rough take, DC is fed by workers from Maryland and Virginia, educated in their universities and pipelined into Defense and Defense contracting.

This has been the case for a long time and those surrounding states have large Republican portions especially where many of the Universities are located in the middle of nowhere. But higher education is heavily Democratic, and doubly so in that area.

But the 2010s don't have much to do with aspirations in the intelligence community, mostly undermining those aspirations with the whistleblowing.

So even a tongue in cheek response like that is still trying to make a relation thats tough to make.