The battle over congressional maps in Virginia, the latest in the nationwide clash over mid-decade redistricting in the lead-up to this year’s midterm elections, is intensifying with a statewide referendum only weeks away.
Tens of millions of dollars have poured into the state to fund campaigns for and against the referendum, which takes place on April 21 and will decide whether Democrats can redraw the state’s map to flip as many as four U.S. House seats currently held by Republicans. The vast majority of the money has flowed in on the Democratic side.
With early voting already underway, the evidence so far points to surprisingly healthy turnout and a relatively close outcome, potentially much closer than the California vote for redistricting was in November.
The stakes are significant: If Virginians approve an amendment that would allow redistricting, Democrats could fight their way to a rough draw in the country’s gerrymandering war. The Virginia delegation in the U.S. House is currently made up of six Democrats and five Republicans; the map proposed by Democratic leaders would give Democrats an advantage in 10 of the state’s 11 districts.
Coupled with the new maps that voters in California approved in November, the new Virginia seats would cancel out most, if not all, of the Republican redistricting gains made last year in states including North Carolina, Ohio, Missouri and Texas, where President Trump and state Republicans kicked off the mid-decade gerrymandering scramble.
Florida Republicans may still redraw their state’s map to give their party more seats, which could lead to a slight Republican advantage heading into the midterms. But the big wild card is that the U.S. Supreme Court could vote to gut a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and if the ruling came in the spring, it would almost certainly set off further rounds of redistricting before November.
So far in Virginia, the main Democratic-aligned effort, Virginians for Fair Elections, has heavily out-raised the main Republican-aligned effort, Virginians for Fair Maps. Over $33 million has flowed into Virginians for Fair Elections, mostly from dark-money groups that are not required to disclose their donors.
Of that sum, $15 million came from House Majority Forward, part of the main Democratic group aligned with Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic minority leader. Another $10 million came from the Fairness Project, a progressive nonprofit group that funds ballot initiatives across the country, and $5 million came from a nonprofit organization tied to George Soros, the Democratic megadonor.
On the Republican side, the main group opposing redistricting has only raised about $3 million, including $2.5 million this month from a nonprofit group with the same name, Virginians for Fair Maps, that was formed in October and doesn’t disclose its donors. The Democratic group has outspent the Republican group by about 14 to 1 on advertising, according to AdImpact, a media tracking firm.
One of those ads features former President Barack Obama, arguably the biggest star in the Democratic Party, saying that the proposed amendment gives Virginians “the power to level the playing field in the midterms this fall.”
Still, despite the lopsided fund-raising, some early indicators have given Republicans cautious optimism. Since the polls opened on March 6, turnout in Republican-heavy counties has been high compared with the level in the state’s elections last November, in which Democrats romped. And in a special election last week in Virginia Beach, in a district that President Trump won by about 14 percentage points in 2024, the Republican candidate won by 19 points.
“We feel very good about where we are,” said Eric Cantor, the onetime Republican House majority leader in Congress, who is one of the leaders of Virginians for Fair Maps. “We’ve still got work to do to raise money. But I feel like the trend and the response from donors has been on the uptick in a big way over the last 10 days, because of where I think people are sensing things are.”
Gauging the state of play by early turnout alone is tricky, election analysts said. The politics behind the question on the ballot — whether to approve a constitutional amendment that would temporarily give the state legislature, now controlled by Democrats, power to redraw Virginia’s congressional map — are not straightforward.
Virginia is no California; it leans Democratic, but is not deep blue. In recent years, the state’s partisan behavior has been reactive, with voters tilting toward Democrats when Republicans are in the White House, and vice versa. In 2021, a year after Joseph R. Biden Jr. won the presidency, Virginia elected Republicans to all three statewide offices. Last November, Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, won the governor’s office by more than 15 points, and Democrats also flipped 13 seats in the state legislature.
The referendum is unlikely to be a simple repeat Democratic performance for several reasons. It is taking place in April, a rarity for a Virginia election, and the amendment is asking Virginians to set aside, temporarily, a system that voters had overwhelmingly supported just years ago. The current redistricting process, involving a bipartisan committee, was approved in a statewide vote in 2020 by roughly 2 to 1.
Public polling has shown that voters largely approve of the current process, though some surveys have shown a slim majority in favor of the redistricting amendment.
“There’s a huge piece of this that’s just pure turnout,” said Chaz Nuttycombe, the executive director of State Navigate, a Virginia-based organization that focuses on state elections. “But there is a piece of the population where you have to sort of assuage concerns, like, ‘Oh, it’s just an endless kind of race to the bottom, everyone’s redistricting.’”
Both sides have taken advantage of the complicated politics at play. Anti-amendment groups have sent out mailers with pictures of Ms. Spanberger, quoting her past criticism of gerrymandering and seeming to suggest that she is against the amendment (she. appears in a new ad airing statewide urging Virginians to vote “Yes”). Another mailer, which drew broad condemnation, said that supporters of the amendment were “just like Jim Crow,” in that they wanted to silence the voices of Black Virginians.
A county Democratic Party in conservative northwestern Virginia put up a billboard urging a “Yes” vote next to a picture of Mr. Trump.
Democrats believe that Mr. Trump’s domination of the daily news cycle, in a state with a large military presence and a huge federal work force, is likely to be a major factor, as it was in the November elections.
“To get people’s attention is difficult, but I think Donald Trump is really helping us,” said Don Scott, the Democratic speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates. Mr. Scott dismissed as “sanctimonious” the concerns about the propriety of middecade redistricting, saying, in effect, that desperate times called for desperate measures. “To pretend that this is a normal period of time, with Donald Trump as president, is to be putting your head in the sand and ignoring reality,” he said.
Even so, the referendum might not be the final word.
In January, a circuit judge in rural Tazewell County, ruling on one of several lawsuits brought by Republican leaders, issued an order blocking the referendum vote. The decision was appealed and the Supreme Court of Virginia ordered that the referendum should go forward.
But in making that ruling, the court cautioned that it was not a final judgment, expressing “grave concern” about the issues raised in the lawsuit regarding the procedural steps Democratic lawmakers had taken in their votes to put the amendment on the ballot.
“It is the process, not the outcome, of this effort that we may ultimately have to address,” the court wrote.
Campbell Robertson reports for The Times on Delaware, the District of Columbia, Kentucky, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia.
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