St. Mary's, Calvert and Stafford counties went for McCain.

Prince William, Loudon and Fairfax Counties are all historically Republican, and tend to vote that way in local and state elections. 2008 was, however, a bad year for the GOP in Virginia. I doubt that Obama's performance will be replicated in those counties in 2012.

Morris, Hunterdon and Somerset counties, NJ, are overwhelmingly Republican, and there is no significant federal government presence here. Much of the wealth comes by way of the pharmaceutical industry and the area is host to many of NYC's bedroom communities.

In short, the answer is yes. These are all "lean" or "solid" democratic counties on the Maryland side. For those of us who live in this area, this is well known. We've talked about the wealth and sprawl for years surrounding DC as a direct result of government largesse. It's really terrible.

Just a thought - but a country w/ limited government has been shown to be the best of all possible worlds. Your political ideology, on the other hand....has been shown to be horrible.

The Utopian dreams reside on your side of the isle.

Also, your insightful statement is actually silly. Your point is well known - it's why the Founders made the location of the permanent capitol such a big deal and also why it is never supposed to have any voting rights.

A country with a limited central government is not some imaginary place where John Galt resides. It is the USA as its Constitutional framework provides for. Our present predicament is directly and easily traceable to to those geniuses (to themselves) who were known as Progressives. Their ideas have been proven to be horrible in comparison to the Founders (not surprising though). A federal system that limited government's control and pushed it down to the lowest level possible would result in more diffuse political power. To argue otherwise is silly. Would there still be profiteers in the Federal capitol - absolutely. Would they wield the unbelievable power they do now? Absolutely not.

It has been pointed out before, but needs to be pointed out again, that these studies are faulty because they rely on medians, rather than on more nuanced measures of wealth. The counties in question are not super-rich so much as they are uniformly affluent. There is more money in certain counties in California, Illinois, and New York, by a long shot, but because those counties have a mix of rich and poor, the median falls lower than it does for the Washington metro area, where counties are very uniform in their income distribution.

Take a drive through Malibu, California, and then take a drive through Arlington, Virginia, and see if there is any way you can make the argument that the latter is more affluent than the former. The numbers aren't the whole story.

The government is a giant sucking behemoth killing the country as a whole.

I was transferred to DC in 2000, at the time, before the tech bust, the WP and news casts in DC were filled with lamentations by the bureaucrat class how the new money of the Dulles area was taking over the committees and other positions in DC society. Of course, after the tech bust, we learned most of the Dulles wealth was all con and fraud with many doing the perp walk. DC corrupts all, innovator to legislator.

From Tips My Dad Says: (makezine.com)

My father (a lawyer) told me, "Company culture is driven from the top - if it's the people who make the product, you're good; sell the product, you're ok; if the accountants take over, look for another job; and if the lawyers take over, run as fast as you can!" - Alden Hart

==================
It's not so much that we are over run with law school graduates, it is that more and more, they've never done anything else. Never produced anything of value, never provided benefit to others, nor even practiced law where they represent any but the wealthy.

And sadly, if you follow the higher ed discussions, we learn that many go to law school simply because having received a useless (in economic sense) liberal arts degree, they'v no better idea what to do with themselves.

As someone who lives in one of the aforementioned (VA) counties, I think that there might be a bit differently explanation for this

The DC metroplex is peculiar insomuch that a tremendous amount of poverty is centered - not only in a unique county in the metroplex - but in a unique state/district. So, the lion's share of all the professionals and business owners live in the VA & MD counties, we have all the poverty that is associated with any large urban area, concentrated primarily in one location.

You also have another dynamic at play in Fairfax, Loudoun and Prince William counties where zoning restrictions make it very difficult for "poverty" to concentrate. And, a significant percentage of all three of those counties is devoted to agriculture - not farming per se, but livestock and horses in particular. The vast majority of those horse farms are owned by people who have had absolutely nothing to do with government - and many of them aren't even native to the Hunt Country.

I would suggest that if the metro Chicago area was broken into multiple counties, with South Chicago being in Cook county and Lake View and the other northern Chicago communities being in another county, you would see the exact same effect.

Also, if Atlanta's Fulton county didn't extend so far north (covering what used to be known as "Milton County"), I also have no doubt that the country containing Alpharetta and John's Creek would EASILY be one of the wealthiest counties in the country.