Obama Physics: Inertia and Gravity May Not Be in His Orbit
The point is relevant to Virginia, which since 2001 has elected two Democratic governors and a Democratic senator by close margins but re-elected George W. Bush by eight points in 2004. Virginia last went Democratic in a presidential election in 1964.
But as Kaine noted, the candidates are starting to flock to the Old Dominion in numbers that are unprecedented in recent memory. Both Sen. John McCain and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, early GOP favorites for the nomination, have been in Richmond recently. (Though there's also the matter of lobbying for the Virginia primary, which occurs a week after the "Super Tuesday" series of 17 primaries and could still be relevant in a tight race.)
"They're coming here for a reason," Kaine said. "They're coming here because they know Virginia will be playing a role in presidential politics." Obama echoed the sentiment: "Virginia is representative of a fundamental shift that is taking place in American politics," he said, neatly segueing into a campaign bullet point: "I wouldn't describe it simply as a shift from Republican to Democrat. I think it is a shift away from a sharply ideological politics to a pragmatic, common-sense, results-oriented politics."
Sabato remains skeptical.
"Virginia still leans Republican," he said. "Can it go Democratic? Sure, if there's a solid Democratic margin of victory bordering on a landslide."
Politics hasn't been reduced to a natural set of formulas–yet. But Obama's campaign could still learn something from one of Newton's dusty equations, his Law of Universal Gravitation: that all bodies attract each other in proportion to the product of their masses divided by the square of the distance between them. This only becomes relevant in cases of large masses, like the sun, the planet Earth, or the number of people secretly hoping Obama's campaign will implode.
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