Virginia looked a lot like a blue state on election night last November, when Abigail Spanberger beat her Republican opponent in the governor’s race by 15 points. It’s looking a bit more purple now, as Spanberger’s approval ratings have dropped below 50 percent in one recent poll, an unusually poor showing for a governor so new in their term. And Democrats’ push to gain another congressional seat through redistricting, part of a flurry of mid-decade gerrymandering touched off by Texas’ successful bid to add five more Republican-leaning districts, is suddenly looking like a nail-biter.
A recent poll published by the Washington Post showed only a slight majority saying they support Democratic efforts to redraw congressional districts. And opponents of the efforts, including rural Republicans who fear permanently losing power, are more motivated than supporters, the poll’s authors say. The proposal to redraw the maps will ultimately be decided by a ballot question, with early voting underway and election day April 21.
“The intensity is on the side of the opposition,” says Mark Rozell, a George Mason University political scientist who conducted the Washington Post poll. “Our polling data clearly show that opposition is driving much stronger intensity overall. In part, it may be that for rural Virginians this is kind of an existential crisis in terms of their representation.”
The campaign has gotten ugly. Some voters have received mailers urging them to vote “no” on the ballot question that feature old quotes from President Barack Obama suggesting he’s opposed to the effort. Obama has criticized partisan gerrymandering in the past, as have most politicians, but he has urged Virginians to vote “yes” on the current measure in response to Republican efforts around the country. Civil rights leaders have criticized the mailers as a GOP-backed misinformation campaign.
Gerrymandering is common. But elected leaders over the past year have been uncommonly blunt about the partisan impulses driving their efforts. President Donald Trump last year urged the Texas Legislature to redraw maps in ways that would help Republicans in the 2026 midterms. California responded by adding five more Democratic-leaning districts of its own via a ballot referendum approved by voters. Missouri and North Carolina also redrew maps with boundaries that are favorable to Republicans. Indiana notably declined to follow suit despite Trump’s urging and despite Republican control of state government. Republican-led Florida may begin a special legislative session later this month to consider new maps ahead of the midterms. In that context, Democrats say, the only option is to fight back or surrender the political future.
“Both [parties] have an argument,” Rozell says. “The Democrats clearly understand that they cannot disarm in this redistricting battle nationally, and that the stakes are enormous given what’s happening in Washington.” Still, given Democrats’ past criticism of Republican partisan gerrymandering, “It does have the air of hypocrisy to some,” Rozell says.
Is there a position on the issue that doesn’t smack of hypocrisy? Perhaps not. As a general prospect, the idea of taking politics out of redistricting is pretty far-fetched. Virginia established a redistricting commission in 2020 to draw new maps, composed of eight legislators split between Republicans and Democrats and eight “citizen commissioners.” They were charged with drawing lines that would provide proportional representation for competing interests, protect the voting rights of minorities, preserve social or cultural “communities of interest,” and would not, “when considered on a statewide basis, unduly favor or disfavor any political party.” The commission couldn’t come to an agreement, and the state Supreme Court ended up drawing the maps, which were meant to last for a decade until the next census.
“It didn’t necessarily work out the way you would want it to work out,” says Virginia state Del. Delores McQuinn, a Democrat who served on the redistricting commission. In the current scenario, she says, there’s no hiding behind a veneer of nonpartisanship.
“I’m extremely proud of Democrats fighting back,” she says. “So often we take the moral high ground and say, ‘OK, we don’t want to do it this way.’ The bottom line is, from my perspective, this is not just about Virginia, this is about our nation. This is about generations to come.”
