In late March, several thousand protesters participated in a “No Kings” rally in downtown Richmond. (Photo by Jay Paul)
Like spring pollen, the political ads just keep coming. With next Tuesday’s redistricting referendum fast approaching, expect the saturation to continue.
No amount of eye-rubbing will help: Democrats may have outraised Republicans more than 3-to-1 ($64 million to just under $21 million, according to the Virginia Public Access Project), but the GOP has been emboldened by polls showing the yes-or-no race has tightened in recent weeks.
George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government (in late March) and the nonpartisan State Navigate (in mid-April) both found Dems were up by 5 points, down from an 8-point advantage in polls from Christopher Newport University and Roanoke College in January and February, respectively — this despite an onslaught of television advertising featuring former President Barack Obama and Gov. Abigail Spanberger, as well as President Donald Trump’s increasing unpopularity in the commonwealth.
The turnabout has been something of surprise after the Democratic wipeout in November — in Virginia, Spanberger won by 15 points, and her party flipped 13 seats in the House of Delegates — and the overwhelming passage of California’s redistricting effort, Proposition 50, which voters approved last fall by nearly 30 points.
Democrats are calling the measure a necessary, if unfortunate, gerrymander to counter similar redistricting that has already occurred in four Republican-led states: Texas, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio. If Virginia’s passes, it would help offset expected GOP gains during the upcoming midterm elections.
Amanda Wintersieck, associate professor of political science and director of the Baldacci Institute for Civil Discourse at Virginia Commonwealth University, expects the vote to be close.
“I think that people understand that the process of partisan gerrymandering is inherently undemocratic,” she says, adding that it reduces trust no matter which side does it. “Those things are really hard to put back together once it’s been lost. I also think Americans care about who represents them in Congress.”
Stephen Farnsworth, professor of political science at the University of Mary Washington, says the outcome now hinges on how many people show up to vote on Tuesday.
“Early voting has been comparable to the early voting for the governor’s race last November, but there may be a significant drop-off for Election Day voting between November of last year and April this year,” Farnsworth says. “Candidates often bring more voters to the polls than policy topics do.”
Mark J. Rozell, dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at GMU, agrees.
“I’m looking for where the turnout is strongest,” he says. “Will we see the return of the power of rural Virginia with a big turnout? Will the polling data hold up and the measure passes, perhaps by not a significant margin, suggesting that the blue wave from last year held up just enough?”
There’s not much precedent. Democracy-in-the-balance elections aren’t typically held in April, and the opposition has been effective at pointing out the obvious flaws with mid-decade, politically motivated redistricting. Currently, Virginia has 11 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives — six held by Democrats, five by Republicans — and the new, gerrymandered map is expected to give Democrats a 10-1 advantage. But that’s only if the referendum passes and the Virginia Supreme Court, which is waiting until after the election to rule on its constitutionality, upholds the vote.
What is also clear is that neither side really likes the idea. On the campaign trail, Spanberger suggested she wouldn’t support a redistricting effort in Virginia. After the measure passed the General Assembly a second time earlier this year, however, she changed her position and now supports the effort.
“I don’t doubt the sincerity of Democratic partisans in their belief that President Trump and the Republican leadership in Congress are a threat to the future of our republic,” Rozell says. “Their position, ‘We wish we didn’t have to do this, but we have to do this, the stakes for our democracy are too large,’ … it’s working with Democratic partisans, for sure. But the polling data definitely shows that they need to work on swing voters. The intensity is on the opposition’s side.”
Both proponents and the opposition have crafted messages that evoke emotional responses, Farnsworth says.
“On the pro side, the narrative is Trump and Texas started this; Virginia is going to finish it. And that’s a simple message that people get. It also plays into the unpopularity that President Trump faces in Virginia,” Farnsworth says. “The anti-side … is this idea that Virginia just decided in a previous constitutional amendment to stop gerrymandering, and now the argument is gerrymandering should start again?”
Indeed, Virginia voters in 2020 approved a constitutional amendment to end gerrymandering by creating a 16-member bipartisan commission to redraw maps every 10 years. It didn’t work as intended, as the commission deadlocked over political differences and, by default, the state Supreme Court wound up redrawing Virginia’s new congressional maps in December 2021. The maps were mostly lauded as politically balanced.
Meanwhile, disenfranchising voters — even in misleading advertisements that use Civil Rights imagery to gin up opposition — is usually a difficult sell.
Most of the time.
“If it passes, it sets a precedent that could come back and hurt Democrats in the future. Imagine having done this once, and there’s a future Republican wave,” Rozell points out. “Do you think the Republicans would stand down on principle and not do the same?”
Redistricting may not even be necessary this year, Rozell suggests. He says Virginia Democrats could pick up two seats, for an 8-3 congressional majority, with or without redrawing the maps. Farnsworth is like-minded.
“All indications are that this midterm election is going to be similar to midterm elections in the past, where the president’s party loses 18 seats, give or take, in the House on average, and three or four Senate seats, on average,” Rozell says. “But the reality is that, you know, an awful lot of Democrats feel that Texas, Missouri and other states cannot go unanswered.”
