HAMPTON, Va. — Nearly everyone in the sanctuary at Sixth Mount Zion Baptist Temple raised a hand when Gaylene Kanoyton asked who had seen “the mailers.”
The primarily Black audience at a town hall this week knew what she was referring to — ads using images of Klansmen in white hoods to warn against voting for Virginia’s redistricting amendment and others falsely suggesting that former president Barack Obama and Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D) want them to vote “no” on redrawing the state’s political map to favor Democrats.
“It’s a lot of confusion,” Kanoyton, president of the Hampton branch of the NAACP, said in an interview. “It’s no different than when I was coming up and they tried to scare people out of voting.”
Democrats, redistricting advocates and the NAACP are working to dispel what they call a disinformation campaign targeting African American and elderly voters ahead of Virginia’s April 21 referendum. Polling and early voting so far suggest a close contest — prompting both sides of the redistricting campaign to pour in tens of millions of dollars.
The state’s maps are pivotal in Democrats’ national efforts to push back against a Republican-initiated gerrymandering fight that could influence which party controls Congress. If voters reject the new maps, Republicans at the national level would probably see a net increase in favorable seats ahead of this year’s midterms.
A Republican-aligned political action committee in Virginia called Democracy and Justice has used images and language from the civil rights movement to raise fears of gerrymandering, long wielded to marginalize Black political power. And the group’s ads recycle old statements against gerrymandering from both Spanberger and Obama, the nation’s first Black president, to suggest that they oppose the referendum.
Obama has supported anti-gerrymandering efforts around the country but endorsed Democratic redistricting last year in response to President Donald Trump’s push for Texas and other Republican states to create new GOP districts. Spanberger has made a similar pivot, and both have appeared in ads supporting Virginia’s plans for temporary redistricting.
The National Democratic Redistricting Committee has condemned the mailers as “desperate, deceptive tactics.” Obama, through his office, declined to comment.
“The problem with misinformation is, if you don’t respond to it, people will believe it. So we gotta spend time responding to this nonsense when we should be out campaigning,” said Rep. Robert C. “Bobby” Scott (D-Virginia), one of two Black House members from Virginia, who attended the Hampton town hall in his congressional district. He said he would like to see Obama visit the state to leave no doubt about his support.
African Americans, who make up nearly 20 percent of Virginia’s population, are a cornerstone of the Democratic Party in the state and crucial to the referendum’s chances of passage. A recent Washington Post-Schar School poll found that 79 percent of Black voters support the measure, the most of any racial group. Overall, 52 percent of voters say they favor the referendum, and 72 percent understand that its passage would favor Democrats — suggesting that few voters are uncertain about its impact, according to the poll. But in a close contest, even a relatively small number of confused voters could swing the outcome.
Virginia is responding to a redistricting arms race touched off by Trump, who has pushed Republican-led states to give him extra seats to maintain control of the House in this fall’s elections. Texas, North Carolina and Missouri have so far delivered for Trump, while California has counterpunched by drawing maps with five new districts that favor Democrats.
Democrats have raised deep concerns about diluting Black voter representation in Republican-controlled states that have recently altered their maps. Republicans in Texas emphasized that four of the five new GOP-leaning districts they drew were majority Latino.
In Virginia, which is now represented in the House by six Democrats and five Republicans, the referendum would allow lawmakers to temporarily enact maps that create 10 districts whose voters favored Kamala Harris for president in 2024 and one where they went for Trump. The state’s two Black representatives would not be in danger of losing their seats. Virginia would resume using a bipartisan redistricting commission to draw maps in 2030.
Republicans have filed lawsuits to block the effort, and the Supreme Court of Virginia is allowing the referendum to proceed before taking up the case against it. In the meantime, several Republican-affiliated groups are mounting political campaigns against the effort. Many argue that the new maps would disenfranchise rural voters by tying them to liberal districts anchored in Northern Virginia.
The pro-redistricting campaign has maintained a significant cash advantage, having raised nearly $50 millionfrom Democratic interest groups, led by House Majority Forward, according to the nonpartisan campaign finance site Virginia Public Access Project. But Republican money has begun flowing into the more fragmented vote-no campaigns; the biggest one — Virginians for Fair Maps — received $9 million so far this month, bringing its total to more than $16 million, according to state elections filings that do not specify the source of the money.
The campaign targeting Black voters, which is funded separately, has drawn outrage from Democrats. “These ads deliberately exploit the history of Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement to mislead Black voters and suppress participation,” Virginia state Attorney General Jay Jones (D), the first Black person to serve that role, said in a written statement. He pointed out that the ads were funded with a $2.5 million contribution from Per Aspera Policy Inc., a group affiliated with billionaire Peter Thiel, a major Trump supporter.
The Democracy and Justice PAC is led by former state delegate A.C. Cordoza of Hampton, who before losing reelection last fall served two terms as the only Black Republican in the General Assembly.
“If they don’t like what the mailer represents, they should not be doing the actions that the mailer represents, period,” Cordoza said in a news conference last month. “They’re having a hard time dealing with it because it reflects upon them and they’re not used to being held accountable.”
Jeff Ryer, chairman of the Republican Party of Virginia, said he has not seen some of those mailers and pointed out that the party is not involved in sending them. “We’re not doing anything with” the Democracy and Justice PAC, he said.
But Ryer defended the use of old quotes from Obama and Spanberger, who have spoken out against drawing maps for partisan advantage — a longtime practice of both parties. “They were against gerrymandering before they were for it,” he said, adding that “they are not in the position to criticize anyone for their veracity.”
Noting that the ballot language of the referendum simply asks voters whether to draw new maps to “restore fairness,” Ryer charged that Democrats “have run the most deceptive campaign this state has ever seen. And they’re throwing stones at others?”
He accused Democrats of using the same advertising tactics, citing a vote-yes billboard in rural Page County paid for by the local Democratic committee that features a huge photograph of Trump and quotes him as saying “take over the voting.” (The quote is accurate.)
Scott acknowledged that Democrats have changed positions on gerrymandering, but said it was the only way to prevent Trump from engineering continued control of Congress by creating Republican districts in other states. A “level playing field” in House elections, he said, would give Democrats a fair chance at winning a majority and putting the brakes on Trump policies such as aggressive immigration tactics, slashing of government offices and waging war without congressional authorization.
The NAACP town hall Monday in Hampton featured a panel of cybersecurity and elections experts who spoke about ways to spot disinformation in political advertising. The organization plans more outreach over the next two weeks, including phone banks and weekend “souls to the polls” events, Kanoyton said.
After the town hall, Bill Burrell, who is retired from the Air Force, said he felt like he understood the situation much better. He has gotten most of the controversial ads in the mail, and said he found them “sly” but was not confused by them. Now that he sees the national implications of redistricting, he said, he is 90 percent sure to vote yes.
Carol Brown, 72, a retired teacher, said she has voted for Republicans in the past — before Trump came along — but now plans to vote in favor of redistricting. The town hall solidified her thinking, she said, adding that she understands why the mailers were targeted at African Americans such as herself. “Because we vote,” she said. “And they don’t want us to vote.”
Patrick Marley contributed to this report.
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