Unlikely Suitor

In post-9/11 New York and Virginia, some voters jilted the party line in the 2004 election.

In the 2004 presidential election, New York, the quintessential blue state, gave Democrat John Kerry a 58 percent victory. More conservative-minded Virginia predictably gave Bush a 54 percent win. Yet an analysis of presidential returns from the areas most directly affected by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon tells a different story.

According to congressional district-by-district data compiled by the political analysis firm Polidata for the 2006 Almanac of American Politics, to be published by National Journal Group in July, and The Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan online newsletter of political analysis, Bush posted some of his greatest gains in some of the unlikeliest places-such as the districts closest to Ground Zero. And in Virginia, where most regions of the state voted solidly for the president, the districts closest to the Pentagon also moved in an unexpected direction-toward Kerry.

Bush improved on his 2000 performance in every congressional district in the New York metropolitan area, but the increases were especially pronounced in the places that suffered the most casualties on Sept. 11. One such place, the 9th District in Brooklyn and Queens, experienced the wildest swing in the nation. In 2000, Al Gore won the district in a 37-point landslide, capturing 67 percent of the vote, compared with Bush's 30 percent. But in 2004, the Democratic ticket experienced a staggering erosion of support there, with Kerry winning by just a 12-point margin, 56 percent to 44 percent. A similar phenomenon occurred in suburban New Jersey and on Long Island, where three districts saw double-digit Democratic declines and two others went so far as to flip to Bush.

In Virginia, the opposite occurred. The three Northern Virginia districts nearest to the Pentagon all posted declining levels of support for Bush. Democratic Rep. James Moran's 8th District, which includes the Pentagon, delivered a 10-point swing in Kerry's direction, moving from a 57 percent Gore win to an even more decisive 64 percent Kerry victory. GOP Rep. Tom Davis' Fairfax County-based 11th District posted a five-point decline in the Republican margin of victory; the Loudon and Fairfax County-based 10th District had a four-point drop.

The trend extended throughout the Washington metropolitan area. In the District of Columbia, where the 9/11 terrorists planned to crash one of the hijacked planes, Bush lost by an even wider margin than in 2000-this time it was 89 percent to 9 percent. In Maryland, the two districts that share a border with D.C. also saw spikes in the Democratic margins of victory.

Only a Sept. 11 effect can explain Bush's gains in New York. Other factors could have contributed to his improved performance there-his steadfast support for Israel, for example, increased his popularity among Jewish voters in such places as Queens, Brooklyn and Long Island-but none alone can account for the size of the surge.

Like New York City, Washington is heavily Democratic and surrounded by close-in suburbs and smaller cities that are either hostile or indifferent to the national Republican Party. In the New York City area, Bush made significant gains in many of those places. In Northern Virginia and the Washington metro area, he lost ground.

One explanation might be that the magnitude of the 9/11 tragedy in New York, which was on a larger scale than in Washington, had a more acute effect on voting there. In the Washington area, another factor could be the prevalence of government employees.

Five of the nation's top 25 congressional districts ranked by percentage of government workers are clustered in the Maryland and Virginia suburbs that surround the District of Columbia. The unions that represent many of those employees were among the most active in working to defeat Bush. Not even the events of Sept. 11 were enough to convince them to rally around him.