40 years after Baliles proclaimed a ‘New Dominion,’ it may have finally arrived

Virginia is about to turn not one, not two, but three pages of history. Maybe even four, depending on how you’re doing the counting.

About midday on Saturday, in quick succession, Virginia will swear in Jay Jones as our first Black attorney general and Ghazala Hashmi as our first statewide officeholder of Indian heritage and the first Muslim woman elected to any statewide office in the country. Then, Abigail Spanberger will take the oath as our 75th governor, a line going back to Patrick Henry 250 years ago, but one that until now has never included a woman.

For the first time in history, none of our top three state officeholders will be a white man. These Democrats will succeed a Republican trifecta that included only one white, non-Hispanic man. 

Next week, when Spanberger makes her first formal address to the General Assembly, she’ll be joined on the dais by Speaker of the House Don Scott and the president pro tem of the Senate, Louise Lucas — the first time there hasn’t been a single white man in that traditional seating arrangement.

Virginia, long dubbed the Old Dominion, has for nearly a century periodically proclaimed itself a “New Dominion.” Gerald Baliles even invoked that phrase six times in his inaugural address, a full four decades ago. Future historians may debate when that New Dominion era began, but there’s no doubt that it’s here now.

Just what is this New Dominion? The Virginia that Spanberger takes over Saturday is quite different from the one that Baliles looked out on in 1986 and certainly different from the one that Henry presided over in 1776.

Northern Virginia is now a global capital for technologies that didn’t even exist in Baliles’ day. Almost 40% of the manufacturing jobs that existed then are gone now, forcing many small communities across Southwest and Southside to reinvent themselves, a painful process that’s still underway. Coal production in Virginia was increasing in Baliles’ day and peaked at 46.5 million tons the year he left office. Now it’s down to about 9.7 million tons, a drop of 79%. Those numbers might cheer those who care about the environment, but the decline of coal has also meant a wrenching economic dislocation in those former coal-producing counties. 

For the past quarter-century, ever since the collapse of textiles, furniture and then coal, Virginia governors have had to tend to the needs of parts of the state that have seen their traditional employers decline or die altogether. Now Spanberger is set to take office with those challenges still very much pressing in Southwest and Southside — along with new ones that have arisen in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads. We have replaced textiles and tobacco with technology, just not in the same communities, which has created stress for all of them. Those stresses today include both the spread of energy-intensive data centers (another new industry for a New Dominion) and the spread of solar energy facilities. The exponential growth of data centers, primarily in Northern Virginia, and the similar growth of solar farms in rural Virginia, has now provoked a backlash against both.

One of the great challenges Spanberger will face is that the state’s two biggest economic engines — Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads — have sputtered. Some localities there have seen more people move out than move in. The recent Old Dominion University State of the Commonwealth report documented how both regions have seen the number of jobs shrink, rather than grow. The recent federal cutbacks have only exacerbated that in Northern Virginia; the ODU report warned that to achieve the same economic growth as before, Virginia will need to create two private sector jobs for each federal job it has lost.

No other Virginia governor since Reconstruction has faced the task that Spanberger will: rebuilding the economy of the state’s biggest metro area. Some governors get a shorthand tag; Baliles set out to be “the transportation governor.” By necessity, Spanberger will be forced to become an economic development governor. Every governor is to some degree, but the task before her is a pressing one that goes beyond the normal ups and downs of the business cycle. The fundamental foundations of the economy have changed and are continuing to change, and new technologies such as artificial intelligence could change them even more. A recent report commissioned by the Virginia Chamber Foundation found that Virginia has a higher share of jobs “exposed” to AI than most states, with 35% of them potentially being at risk.

Virginia is a New Dominion, not just economically but demographically

In Baliles’ time, the state’s population center was in the Richmond suburbs and had just started to move north rather than east, drawn by the population growth in Northern Virginia. Today, the state’s population center has moved up Interstate 95 and is currently somewhere in Caroline County. By the time Spanberger leaves office in January 2030, it may have crossed into Spotsylvania County — assuming, of course, that population growth in Northern Virginia continues.

Baliles took office with a barrier-breaking ticket that included the first Black candidate elected statewide (Doug Wilder as lieutenant governor) and the first woman (Mary Sue Terry as attorney general). Spanberger takes office with a barrier-breaking ticket of her own, but in a state that is far more ethnically diverse than it was then — or ever has been.

After the initial waves of settlement in the 1600s and 1700s, immigration has generally passed Virginia by, even as newcomers to our shores reshaped much of the country. For most of the 20th century, Virginia’s foreign-born population was only about 1%. In Baliles’ day, that was starting to rise, ever so slightly. During his term, somewhere between 3% and 5% of the state’s population was foreign-born. Today, it’s about 13.6%, which might mean that Virginia today is more akin to the Virginia of the founders, just with a different ethnic mix. Then it was more common to encounter German speakers in the Shenandoah Valley than it is to encounter Spanish speakers today.

In last year’s elections, two of the six statewide candidates were born outside the U.S.: Hashmi was born in India; the Republican candidate whom Spanberger defeated, outgoing Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, was born in Jamaica. With Hashmi taking office, that means we’ll now have two foreign-born lieutenant governors in a row. Our founders would not have found that unusual because some of them were also immigrants to these shores. Virginia’s last foreign-born governor was William Fleming of Roanoke County — a native of Scotland — who briefly served in the role during the American Revolution.

Were it not for immigration, some of Virginia’s biggest communities — including its very biggest one, Fairfax County — would be losing population, which means they’d also have a shrinking labor pool, a red flag for potential employers. However, Spanberger will have to contend with a president who wants less immigration at a time when Virginia’s economy needs more. All but one Virginia governor over the past half-century has had to deal with a president of the opposite party, but none have had to deal with one so headstrong, so unpredictable and at times so vindictive as the present one. Not only do we have a New Dominion, we have an entirely new political paradigm in the country, the permanence of which is not yet known.

The immigration patterns that are remaking Virginia today are dramatically uneven across the state, which leads to an uneven understanding of the degree to which immigration is tied to economic growth. In Manassas Park, 36.6% of the population is foreign-born. In Northern Virginia overall, it’s about 28.0%. In much of Southwest and Southside Virginia, the figure is less than 1%, with Dickenson County the lowest at 0.2%. This is why Spanberger’s inaugural parade will include the Hasang Korean School Dance Team, the Cultural Center of India Bollywood Dancers and the ADAMS Center Scouts — the ADAMS Center being a cultural center for the Muslim community in Northern Virginia. Southwest Virginia will be represented in the parade by the Crooked Road Heritage Music Trail Fiddlers. 

Part of Virginia is very much the New Dominion; other parts are still demographically the Old Dominion. The differences between the two are sometimes so stark that it’s difficult for one part of Virginia to recognize the other. Sometimes their interests converge — a strong economy is good for everybody. Sometimes they don’t. Balancing those competing interests challenges every governor. 

For all these challenges, this New Dominion also comes with the promise of new opportunities that previous generations could not have conceived of (sometimes even the present ones have trouble grasping them). Autonomous vehicles are being tested in the New River Valley. Roanoke, a city built by the railroad, is now growing a life sciences cluster. A pharmaceutical cluster is rising in Richmond and Petersburg and beyond. Culturally, Virginia is now embracing some of its own people whom it would not have in previous generations. Roanoke and Blacksburg now have openly gay mayors; their sexual orientation also wasn’t an issue, more conventional municipal issues were. Last year’s campaign saw Republicans nominate the first openly gay candidate for statewide office. He lost but polled more votes than the party’s candidate for governor.

On a cold January day in 1986, Baliles declared that he and his ticketmates “welcome the exciting demands of leadership in the 1980s; we are ready — even eager — for the journey that will take us to the New Dominion.”

Today, New Dominion is undeniably here, yet still taking shape every day. Spanberger will have 1,463 of them in which to shape it anew. 

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