policies and tend to be open to new ideas. "They are not radical social liberals like you'd find in San Francisco," said Joel Kotkin, a presidential fellow at Chapman University, "but tend to a moderate, pragmatic fiscal conservatism with a basically libertarian approach to social issues."

Both of these groups are "very well educated," says Republican Rep. Tom Davis, whose district includes most of Fairfax. Connolly agrees. "Twenty-seven percent of my constituents have a master's degree or better," Connolly points out.

These groups share another important trait, as a top Democratic strategist familiar with Virginia puts it, "They don't vote 'Democratic'; they vote 'pragmatic.' " Everyday quality-of-life issues are the biggest influence on their voting, observers say. "Education is at the top of their minds," said state Rep. Grier Martin, a Democrat who defeated a GOP incumbent in a northern Wake district in 2004. "They're [also] worried about transportation because they are stuck in traffic," he adds.

A third group is composed of the low-skilled laborers who build homes, mow lawns, and clean offices; they fit naturally into the Democratic coalition. But the first two groups -- the 30-somethings with children and the "creative class" -- are not a lock for Democrats.

Davis argues that candidates who focus on gay rights and abortion will do less well in these high-tech counties of the South than ones who stress government efficiency and encourage commerce. Guillory sums up the voting mentality of these new residents: "They'll vote for Democrats, as well as Republicans, who they see as fostering the kind of government and the kind of mixture of fiscal prudence but expanded public services that they desire."

In Fairfax, those candidates have been mostly Democrats in recent elections, regardless of whether the contest involved a county post or the presidency. When Fairfax voted for Allen for governor in 1993, Republicans had a 6-4 majority on the county board of supervisors. Today, Democrats have a 7-3 majority. Democrats have "picked up five House of Delegates seats in Fairfax County in that time period," Connolly brags. In Wake, Democrats have flipped three state House seats in the past two elections.

On the presidential level, where voting habits most closely reflect attitudes toward the national parties, Wake is also following Fairfax's trajectory. Fairfax voted for the Republican presidential nominee for 36 years, until John Kerry broke that streak in 2004. Kerry lost Wake by 2 points, but he improved 5 points upon Al Gore's 2000 tally in the county; the state as a whole remained steady in its support for George W. Bush, giving him 56 percent in both elections.

Could Fairfax's clout turn Virginia into a blue state for the 2008 or 2012 presidential election? If that's a possibility, as some observers think, then both national parties might want to keep in mind that Wake is following much the same route as Fairfax and running just 10 to 15 years behind.

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