LEESBURG, Va. — Virginians head to the polls on Tuesday to vote on a congressional redistricting referendum that, if passed, could give Democrats a significant boost in the battle for the U.S. House majority in this year’s midterm elections.
If the ballot measure is successful, it would give the Democrat-controlled Virginia legislature — rather than the state’s current nonpartisan commission — temporary redistricting power through the 2030 election. It could result in a 10-1 advantage for Democrats in Virginia’s congressional delegation, up from their current 6-5 edge.
That would give the Democrats four additional left-leaning U.S. House seats ahead of the midterms as the party tries to win back control of the chamber from the GOP, which currently holds a razor-thin majority.
“It’s the most partisan map in America,” former Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin told supporters at his final campaign stop on the eve of the election in this northern Virginia town on the far end of Washington, D.C.’s suburbs.
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Pointing to the Democrats pushing new maps, Youngkin charged, “What they are doing is immoral.”
Teaming up with Youngkin to crisscross the state in leading the GOP opposition to the ballot initiative was former Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, who told the crowd the Democrats’ map is one that “you draw when you’re drunk with power.”
Speaking with Fox News Digital ahead of their final election eve rally, Miyares charged that “Democrats want to take away the voices of millions of Virginians and gerrymander the state.”
Youngkin, pointing to the duo’s relentless campaigning in recent weeks, said “what we’re hearing over and over and over again is Virginians want fair maps. And what the yes vote represents are unfair maps.”
And the two Republicans reiterated their charge that the referendum was an “unconstitutional power grab” by the Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger and the Democrats who control the state legislature.
As Youngkin and Miyares were speaking in Leesburg, President Donald Trump took to the airwaves on a popular Virginia-based conservative talk show and later teamed up with House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., to urge voters to defeat the referendum.
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Pointing to congressional Democrats, Trump warned that “if they get these additional seats, they’re going to be making changes at the federal level.”
Democrats counter that the redrawing of the maps is a necessary step to balance out partisan gerrymandering already implemented by Republicans in other states at Trump’s urging.
“By voting yes, you have the chance to do something important — not just for the commonwealth, but for our entire country,” former President Barack Obama said in a video released Friday on the eve of the final day of early voting. “By voting yes, you can push back against the Republicans trying to give themselves an unfair advantage in the midterms.”
“By voting yes, you can take a temporary step to level the playing field. And we’re counting on you,” the former president added.
The video by Obama was the former president’s latest effort tied to the referendum. He has previously appeared in ads released by Virginians for Fair Elections, the Democrat-aligned group working to pass the ballot initiative.
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But Virginians for Fair Maps, the leading Republican-aligned group opposing redistricting, used past comments by Obama against political gerrymandering in its ads opposing the referendum.
“Because of things like political gerrymandering, our parties have moved further and further apart, and it’s harder and harder to find common ground,” the former president said in an old clip showcased in the spot.
Republicans are also pointing to comments from Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine, a former Virginia governor and former chair of the Democratic National Committee, who acknowledged this past weekend in a “Fox News Sunday” interview that the new maps don’t represent Virginia’s partisan breakdown.
“Ninety percent of Virginians are not Democrats, that’s true,” Kaine said.
But Kaine added that “about 100% of Virginians want election results to be respected.”
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And Republicans are also taking aim at Spanberger, who won last November’s gubernatorial election by over 15 points as Democrats also captured the lieutenant governor and attorney general offices.
“Abigail Spanberger told everybody last summer that she had no interest in redistricting and then the first bill she signs is a bill to enable the gerrymandering of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Virginians don’t like this and that’s why independents and a lot of Democrats are voting no too,” Youngkin told Fox News Digital.
Minutes later, Youngkin told the crowd that Spanberger is “trying to disenfranchise million, millions, of Virginians.”
Republicans have trained their redistricting firepower on Spanberger since a poll two weeks ago from The Washington Post indicated that the new governor’s approval rating was barely above water, with the highest unfavorable rating for a new Virginia governor in two decades.
“She’s an unpopular governor with an unpopular agenda and she lied to the voters,” Miyares charged.
And Miyares and other top Republicans have accused Spanberger of pulling a “bait and switch.”
Spanberger, in an ad in support of the referendum, said she’s backing the measure because “it’s directly in response to what other states decide to do and a president who says he’s quote entitled to more Republican seats before this year’s midterms. Our approach is different. It’s temporary. It preserves Virginia’s fair redistricting process into the future.”
Supporters of redistricting have dramatically outraised and outspent groups opposed to the referendum, with Virginians for Fair Elections outraising Virginians for Fair Maps by a roughly three-to-one margin. Much of the funding raised by both sides came from so-called “dark money” from nonprofit public policy groups known as 501(c)(4) organizations that are not required to disclose their donors.
Despite the Democrats’ funding advantage, recent polling suggested support for the ballot initiative was only slightly ahead of opposition amid a surge in early voting, which ended on Saturday.
“They have outspent us three to one. They’ve raised over $70 million. And yet this is a close vote,” Youngkin said.
Pointing to the ads in support of the referendum, Youngkin said Virginians “aren’t believing the mistruths. They aren’t believing the lies on TV. They’re actually doing the work themselves and understanding that a no vote is for fair maps and a yes vote is for the most gerrymandered maps in America.”
And Miyares emphasized that Democrats “outspent us but we have the truth.”
Virginia is the latest battleground in the high-stakes fight between Trump and the GOP and Democrats over congressional redistricting.
Aiming to prevent what happened during his first term in the White House when Democrats reclaimed the House majority in the 2018 midterms, Trump last spring first floated the idea of rare, but not unheard of, mid-decade congressional redistricting.
The mission was simple: redraw congressional district maps in red states to pad the GOP’s fragile House majority to keep control of the chamber in the midterms, when the party in power traditionally faces political headwinds and loses seats.
When asked by reporters last summer about his plan to add Republican-leaning House seats across the country, the president said, “Texas will be the biggest one. And that’ll be five.”
Republican Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas called a special session of the GOP-dominated state legislature to pass the new map.
But Democratic state lawmakers, who broke quorum for two weeks as they fled Texas in a bid to delay the passage of the redistricting bill, energized Democrats across the country.
Among those leading the fight against Trump’s redistricting was Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom of California.
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California voters in November overwhelmingly passed Proposition 50, a ballot initiative that temporarily sidetracked the left-leaning state’s nonpartisan redistricting commission and returned the power to draw the congressional maps to the Democratic-dominated legislature.
That is expected to result in five more Democratic-leaning congressional districts in California, which aimed to counter the move by Texas to redraw their maps.
The fight quickly spread beyond Texas and California.
Republican-controlled Missouri and Ohio and swing state North Carolina, where the GOP dominates the legislature, have drawn new maps as part of the president’s push.
In blows to Republicans, a Utah district judge late last year rejected a congressional district map drawn by the state’s GOP-dominated legislature and instead approved an alternate that will create a Democratic-leaning district ahead of the midterms.
Republicans in Indiana’s Senate in December defied Trump, shooting down a redistricting bill that had passed the state House. The showdown in the Indiana statehouse grabbed plenty of national attention.
Florida is next up.
Two-term Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and state lawmakers in the GOP-dominated legislature are hoping to pick up an additional three to five right-leaning seats through a redistricting push during a special legislative session that kicks off April 28.
Hovering over the redistricting wars is the Supreme Court, which is expected to rule in Louisiana v. Callais, a crucial case that may lead to the overturning of a key provision in the Voting Rights Act.
If the ruling goes the way of the conservatives on the high court, it could lead to the redrawing of a slew of majority-minority districts across the county, which would greatly favor Republicans.
But it is very much up in the air when the court will rule and what it will actually decide.
