An architect of Virginia’s aggressive redistricting scheme will announce on Wednesday that he intends to run for one of the newly drawn Democratic seats himself.
Dan Helmer, a four-term state delegate who played a key behind-the-scenes role in last October’s surprise move to redraw Virginia’s congressional maps, is entering the race for the lobster-shaped Seventh Congressional District that will be created if voters approve a constitutional amendment to allow for mid-decade redistricting.
A top ally to Don Scott, the Virginia House speaker, Mr. Helmer served as campaigns chairman for the Virginia House Democratic Caucus as the party took control of the chamber in 2023 and then flipped 13 more Republican-held seats last November.
Last fall, Mr. Helmer helped devise and implement the redistricting strategy and then marshaled support in Richmond for the first set of votes on the amendment to redraw congressional maps. He later recused himself from the map-drawing process.
“We need fighters with a proven track record of not just standing up but winning against Donald Trump and the Republican Congress to get our country back in the right direction,” Mr. Helmer said in an interview. “I’m a progressive fighter with an unmatched record of taking on Trump and winning.”
The Seventh is one of four new districts likely to favor Democrats that would be created if Virginia voters pass the redistricting amendment on April 21. It begins at the Potomac River in Arlington and stretches west to the West Virginia border in one lobster claw and south past Richmond to rural Powhatan County, in the other. Vice President Kamala Harris won 54 percent of the vote there in 2024, and Joseph R. Biden Jr. took 56 percent in 2020.
An Army veteran of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Mr. Helmer, 44, entered state politics in 2019 on a platform of gun control and abortion rights. He flipped the last Republican-held state House seat in Fairfax County, a Washington suburb that was then in the final stages of a transition from Republican territory to one that now votes for Democrats by large margins.
Mr. Helmer is the second Democrat to enter the race, following J.P. Cooney, a top deputy to Jack Smith, the special prosecutor who twice indicted Mr. Trump.
While Mr. Cooney, a career federal prosecutor, is a relative newcomer to Virginia politics, Mr. Helmer has run for Northern Virginia congressional seats twice before, losing in Democratic primaries in 2018 and 2024. He has built a political base in Fairfax County and among the state’s power brokers in Richmond.
Mr. Helmer enters the race with endorsements from former Gov. Ralph Northam; 43 of Virginia’s 84 other Democratic state legislators; and Representative Eugene Vindman, a Virginia Democrat whose current district covers much of the territory Mr. Helmer seeks to represent.
“Dan Helmer delivered the largest Democratic majority in four decades,” Mr. Scott, the Virginia House speaker, said. “He whipped Virginia Republicans — Republicans in D.C. should be trembling in their orthopedic shoes.”
Though Mr. Helmer helped to whip votes for the constitutional amendment last fall, he said he was not involved in drawing the proposed new maps, an assertion confirmed by several people involved. Still, there was a widespread belief among Virginia Democrats as the new maps were being debated that a new Democratic seat would be drawn for Mr. Helmer.
Mr. Helmer said his primary role in drawing the new maps was leading the party’s campaign committee in the House of Delegates to elect new Democrats to the chamber.
“There are 17 Republican-held seats that are now held by Democrats,” Mr. Helmer said. “That has allowed us to put redistricting in front of the people, and I’m convinced they will allow us to enact new maps.”
Reid J. Epstein is a Times reporter covering campaigns and elections from Washington.
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