photo by John Arundel/Local Kicks West Alexandria is an example of how changing demographics has changed the way the Old Dominion.

Outside a poll at the William Ramsey Recreation Center in West Alexandria, reporter Angela Valdez of Salon.com spoke with an Obama volunteer named Claudia Waller, 69, who has watched her community change twice in the past 50 years.

First, in the 1960s, African-Americans started buying quarter-acre lots on her street, and she was happy to see it. Then, in the past 20 years, her neighborhood shared Northern Virginia's influx of foreign immigrants. Waller was happy to see the Vietnamese and Salvadorans and Ethiopians, who, she says, all hang out at Starbucks. "All the brown people go down there and you can hear Ethiopian here, Hispanic over there," she said. "They must drink coffee all day."

West Alexandria is an example of how changing demographics has changed the way the Old Dominion votes, and not just because rapid growth in the Washington suburbs has tipped the balance of power away from the redder downstate Virginia.

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http://www.ethiopianreview.com/content/6286/print/