Alexandria, Va.—Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D.) wants to make sure that "Virginia is Hillary Clinton territory," so he brought her out to Terry McAuliffe territory.
The perennial Clinton insider and prolific fundraiser won the 2013 gubernatorial election by about 55,000 votes out of more than 2 million cast; he won Alexandria, a city of 150,000, with more than 70 percent of the vote, giving him a 20,000-vote edge. The Washington, D.C., suburbs in Northern Virginia have almost singlehandedly transformed Virginia from a deep red state to a swing state in the past two decades and if Hillary Clinton wants to mimic President Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 success in the commonwealth, she will have to turn out the government contractors and bureaucrats who now populate the city.
"We’re born to be fighters and we’re fighting for our lives," the PA blasts out to the mostly white audience.
Alexandria is natural Hillary territory. Back in 2000, the Clintons were "dead broke"—indeed, McAuliffe spotted them the down payment on their Chappaqua mansion. Alexandria was a city of about 125,000 people with a median income of $56,000. By 2013, former New York senator and secretary of state Clinton was charging $300,000 for an hour-long speech and Alexandria was a city of 150,000 where the median household netted nearly $86,000.
About 600 to 700 fellow carpetbaggers—the Hillary camp claimed 3,000 attendees, but there was elbow room to spare—made the trek down King Street’s brick sidewalks. A dozen Secret Service agents man four metal detectors in the cordoned off block of King Street between Fairfax and Royal streets. They’re thorough, which is why the line stretches around the corner.
"They took my lucky rock. I told them it was a potato, but they said I could throw it," Charles Lehner says.
Lehner is an architect who moved to Virginia a year ago from Kuwait. He’s spent most of his career working out of the Middle East, receiving accolades from the Gulf Cooperative Council for his design of Qatar’s Faculty of Islamic Studies.
Lehner remains unperturbed by the email scandal that has engulfed Clinton in recent months.
"The whole email thing, she’s been under the gun and her testimony is going to close the door … The United States government has done very little to protect email from China or the Islamic radicals. I bet her security was as good or better," he says of the unsecured server that she used to receive and distribute classified material.
"Also she’s going to kick Putin’s ass. I can guarantee that," he says of the woman who brought a reset button to meet Russia’s ambassador in 2009. Then he broke into a dance as Taylor Swift’s "Shake it Off" played for the third time. "I love this song."
Lehner plans on moving back to Qatar to do another construction project but will cast an absentee ballot.
Bridgette Patterson, a recent transplant from San Antonio, Texas, who has driven up from Woodbridge, Va., to catch the Clinton rally, is trying to get control of her 3-yeard-old son. Her husband works as a management consultant, and she’s in finance, though on maternity leave.
"I took my son to see Obama in 2012. He was six weeks old but I flew with him so he could see history," she says. She met then-Sen. Clinton while working at Advocates for Youth, a non-profit focused on education, and says she was warm and friendly. "This is historic too, so I want them to be here."
Cabin Campbell, 55, is a lifelong resident of Alexandria. His parents moved here when he was 1. He speaks with a Southern drawl. He smokes Pall Malls, wearing a bright red shirt and $2 pin of Hillary in a red pantsuit on his shirt. He backed McCain in 2000, but has been a Democratic voter since George W. Bush won the primary. He has his problems with Clinton, namely the Iraq War vote, but is willing to overlook it. He’s surprised that his state has gone Democratic the past two presidential elections. Everyone around him remains Republican, including his Reagan Democrat parents.
"My parents are Reagan Democrats. My father’s a Pentecostal minister, so abortion, gay marriage, those are the issues," he says. "Virginia’s definitely changed demographically. People come here with more liberal tendencies."
McAuliffe stand between two TelePrompTers in front of Alexandria City Hall, a three story American flag hangs to his right. The upstate New York Democratic moneyman brags about his landmark achievements as the head of the former confederacy.
"I was the first southern governor to perform a gay marriage," he says, proudly.
Five minutes later, Clinton is at the podium gushing about how happy she is to be "out in the sunshine in such a historic setting." She’s talking about Market Square, the center of Virginia’s slave trade in the Colonial era.
She delivers a capable Democratic speech, plugging every constituency. Student loan refinancing, inequality, the gender gap in income, and everything else.
"I haven’t been shouting, but sometimes when a woman talks …" she trails off as the crowd roars. "I will not be silenced."