(I'm replying to both rayiner and tptacek here.)

I grew up in Maryland and have lived in Northern Virginia for many years so this conversation is a little weird to me.

The big drama in NoVA state politics at the moment is that the Republicans are trying to restrict the legislative session to the constitutionally-mandated 30 day length when waivers have been routinely granted for many years prior, because the Democrats gained full control of the state government in 2019 and the Republicans are trying to physically block them from getting things done in the allowed time. Not-so-coincidentally, 2019 was when Virginia finally implemented the ACA's Medicaid expansion. So at the moment the VA GOP doesn't look like the right choice if you want people who actively govern, or social services on par with a "second tier German city."

Also in 2019 there was a Democratic primary upset in Arlington after a fierce campaign where an established county prosecutor was kicked out by a more progressive candidate. This argues against machine politics in Virginia.

I'm not sure what a "good-governance Democrat" is, but I looked up Chuck Robb -- he was before my time in Virginia -- and among other things he voted to confirm Clarence Thomas to SCOTUS and was the only Democratic Senator to vote for the 1994 GOP "Contract with America." So it sounds like rayiner means "good-governance" as "siding with Republicans." If there's more to it than that then please let me know.

My own example of a "good-governance Republican" would be 2006 Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney when he signed the Massachusetts ACA-equivalent into law. But, he was tightly controlled by an overwhelmingly blue state legislature, called a RINO, and later got on board the GOP "repeal and replace" train when it became politically expedient to do so. I'm not sure why I'd vote for someone like that instead of a Democrat selling the same program. On the flip side there was Scott Brown (R) who won the special 2010 U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts and almost torpedoed the national ACA.

All the legitimate "laboratories of democracy" stuff is happening within the Democratic party. What experiments are running right now in GOP areas that make sense to continue? It seems to me that Republicans work toward different goals than Democrats, such as valuing the freedom to go without insurance, or expanding options for cars at the explicit expense of public transit, or increasing the number of assault rifles per capita. Are there any apples-to-apples comparisons of Republican vs Democratic policies that show the Republican policies as more effective achieving goals and using benchmarks that, say, a typical German citizen would consider reasonable?

There's also the issue now that the national Republican party has shown itself willing to lean hard on local Republicans to subvert elections. So for example the Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D) basically said no to all the stuff that Trump was trying to do and that was that, but over in Georgia her counterpart Brad Raffensperger (R) got roasted. If the election had really come down just to Georgia, well I don't know about you but I think Raffensperger would have "found the 11,780 votes," and even as things were, that second "audit"/recount is going to cost some taxpayers a lot of money. So until the national Republicans explicitly reject the recent anti-democratic stuff, I'd be careful about going out of your way to put Republicans into state-wide office.