Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger has pursued a maximalist partisan agenda since being sworn into office. She is making housing, healthcare, and energy all more expensive. But nothing she has done so far is as insulting as the language her party attached to its ballot referendum to disenfranchise millions of rural Republican voters this April.
Six years ago, Virginia voters overwhelmingly passed a Constitutional Amendment creating a bipartisan Virginia Redistricting Commission. That commission drew a congressional map that was objectively fair. In 2024, when Vice President Kamala Harris won 52% of the vote to President Donald Trump’s 46%, the resulting congressional delegation was 55% Democratic (six seats) and 45% Republican (five seats).
It could not be fairer than that.
FIRST 2026 PRIMARIES REVEAL TROUBLE FOR INCUMBENTS
Now Spanberger and her Democratic Party majorities in the Virginia House and Senate intend to change the commonwealth’s congressional map radically in a distinctly unrepresentative manner. By cramming as many rural Republican voters as possible into one western congressional district, and extending the reach of overwhelmingly Democratic suburban Washington, D.C. voters far into rural Virginia, Democrats have changed a fair and representative 6-5 congressional map into a lopsided and undemocratic 10-1 Democratic advantage.
Voters in deep blue Arlington County, across the river from DC, would select congressmen for voters in deep red Augusta County on the West Virginia border. Voters in deep blue Fairfax County would be in the same district as voters in the Shenandoah Valley. There is no logical or policy reason for these changes. The voters in the new districts share no media markets and live hours apart. These changes would only be made for purely partisan reasons.
To add insult to injury, Spanberger and her Democratic allies have written the language that appears on the ballot in the most dishonest and partisan way possible. Instead of admitting that they want to throw out bipartisan maps and use partisan ones, the description on the ballot asks, “Should the Constitution of Virginia be amended to allow the General Assembly to temporarily adopt new congressional districts to restore fairness in the upcoming elections, while ensuring Virginia’s standard redistricting process resumes for all future redistricting after the 2030 census?”
Fairness? There is nothing “fair” or honest about taking a map that matches the partisan outcome of the last presidential election and replacing it with a map that favors Democrats by a 10-1 margin.
Virginia Democrats claim, like children, that since Trump “started it” by calling on Texas to change their maps, Democrats should retaliate by changing their maps, too. But this argument ignores two facts. First, before Texas moved to change its map, the states with the most gerrymandered maps were all Democratic. Despite only 55% of voters choosing Democrats in 2024, 82% of Illinois House seats went to Democrats. In California, 83% of House seats were under Democratic control while Democrats only got 59% of the vote statewide. In New Jersey, 75% of House seats belong to Democrats, while the party secured only 52% of the seats statewide.
LESS REGULATION, NOT MORE, WILL LOWER HOUSING COSTS
Second, the Census Bureau has admitted it bungled the 2020 Census, overcounting people in Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Rhode Island (all Democratic states), while undercounting in Texas, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas (all Republican states), costing Republicans six House seats. None of these facts made their way onto the ballot wording of Spanberger’s proposed Virginia constitutional amendment.
Democrats nationally, not just in Virginia, have been asking themselves how they lost rural America and what they can do to get it back. Perhaps the party ought to consider that disenfranchising millions of rural voters with blatantly partisan congressional maps is a step in the wrong direction.