Beth Macy, the best-selling author of books like “Dopesick,” about the struggles of Appalachia, had planned to test her contention that Democratic candidates could win back the House by talking and listening to rural voters.
But after Tuesday, if Virginia voters approve a wholesale redrawing of the commonwealth’s House districts, Ms. Macy will instead have to campaign mostly in college towns, talking and listening to well-off, well-educated people who are more likely to be readers of her books than their subjects. Her more immediate challenge will be fighting another Democrat in the primary for a newly drawn seat.
Ms. Macy is not the only candidate whose political fate swings on Tuesday’s vote. Several Democrats have declared that if voters approve the new map, then they will run in a district that does not yet exist. Such if-then candidates include a Mike-Pence-adviser-turned-Trump-scourge, a former Virginia first lady, an architect of the Democrats’ redistricting push and a former top deputy to the special prosecutor who twice indicted Mr. Trump.
Virginia voters are the latest to weigh in on a mid-decade redistricting war that President Trump started when he asked Texas Republicans last summer to redraw their state’s map to help his party stave off a Democratic takeover of the House. Since then, California voters approved a new map that could offset whatever gains Republicans made in Texas. Missouri legislators redrew their state to erase one Democratic seat, while North Carolina legislators redrew their already-gerrymandered map to try to grab a swing district now held by a Democrat.
The Democrats who control Virginia are asking voters to approve a map that could shift the Commonwealth’s delegation from a 6-to-5 Democratic advantage to a 10-to-1 rout. But the vote is expected to be close, as Republicans try to appeal to a sense of fairness in the electorate.
Waiting in the wings are candidates whose campaigns could be radically altered by the outcome.
If the new map prevails, Tom Perriello, a one-term Democratic congressman who lost his seat in the Tea Party wave of 2010, would have his comeback bid complicated by a competitive primary against Ms. Macy. (Both have been endorsed by Gov. Abigail Spanberger — in their existing districts.)
Then there are the Republicans: Ben Cline, the representative for the current Sixth District, lives in what would be the Ninth District in the new map. Morgan Griffith, the incumbent in the current Ninth, would find his house in the new Sixth. A neat swap isn’t possible; the proposed Ninth District, where Mr. Trump would have won 74 percent of the vote in 2024, is the only one the mapmakers in a legislature controlled by Democrats created as a sink for Republican voters.
Because members of Congress do not need to reside in their districts, Republicans expect Mr. Griffith and Mr. Cline to compete in a primary.
This all assumes the state Supreme Court does not overturn the new map, which it could, in a pending case it has said it will decide after the vote.
“I’m on pins and needles, I really am,” Ms. Macy said in an interview last week. She rattled off the rural stops she had been making in the Shenandoah Valley in the early part of her campaign. “This new map comes out,” she said, “and it’s …” She ended her sentence with the sound of screeching brakes.
“It does complicate things,” she added.
Ms. Macy put a sign on her lawn encouraging a “yes” vote on the referendum to approve the new map. That map would take a district that favored Mr. Trump by 12 percentage points in the last election and shape it into one that favored Kamala Harris by three.
Still, Ms. Macy can’t help but feel that the Democratic mapmakers stiffed her by pitting her against Mr. Perriello in what’s been nicknamed the “college district.”
“I felt like, ‘Guys’ — and it’s mostly guys — ‘you said you wanted more women candidates, you said you wanted more non-politicians,’” she said. “I’m raising money like hell, I’m doing everything that the Democrats said they wanted, and then they do this. I’m being a good party girl, but I’m not happy about it.”
Ms. Macy and Mr. Perriello have both been campaigning in their existing districts as well as the possible one: He lives in the current Fifth and would live in the new Sixth; she lives in the Sixth either way.
But Mr. Perriello is already talking as if he’s running in the new district. In an interview, he spent more time criticizing the Republican incumbent he would run against, Mr. Cline, than he spent on the one he is currently running against, John McGuire.
“Whether it’s Cline or McGuire, the fury from voters in this part of the state is the same,” Mr. Perriello said.
To his eye, mapmakers drew the new Sixth District the way it should have been all along — what he described as “a beautiful set of communities across the Blue Ridge Mountains,” one of the youngest districts in the country with 18 institutions of higher education “and even more microbrews.”
In his current district, the Fifth, voters went for Mr. Trump over Ms. Harris by 12 points.
The prospect of a primary did not seem to preoccupy Mr. Perriello. “We’re focused on November,” he said. “The priority right now is to turn the Blue Ridge blue and be part of restoring the House into the hands of the people, and restore the system of checks and balances on Trump.”
Virginia’s new map would draw eight seats considered safe for the Democrats, two competitive districts that lean to the Democrats, and one safe Republican district.
If approved, it would also create at least two competitive primaries for the Democrats — Perriello versus Macy and an even bigger brawl in the newly created Seventh, nicknamed the “lobster district.” Its tail would be near the nation’s capital, and its claws would reach to the West Virginia border on one side and past Richmond on the other.
That primary is so crowded that Democrats have joked that Republicans could have a chance because all the Democratic voters in the district have declared themselves candidates. There are at least seven so far. Dorothy McAuliffe, the wife of a former governor, Terry McAuliffe, began her campaign last month with a four-day tour of the proposed district, a host of endorsements and a video message in which she appeared wearing a campaign-branded vest.
Dan Helmer, a member of the state’s House of Delegates who ran the Democrats’ successful campaigns to take control of the chamber in 2023 and to flip 13 more Republican-held seats last November, declared in February. Mr. Helmer helped devise the strategy for the redistricting campaign he now hopes to capitalize on — but later recused himself.
Two outsiders, both antagonists of the president, are also trying to make a splash.
J.P. Cooney, the former top deputy to Jack Smith, the special counsel who led two prosecutions of President Trump, kicked off his campaign with a video message recounting how he had also prosecuted the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, among other Trump allies — and been fired by the president a week after Mr. Trump took office.
Olivia Troye, the former Pence aide who broke with President Trump and spoke at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, became the latest entrant last week.
Also running are Virginia Delegate Adele McClure; State Senator Saddam Azlan Salim; and Joe Schiarizzi, a 30-year-old entrepreneur and affordable housing activist.
All of their campaigns hang on a “yes” in Tuesday’s vote, and polls show it is likely to be close.
Mr. Cline has warned that Democrats are trying to silence rural voters by lumping them into a district with elite “Northern Virginian suburban NGO defense contractors.”
“Are you going to let them take away your vote?” he asked a small crowd at a stop in the Shenandoah Valley last month. “Are you going to let them take away your Commonwealth of Virginia?”
Asked about the possibility of an ugly intraparty fight in the new Ninth District, Reilly Richardson, a spokesman for the House Republicans’ campaign committee, deflected to the crowd of Democrats measuring the drapes in the new Seventh.
“While Democrats fight amongst themselves over congressional districts that do not exist,” Mr. Richardson said, “Republicans across the Commonwealth are united in the fight to defeat Virginia Democrats’ corrupt power grab.”
Kate Zernike is a national reporter at The Times.
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