Ben Pershing is a former reporter and editor at Roll Call, and a former reporter at the Washington Post, where his beat included Virginia politics.

Virginians: Before you go to the polls in November to elect a U.S. senator, there is a very real and terrifying fact you simply must know about Ed Gillespie.

No, it’s not that he’s a former lobbyist (though he is). Or that he worked in George W. Bush’s White House (he did), ran the Republican National Committee (that too) and has said he was “torn” between rooting for the Redskins and the Eagles (shudder). It’s far more sinister than that.


He’s from New Jersey.

Sure, Gillespie has lived for more than two decades in Virginia’s Fairfax County, where he’s raised a family, gone to church, shopped at ABC stores and paid the car tax. But much will no doubt be written between now and Election Day about whether Gillespie – the current Republican frontrunner in the race to face Sen. Mark Warner (D) – is a “real” Virginian or merely an interloper whose true heart lies in the Philly suburbs or the dreaded District of Columbia.

Warner, meanwhile, is busy telling anyone who’ll listen that Gillespie “doesn’t have many ties to Virginia.” This despite the fact that Warner – whom polls typically dub Virginia’s most popular statewide politician – is originally from Indiana.

But maybe this line of attack won’t work anyway. The commonwealth actually has quite a habit of voting for non-natives. The 2013 ballot for governor pitted Terry McAuliffe (born in New York) against Ken Cuccinelli (New Jersey). The previous year featured the Senate race between George Allen (California) and Tim Kaine (Minnesota). And in the 2009 governor’s contest, Robert McDonnell (Pennsylvania) trounced born-and-bred Virginian Creigh Deeds. In fact, McAuliffe is the fourth consecutive Virginia governor born elsewhere, and the state hasn’t had a Virginia-birthed U.S. senator since Harry Flood Byrd Jr., who left office in 1983.

Virginia isn’t alone in this trend, as recent years have witnessed the rise of the rootless candidate. President Obama, after all, was born in Hawaii to a Kansan and a Kenyan, and went on to study in California, New York and Boston before settling in Chicago. Little wonder so many cities are battling to host his presidential library.

And then there is Hillary Clinton, who dropped into New York to run for Senate in 2000, and Scott Brown, who represented Massachusetts on the Hill and now wants to do the same for New Hampshire. Sean Eldridge, the husband of Facebook mogul Chris Hughes, launched a bid for an upstate New York congressional seat shortly after buying a home there (he already owned an upstate estate, but in the wrong district). And Alex Mooney is running for a West Virginia congressional seat having just resigned as state Republican Party chairman — in Maryland.

Every circumstance is different. Cuccinelli and McDonnell both grew up in Virginia. McAuliffe, Warner and Kaine moved there as adults, as did Gillespie, who has acknowledged having some divided loyalties.

“Thinking of becoming skins fan, abandoning the Eagles. torn about it tho,” Gillespie tweeted in December 2012, adding: “always considered switching allegiances to be character flaw of sorts. but RG III so good, on and off the field. and have lived in NoVa longer than s.jersey, but to be consistent would i have to root for Nats, Wizards and Caps too?!”

Gillespie’s neighbors may be wrestling with the same questions, as Virginia has increasingly become a home for transplants. According to data from the 2010 American Community Survey, roughly 37 percent of Virginia residents were born in other states and more than 11 percent were born abroad.

But those ratios can vary widely from Lee County to Loudoun. A 2009 Pew Research Center report dubbed Virginia a “High Magnet/High Sticky” state, typical of those that “have split personalities, with some communities that have high shares of transplants and others that have large proportions of residents who were born locally.”

Many of the charges that were lobbed against McAuliffe last year will likely be targeted at Gillespie this time. McAuliffe, Republicans alleged, was a “Washington insider and a Virginia outsider” who didn’t know enough about the state’s government to even name all of its Cabinet posts. Maybe he should have run for governor in New York or Florida instead, they said. McAuliffe won narrowly in November, though there’s no way to know for sure whether those attacks mattered a lot, a little or not at all.

Then there’s the fact that Gillespie and McAuliffe are both, in addition to being millionaires several times over, longtime denizens of Northern Virginia, which some residents of Southside or Southwest Virginia view as only slightly more familiar than Mars.

Gillespie and McAuliffe’s home county has almost nothing in common with Bristol, which is 350 miles away – nearly as far west as Detroit – and has a median household income of $31,000, compared with $109,000 in Fairfax.

During the 2008 presidential election, Nancy Pfotenhauer, an adviser to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and a Fairfax County resident, made news by suggesting on MSNBC that blue-leaning NoVa wasn’t the “real Virginia.” Asked to clarify, Pfotenhauer said: “I mean ‘real Virginia’ because Northern Virginia is where I’ve always been, but ‘real Virginia’ I take to be the — this part of the state that is more Southern in nature, if you will. Northern Virginia is really metro D.C.”

In 2009, Cuccinelli told Shenandoah County Republican Party members that they represented “the real Virginia,” echoing Sarah Palin’s controversial references to “the real America.”

Which takes us back to the original question: Is Gillespie a “real Virginian” – whatever that means? Voters probably won’t care. But rooting for two NFC East teams? That could be a problem.