Election alters face of the South

ByABC News
November 5, 2008, 4:01 AM

MANASSAS, Va. -- The capital of the old Confederacy, a state known as the mother of presidents but that once barred interracial marriages like that of his parents, chose Barack Obama for president Tuesday.

"Virginia is no longer a southern state," says Robert Lang of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech. "The northern part is an extension of suburban New Jersey grafted on to South Carolina."

Mark Thorpe has lived in once-pastoral Loudoun County for 20 years and seen cornfields turn into subdivisions and his all-white neighborhood become an ethnic and racial melting pot of new immigrants and young professionals.

"It is as diverse as anywhere," says Thorpe, 56, a software company owner who Tuesday canvassed his Sterling neighborhood for Obama. "It was more Republican in the early days. We can see the trend is definitely moving more toward the middle or the Democratic side."

Tuesday's historic vote follows by nearly two decades Douglas Wilder's victory as the nation's first elected black governor. Obama's victory is the first by a Democratic presidential candidate since the Old Dominion voted for Lyndon Johnson in 1964. It fed on momentum built since "NASCAR Democrat" Mark Warner was elected governor in 2001.

On Tuesday, Warner defeated former Gov. Jim Gilmore for the U.S. Senate, marking the first time since 1970 the state will have two Democrats on Capitol Hill. He and fellow Democrats Sen. Jim Webb and Gov. Tim Kaine shared Warner's victory at a Democratic party in McLean. All three have made inroads in the fast-growing Washington exurbs of Loudoun and Prince William counties that President Bush won. They also chipped away at GOP advantages in rural areas.

Sarah Broadwater, 51, an Alexandria consultant, thought of her late father, who lived in the coal-mining town of Big Stone Gap in the state's southwest corner, at the moment Obama clinched Virginia. "He would be so proud of the changes in the Commonwealth," she said. "This is a night that turns a page in our history."