RESTON, VA — They say everyone's vote is important in a presidential election, but residents of Reston and Fairfax County take note: your vote is really, really important in determining whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump takes Virginia's 13 electoral votes -- and, possibly, the entire election as a result.

Virginia is considered a vitally important swing state. Ever since Lyndon Johnson's landslide defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964, the state hadn't voted for a Democrat in the White House until Barack Obama came along. As a result, Democrats know it's going to be a battle to turn the heavily divided Commonwealth blue, and Republicans know that they can't count on the state's vital 13 electoral votes as a given anymore.

In 2012, Obama defeated Republican candidate Mitt Romney by 1,971,820 votes to 1,822,522 votes, showing just how deeply polarized Virginia is. And if you look at a district-by-district map of the state, it looks mostly red. So how did Obama pull off the win?

Big thanks goes to Fairfax County. Out of the 3.8 million votes statewide, 536,701 came from Fairfax County residents, according to the county's official elections site. That's 14 percent of the entire Virginia vote. And considering 60 percent of Fairfax County voters picked Obama, the president owes a lot to voters in the county for helping him take Virginia's 13 electoral votes.

Obama certainly didn't need Virginia to win the election after scoring an electoral landslide, and Hillary Clinton might not either -- she appears to have a large lead nationwide as well as in Virginia. But you never know what can happen in the weeks up until election day, and no matter what polling figures say, no one knows what the results will be until everyone actually heads to the polls, especially in an unconventional election like this.

Donald Trump will need to grab some swing states from Clinton in order to win the election, and Virginia is one that is vulnerable. There are 739,223 registered voters in Fairfax County -- five times the margin of victory for Obama in Virginia in 2012 -- and the largest voting district in the county is Reston's Hunter Mill district with 81,540 active voters.

So when Reston and Fairfax County residents head to the polls on Nov. 8, they may have a bigger influence on the outcome of this election than most people.

Image via U.S. government

