Meh. I'm as cynical as anyone, but this is a "just so" hindsight story. You don't need 10s of thousands of engineers near DC to get facetime with powerful officials.

My take on Amazon's political ambition was always that one main goal of HQ2 was to get 2 more US senators on their side. If they now are adding 4 instead, I don't exactly feel disproven :)