I met Debbie having a cigarette outside my hotel this week. She is 80, a great-grandmother of eight, and smokes as much as I do. She was up from rural Georgia, and asked me, in the sweetest voice you ever heard, what all the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ signs on the roads were about.
I gave Debbie a thumbnail explanation of the referendum set for April 21 over whether to amend the state constitution, change the Virginia U.S. House of Representatives district maps and go from a 6-5 advantage for Democrats to a 10-1 advantage. She simply smiled and said, “Well, these days, everyone’s yelling about something or other.”
I was struck by her words. It had been my son’s job on the mostly bucolic drive south through the commonwealth to count the yard signs, a task he well remembers from the last election that also keeps him off his phone, sort of.
We found about 20 ‘Yes’ signs and 15 ‘No’ signs, the former mostly in pricey suburbs, the latter in the rural areas Democrats are seeking to forcibly turn blue. One sign was up on a tractor, but through Debbie’s eyes, I saw how absurd this display really was.
It is surreal, almost out of a Jonathan Swift novel, to drive hundreds of miles seeing signs that read simply “Yes,” or “No.” No context, no meaning, just pick a side. And that’s exactly how this campaign in Virginia feels.
Jodie is a Democrat in her 40s and is a teacher in the Newport News area.
“This isn’t about the moral high ground,” she told me, adding, “because they don’t care about the moral high ground and if only we do, we lose.”
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This sounded an awful lot like the Republicans I spoke to in Texas recently defending their own redistricting, which they very plausibly say was in response to New England being 40% Republican yet has no GOP House members.
Liam, a retired lifelong Virginian and Republican, seemed to understand this dynamic.
“It’s obviously unfair and anti-Democratic, but then they say ‘Texas did it, too,’ so everyone just goes with their own team,” he told me.
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Another woman chimed in, overhearing us to simply say, “It’s a bloodbath now. Nobody talks.”
From the earliest moments of our Republic, and even 100 years earlier in England, wise men of government had feared that parties or factions would be the death of constitutional governance because they would put their differences ahead of the nation’s good.
In his farewell address, George Washington, who attended college here in Williamsburg, warned us all of parties and of the “ill-founded jealousies,” that can lead to “frightful despotism.”
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Virginia’s redistricting, which effectively disenfranchises thousands of Republicans, is a good example of it.
To go from a 6-5 margin to 10-1 is so fabulously anti-democratic and beyond the pale that many Republicans feel certain that if they point this out, surely saner heads will prevail.
The problem is that Democratic voters I talk to know it’s sketchy, they know Barack Obama is lying about it being about fairness in local TV ads, but they don’t care. For them, the Republicans are worse and must be beaten.
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Among the ironies of this happening in Virginia, the state that produced James Madison, author of our Constitution, is that the special election referendum in two weeks will have very low turnout, despite constitutional amendments supposedly requiring the highest bar of popularity possible.
This referendum could easily be the difference between President Donald Trump spending the next two years in impeachment purgatory or being free to lead. Not only will it be decided by a very small group of people, they are barely talking to each other, from what I can tell.
My warning to Virginia Republicans is that winning hearts and minds won’t win this fight. It needs all the ground game it can muster, all the knocking on doors, and yes, all the road and yard signs, because this really will be, as they say, all about turnout.
In the end, Debbie is right. Sadly, this referendum in the birthplace of constitutional representation has turned into little more than people yelling about something. I guess at least this time, on the ride home she will know what they are yelling about.
Vote yes, Vote No, Vote Yes, Vote No. It’s like the old Bugs Bunny routine. Maybe one side should try the old switcheroo, reverse psychology trick. At this point, it would represent more erudite discourse than anyone, other than maybe Debbie, seems to be offering.
