The New Dominion – The 20th Century Elections that Shaped Modern Virginia
John G. Milliken & Mark Rozell, editors
Book Abstract
The book explores the politics of Virginia in the latter half of the 20th Century using six selected elections to explore the demographic and economic changes that drove the transformation of the state’s politics. Virginia’s Constitutional limitation of a Governor to one four-year term guarantees frequent elections at the state level with an ever changing cast of characters.
It opens with a look at the segregationist Democratic Organization that had dominated state politics beginning at the close of the 19th Century and covers the changing political coalitions that marked the period 1949 – 2001, closing with elections in which the political parties more resembled their national counterparts. Tying these elections together, the book concludes that these changes had not come suddenly in the 21st Century but instead had been building inexorably during the prior fifty years, driven by wildly disparate population growth in different areas of the state and an expanded electorate begun in the civil rights movement and more recently, by newly arrived immigrants.