Virginia’s Gerrymandering Vandalism

National Review Online

Thursday, February 12, 2026

 

Politics ain’t beanbag, as the saying goes, and few areas of it are as grubby and self-serving as redistricting. But even by the low standards of gerrymandering, what Democrats are doing in Virginia is both outrageous and legally dubious. Abigail Spanberger, the state’s new supposedly moderate governor, is scheming with Democrats in the legislature to create an expected ten-to-one Democratic House district map.

 

Currently, Virginia’s eleven congressional districts send six Democrats and five Republicans to the House. That’s essentially a fair representation of the light-blue tint of the state. Over the past three election cycles, Republicans have won 47.6 percent of the vote for House seats in Virginia. Over the past four, counting a Democratic wave year in 2018, that number is still 46.5 percent.

 

Republicans won 40.9 percent of the House seats over the past four cycles — winning four seats in 2018 and 2020 and five seats in 2022 and 2024 — so Virginia’s existing congressional maps can hardly be said to have favored the GOP. They were well within the margin of reasonable maps. Drawn by a nonpartisan districting commission as required by a Virginia state constitutional amendment adopted overwhelmingly by the voters in 2020, all of the districts are reasonably compact and represent distinct regions of the state.

 

Republicans remain reasonably competitive statewide in Virginia, winning between 44 and 47.3 percent of the presidential vote in the past five elections. As recently as 2025, Virginia had a Republican governor, a Republican lieutenant governor, and a Republican attorney general.

 

More to the point in drawing House districts, large areas of Virginia lean Republican. The GOP held a majority in the state house as of 2023 and today is only a step behind Democrats in the state senate, 21–19. In 2024, Donald Trump carried 90 of Virginia’s 133 counties and independent cities. Even in Spanberger’s blowout victory over Winsome Earle-Sears in the 2025 gubernatorial race, Earle-Sears won 83 of them. West of the Brunswick County line, covering some two-thirds of the state’s land mass, Spanberger carried only four counties. She also lost most of the upper Chesapeake area in the state’s east.

 

While these areas are generally less populated than the big cities, they deserve representation. On the current map, three House districts lie mostly west of the Brunswick line, and one covers the upper Chesapeake; all four send Republicans to the House. The other Republican-held seat is an evenly divided district around Virginia Beach, the state’s largest city.

 

Democrats would prefer that Alexandria, Arlington, and the rest of the D.C. suburbs — currently represented by three heavily blue districts — be able to control the rest of the state. So, under the new map proposed by Spanberger in a naked partisan power grab, five different districts snake their way to the Beltway. Of the three districts west of the Brunswick line, one has a long tendril reaching east, and the other has one reaching west to pick off all the Democratic cities in the western portion. By their 2024 presidential votes, these two districts flip from 12.2 percent and 24.1 percent Republican to 8.5 percent and 3.1 percent Democrat, respectively; the upper Chesapeake district shifts from 4.9 percent Republican to 7.5 percent Democrat. Few of these districts now look like communities rather than mapping-software abstractions.

 

True, quite a number of both red and blue states have pushed the envelope in the latest round of mid-decade redistricting, but at least those were states with a heavily partisan statewide tilt. Virginia, a purple state run by Republicans six weeks ago, would suddenly have a House delegation that looks like those of Illinois or Maryland. Worse, it would send representatives from D.C. to D.C., ignoring the distinct interests of Virginians outside the Beltway. All of this simply because of one good Democratic election cycle.

 

The anti-gerrymandering ballot initiative was pushed in 2020 by Democrats in order to prevent Republicans from redistricting Virginia in their favor if (as happened) they took control in 2021. Now that it has become inconvenient, they are simply ignoring their own state constitution. That may not fly with the state’s supreme court, which ought to reject it. So should the voters, who would have to approve the change in an April referendum.

 

Virginia isn’t even pretending to do this for any reason other than to benefit Democrats — and unlike the majority parties in California or Texas, they can’t claim a longstanding mandate from voters for governance by just one side. They ought to be ashamed, and they ought to be defeated.