CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA--Virginia has not gone Democratic since it gave 12 electoral votes to LBJ in 1964. Now Obama has a chance of winning today's 13 electoral votes from over 5 million registered voters, and the mood in Charlottesville, beneath gray skies and brilliantly colored leaves, seems almost festive.

Around...

If campaign signs in my neighborhood tell any story, it's that Obama supporters also support the environment and labor unions , while McCain-Palin's remain mum on both subjects. But what's that clean-air-loving Democrat to do come Wednesday, when the only certainty is that we'll...

Jennifer Johnson and Sarah Johnson, friends since college rather than relatives, meet me at one of three Obama offices in Charlottesville. A reliably liberal university town in central Virginia, Charlottesville peers on all sides into rural, Republican counties. Those hinterlands have been traversed by this duo since Friday evening,...

Virginia gains about 30,000 new legal permanent residents annually, around 2 percent of the United States' total. (In comparison, the top two states, California and New York, combine for 37 percent. See here.)
Those green-card holders and their foreign compatriots living here cannot vote in a U.S. presidential...

The presidential race in Virginia is heating up--so is the environment. In the same week that an autumn heat wave brought 80º days to the Commonwealth, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a report that Arctic temperatures climbed 9º Fahrenheit above normal this fall, Greenland's ice melted at a...