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byjohn goolrick
Rappahannock News Special Writer
Politicians who don’t study demographics—the science of knowing where the people are—often meet the same fate as General Custer, who badly underestimated the Indian population at Little Big Horn.
For three decades, Virginia has steadily moved from a largely rural economy to one that depends more now on computer chips and tourism than apples and tobacco.
The state’s growth has been explosive, particularly along the socalled Golden Crescent from Northern Virginia to Tidewater.
.Most of the new residents are people with no roots in Virginia and no prior knowledge of state politics. Their influx has continually diminished the influence of the old Courthouse crowd that once controlled the state from rural bastions.
When redistricting rolls around in J991, the full measure of the population growth in the 1980’s will practically sweep away the last vestiges of the stranglehold rural Virginia once had on the rest of the state.
^Northern Virginia will exact its revenge for all those years when it was treated as a distant disreputable cousin barely worth acknowledging.
-This year, 64 years after the Byrd Era started with the election of "Harry Flood Byrd as governor, a new era may be imminent, one in which the politics of moderation and
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