Virginia voters on Tuesday approved a constitutional amendment temporarily redrawing the state’s congressional district lines, handing Democrats a victory that is likely to aid their midterm election hopes of recapturing control of the U.S. House of Representatives.
With 83% of the estimated votes counted and many votes outstanding in Northern Virginia and Richmond, 50.3% had voted in favor of the amendment. The Associated Press called the race about two hours after the polls closed.
Supporters of the measure cast the campaign as a necessary response to mid-decade redistricting efforts launched in Republican states, beginning in Texas last year. In television ads and on the stump, Democrats who backed the amendment stressed that control of future congressional redistricting would revert to the nonpartisan panel that crafted the soon-to-be discarded maps.
“Virginia voters have spoken, and tonight they approved a temporary measure to push back against a President who claims he is ‘entitled’ to more Republican seats in Congress. Virginians watched other states go along with those demands without voter input — and we refused to let that stand. We responded the right way: at the ballot box,” Gov. Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat who backed the amendment, said in a statement. “Looking forward, I remain committed to ensuring Virginia’s bipartisan redistricting commission gets back to work after the 2030 census, and to protecting the process Virginians voted to create.”
Opponents, including Republicans and good-government groups, cast Democrats as hypocrites for their reversal after years of supporting fairer redistricting.
The new map lines will dramatically shift the partisan composition of a swing state that has trended toward Democrats in recent years. Democrats currently hold six of the state’s 11 U.S. House districts; under the new map, the party would be favored to win 10 of those 11 seats.
Districts held by U.S. Reps. Ben Cline and John McGuire, both Republicans who represent the Shenandoah Valley and southern Virginia, will be drastically overhauled. Under the existing lines, Republican gubernatorial nominee Winsome Earle-Sears claimed 54% of the vote in McGuire’s district and 59% in Cline’s. Under the new lines, Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger would have won both seats by double-digit margins.
Spanberger already won districts held by U.S. Reps. Robert Wittman and Jennifer Kiggans, Republicans who represent coastal Virginia from the Eastern Shore to Hampton Roads. Under the new lines, Spanberger’s narrow victories would become blowouts; she would have carried Wittman’s district by 19 percentage points and Kiggans’s by almost 13 points.
Democrats crammed as many Republican voters as possible into a southwestern district in the Blue Ridge mountains currently represented by Republican Rep. Morgan Griffith.
The contest over Virginia’s new district lines is not finalized: The state Supreme Court is still reviewing the measure, though it allowed the referendum to go to a public vote.
State and national Democrats invested heavily in the amendment campaign, viewing it as an investment in winning back control of Congress for the second half of President Donald Trump’s term.
House Majority Forward, a super PAC that backs Democrats, poured $38 million into the race — more on its own than the $22.9 million spent in total by the entire opposition campaign. Altogether, supporters outspent opponents by a nearly 3-to-1 margin, according to campaign filings.
The unprecedented spree of mid-decade redistricting, egged on by Trump and taken up by Republican lawmakers in Texas, Ohio, Missouri and North Carolina and Democrats in California and Virginia, has substantially shrunk the number of potentially competitive seats in Congress up for election this year.
But the upshot of the redistricting wars so far has been something close to a wash. Texas lawmakers carved up five Democratic-held seats in a bid to pad the GOP’s narrow majority in Washington. California voters responded months later by approving a bid to slice up five Republican-held seats. Missouri eliminated a Democratic-held seat in the Kansas City area, though that measure is on pause amid a referendum fight.
North Carolina eliminated a Democratic seat, while Ohio put two incumbent Democrats in more difficult districts. In Utah, a court order required the state to adopt a map likely to add one Democrat in the Salt Lake City area.
Just over six months before the midterm elections, the redistricting wars are not over. Florida lawmakers return to special session next week to debate, among other items, a plan to draw new Republican-friendly maps. And the U.S. Supreme Court has not yet released a decision in Louisiana v. Callais, a case that challenged congressional district lines drawn under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
If the court sides with Louisiana Republicans and guts the Voting Rights Act, civil rights advocates worry Southern Republican states will move quickly to carve up Black-majority districts.