Yesterday, the Virginia legislature passed a budget that once again rejected Governor Terry McAuliffe's call to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, which would have given health insurance to 400,000 Virginians who are currently uninsured. We don't have to go over all the specious arguments made by expansion's opponents, or delve into the details of the billions of federal dollars and economic benefits that the state is giving up. The question I want to address at the moment is, in a state that everyone acknowledges is trending blue, how does this happen? Particularly when even many strongly conservative states are coming around to expanding Medicaid?
At one level, the answer is that Virginia's elected Republicans are a particularly cruel bunch, who like Republicans elsewhere would happily see a poor family go without coverage if it means they can give the finger to Barack Obama. But the more structural answer lies in the way district lines have been drawn there.
First, let's look at the state as a whole. In the 2012 election, Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney in Virginia by just under 150,000 votes, or a margin of 51-47. The congressional elections were also close: Republicans got a total of 1,876,761 votes, while Democrats got just slightly less, a total of 1,806,025. Put another way, Republicans got 51 percent of the two-party vote for Congress, and Democrats got 49 percent.
Yet Republicans hold eight of the state's eleven congressional seats. As in the rest of the country, this is due to a combination of clever redistricting and the distribution of population around the state. Democrats are concentrated in Richmond, the state's largest city, and in the Washington suburbs. Republicans are more efficiently spread out over the rest of the state. Right now all five officials elected statewide-the governor, the lieutenant governor, the attorney general, and both U.S. senators-are Democrats. But even if the state keeps getting bluer, Republicans will likely continue to hold most of the congressional seats, not to mention the legislature.
The Virginia state Senate is closely divided-at the moment it's twenty-one Republicans and eighteen Democrats, with one vacant seat. But the state House of Delegates is spectacularly skewed toward the GOP: Right now there are sixty-seven Republicans and thirty-two Democrats (with one vacant seat).
So in a state that is closely divided but leans slightly Democratic, Republicans have over a two-to-one margin in the state House, which gives them one veto point where they can stop something as horrifying as insuring people of modest means. And that's why those 400,000 people are screwed.
