Nearly three months to the day after his term as Virginia’s governor ended, Republican Glenn Youngkin stood in an unshaded corner of an office parking lot to warn dozens of conservative activists that they were in the midst of “the most important election” in the commonwealth’s 237-year history.
The question before the voters casting ballots at an early voting precinct a few yards away in the city of Leesburg ahead of Tuesday’s special election was whether to temporarily set aside Virginia’s congressional maps intended to advantage neither party and replace them with a new version that could allow Democrats to win all but one seat in the 11-member delegation in the November midterm elections.
“They want to override the voice of Virginia and push us into what is now being called the most partisan, most gerrymandered map in America, worse than Illinois, worse than California,” Youngkin warned.
Left unmentioned by the former governor was the role of Donald Trump, who instigated the nationwide redistricting war last year in an effort to preserve Republican control of Congress for the entirety of his second term, sparking a tit-for-tat between red and blue states that will see its latest skirmish decided on Tuesday, when polls close in Virginia’s redistricting referendum.
The question seems to have divided voters in the commonwealth, just five months after they overwhelmingly elected a Democratic governor, Abigail Spanberger, and gave her allies a sizable majority in the legislature’s lower house. Polls have shown a narrow lead for the side in favor of redistricting, as demands to combat Trump and his allies nationally collide with Virginia’s own political dynamics.
“Virginia remains a purplish state. It often swings from D to R and vice versa. That could happen again,” said Mark Rozell, dean of George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government.
Earlier this month, a survey his school conducted with the Washington Post found 52% of voters back the new maps and 47% are opposed – a much narrower margin than the landslide by more than 15percentage points in which Spanberger was elected to office last November. A similarly small lead for the yes vote has been reported in polls from State Navigate and Quantus Insights.
“This issue has energized the Republican base. That’s the danger for the Democrats,” Rozell said.
Democrats have portrayed the referendum as a necessary but temporary response to the GOP’s nationwide redistricting push. Aware that the party in power historically loses congressional seats in midterm elections, Trump successfully encouraged Republican-controlled governments in Texas, North Carolina and Missouri to redraw their maps in a way that imperiled up to seven Democratic-held House seats. California voters responded by approving a new map that could oust up to five Republican lawmakers in the state.
Democrats may also pick up a seat in Utah thanks to a court ruling, while Republicans could pick up two seats in Ohio after its bipartisan redistricting commission approved a new map.
With Republicans controlling the House with 217 seats to the Democrats’s 213, every vote counts, and Democrats have characterized supporting Virginia’s referendum – which would likely undo the current delegation’s split of six Democrats and five Republicans – as a way to retaliate against Trump’s machinations in other states. The commonwealth backed Kamala Harris in 2024, and Democrats have deployed ads featuring Barack Obama to sway voters. The main pro-referendum group has received more than $64m in contributions, and groups supporting the no vote have taken in around $30m, according to campaign finance records.
“It is responsive, it is temporary, and a yes vote is our way to stand up and ensure that efforts in other states do not go unmatched,” Spanberger said at a virtual rally for the yes vote on Thursday.
Seizing on the unpopularity of Trump in a state that is home to many of the federal workers whose careers have been thrown into turmoil by his layoffs and downsizing of government agencies, Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic House minority leader, told the event: “This is a critical step forward for the people of the Commonwealth of Virginia, but it has national and international implications, because we can cut Donald Trump’s presidency in half, legislatively.”
Yet there are signs that some Virginia voters are thinking less about Trump and more about Spanberger. Some of the same surveys that found the pro-referendum side with only a narrow lead recorded a drop in the governor’s popularity, and Republicans have seized on her championing of redistricting to accuse her of deceiving voters about her political moderation while on the campaign trail.
She has also been dogged by claims that she supported a host of tax measures that never made it through the legislature, prompting the governor to put out an unusual press release underscoring that she never signed any such proposals.
“The Republicans have gotten a little bit of an upper hand in the narrative, in portraying the Democrats in Richmond as lurching too far left and having misled the voters about their intentions in governing,” Rozell said.
Virginia’s right-leaning rural voters, in particular, have been energized by what they see as an “existential threat” to their congressional representation, Rozell added.
Under the new maps, four Republican-held districts would be made blue-leaning by redrawing their boundaries to include heavily Democratic areas in northern Virginia and elsewhere, with one attracting particular scrutiny for resembling the shape of a lobster.
There’s also the question of whether voters are ready to undo maps drawn though a constitutional amendment they approved in 2020 that was intended to end partisan gerrymandering. After a bipartisan commission the amendment created could not agree on the maps, they were drawn by two experts nominated by lawmakers from each party and hired by the state supreme court.
If the referendum passes, that process would be set aside through the 2030 census, a prospect that has unnerved some Democrats who see it as undermining the party’s stated focus on bolstering the country’s democratic tenets.
“We need to strengthen our democratic norms where we can. And if you have to burn one for a cause, if you’re burning a bridge in a war or something like that, it damn well better be worth it,” said Brian Cannon, a Democrat who campaigned for the voter-approved redistricting process and opposes the referendum.
Between historical trends and polls showing Democrats leading on the generic ballot, Cannon argued that the party could expect to win eight seats in Virginia in the midterms, without changing the maps.
“The question for Virginia voters is, do those extra two seats matter towards the bigger picture of taking back the House this November? And there’s just no math that says that it does matter,” he said.
James Abrenio, a Democratic appointee to the bipartisan redistricting commission that deadlocked five years ago, countered that Republicans have benefited from being able to redistrict at Trump’s demands, while states such as Virginia have to walk much more convoluted paths. Because overriding the redistricting process requires a change to the commonwealth’s constitution, the legislature has to approve it, then voters have to pass it, then the legislature has to approve it again.
“My concern is that states like Virginia are being taken advantage of because we have a much more difficult process to respond if somebody is going to be behaving in such an inappropriate way,” Abrenio said.
“You have the first time in American history where you have a sitting president who is willing to coordinate with multiple states to redistrict, not just to protect his own party, but to protect himself specifically … I think the cost of doing nothing is far greater than what could happen in 10, 20 years.”
Even if the referendum does pass, it remains the subject of a case before the state supreme court, which could overturn the result. And it’s unlikely to be the last word on redistricting this year: governor Ron DeSantis has called Florida’s Republican-controlled legislature into a special session later this month to look at changes to their maps.
Forecasters believe the GOP could potentially squeeze themselves at most three more seats from the state.
