No matter who wins Virginia’s redistricting referendum today, the message Democrats are sending to rural Virginians will last for decades. By backing an amendment to the Virginia Constitution that effectively disenfranchises half the state, Democrats are telling voters outside Virginia’s most populous urban counties that instead of trying to win their support, they would rather rig the election so some votes don’t count at all. The move may pad Democrats’ numbers in Congress for the next six years, but it should and probably has permanently damaged the party’s relationship with rural voters.
Six years ago, two-thirds of Virginia voters approved a constitutional amendment that took the power to draw the state’s congressional map away from politicians in Richmond and gave it to the new Virginia Redistricting Commission. The commission drew an objectively fair map. In 2024, Democrats won six of Virginia’s 11 congressional seats. That 55%-45% seat split closely mirrored the 52%-46% vote split Vice President Kamala Harris achieved over President Donald Trump.
If Democrats get their way at the ballot box today, the fair and nonpartisan map will be scrapped in favor of a grossly lopsided map drawn by Democratic politicians. Instead of every community in Virginia having a meaningful voice, the new Democrat map slices up communities across the state to silence as many rural voters as possible. Instead of a map that produces a six-Democrat, five-Republican congressional delegation that closely mirrors how Virginians vote, the Democrats would engineer a 10-1 seat advantage over Republicans that bears no relation to voter preferences.
Instead of Northern Virginia’s Fairfax County dominating two of the state’s 11 congressional districts, the new map would give Fairfax voters control of five seats stretching as far west as the West Virginia border and as far south as Richmond. Cattle farmers in Bedford County and wine growers in Nelson County would be left at the mercy of Fairfax County’s whims. Residents of these new districts do not share media markets and live hours apart. There is no justification for this map beyond naked Democrat self-interest.
Democrats poured more than $70 million into promoting this power grab, almost all of it from out-of-state activist donors. They rigged the wording on the ballot to obscure what they are doing, telling voters their gerrymander would “restore fairness in the upcoming elections.” They even banned images of the proposed maps from polling stations so voters would not see how absurd the new congressional districts really are.
Gov. Abigail Spanberger has seen her approval ratings crater as she pushes this power grab, and she deserves it, but no one has done more damage to their reputation than former President Barack Obama. He has been a ubiquitous presence on television, falsely telling voters in paid advertising that the proposed map would “let voters decide — not politicians.”
He says rural Virginia voters must be disenfranchised because Republicans are trying to “steal” congressional seats in other states. While it is true that Texas redrew its map to increase Republican seats, California passed a measure to do the same, which will likely cancel out Texas’s GOP gains. But another truth Democrats hide is that the worst existing partisan gerrymanders are all already in Democratic states. In Illinois, 55% voters chose Democrats in 2024, while 82% of the state’s House seats went to Democrats. In California, even before its latest gerrymander, 83% of House seats were controlled by Democrats — even though Democrats won only 59% of the statewide vote. And in New Jersey, 75% of House seats belong to Democrats, while the party won just 52% of the vote.
Democrats claim their map is temporary and that they will take map-drawing power away from politicians and return it to the Virginia Redistricting Commission after the 2030 census. But how will Texas’s 2032 congressional map be any more or less “fair” to Virginia Democrats than the 2026 map is today? Do not forget that the census admitted it overcounted eight Democratic-leaning states in 2020 while undercounting six Republican-leaning states, potentially costing Republicans House seats.
UNIVERSITIES CANNOT SURVIVE AS LEFT-WING ECHO CHAMBERS
On top of that, California, New York, and Illinois are all projected to lose congressional seats in 2030 as residents flee and their populations shrink, while the Republican states of Florida, Texas, and Georgia are projected to gain seats. The 2032 House map is going to be brutal for Democrats. Of course, they are going to rig every map they can to maximize their power.
The reality is that Republicans were already likely to lose control of the House of Representatives this November, even before Democrats’ Virginia power grab. Those five seats are not going to decide who becomes the next speaker of the House. But rural Virginians have long memories. They will remember well beyond 2032 which party tried to disenfranchise them in congressional elections. They will vote accordingly, up and down the ballot, for generations to come.