RICHMOND — A slim majority of Virginia voters supports a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would let Democratic lawmakers draw new, blue-leaning congressional districts ahead of this fall’s midterm elections, according to a new poll from the Wason Center at Christopher Newport University that found Virginians are deeply unhappy with the actions of President Donald Trump.
The poll shows even stronger support for two other proposed amendmentsto the state constitution that are priorities of Democratic lawmakers in the General Assembly session that began this month: protecting access to abortion (66 percent favor) and automatically restoring voting rights for people who complete felony prison sentences (64 percent favor). A fourth proposed amendment that would enshrine same-sex marriage was not included in the survey.
The findings are generally positive for Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D), whose affordability agenda jibes with the top issues for voters across party lines in the poll. Sixty percent of registered voters say they’re optimistic about the new governor, with 33 percent pessimistic and 7 percent saying they either have mixed feelings or don’t know.
They were less happy with former governor Glenn Youngkin (R), whose term ended Jan. 17 — about halfway through the Jan. 13-20 span when the survey was conducted, Youngkin’s approval rating was 44 percent, down from 53 percent a year ago, with 43 percent in the latest poll saying they disapproved of his performance and 13 saying they didn’t know.
That drop coincides with significantly low approval ratings for Trump, with 62 percent of registered Virginia voters saying they disapprove of Trump’s job performance and 34 percent approving, with 4 percent undecided.
“This is the lowest we have seen in polling of Trump, including during his first term,” Rebecca Bromley-Trujillo, research director at the Wason Center, said in a briefing for reporters. A lot of the other findings, she added, are “being filtered through how folks are feeling about the Trump presidency.”
That comes after a year in which Trump cost thousands of Virginians their jobs by slashing the federal workforce and imposed trade tariffs — including on agriculture, Virginia’s largest private industry — that were widely seen as boosting the cost of consumer goods.
Virginia voters remain in a bad mood about the nation’s future, with 65 percent saying the United States is heading in the wrong direction and 28 percent saying it’s headed in the right direction. A year ago, 31 percent said the nation was on the right track.
Voters of both major parties rated “inflation/cost of living” as one of the top issues confronting the state. However, Democrats rated “political extremism/threats to democracy” as similarly important, while Republicans ranked immigration second.
Another area of agreement: placing limits on data centers, the large-scale facilities containing the equipment that hosts the internet and draw massive amounts of water and electricity. “Folks in Virginia have kind of soured on data centers,” Bromley-Trujillo said, with 69 percent supporting a prohibition on data centers within a mile of a park or historic site, and 63 percent favoring a requirement that the facilities get their power from renewable or nuclear sources.
Nearly two-thirds of voters support Virginia’s current method of drawing political boundaries — a bipartisan commission designed to create new maps every 10 years without gerrymandering to favor one side. Under that system, the state’s delegation to Congress consists of six Democrats and five Republicans.
But 51 percent of voters said they would support temporarily suspending that system, as outlined in the proposed constitutional amendment, with 43 percent opposed. Democrats have cast the effort as a response to Trump’s campaign to get Republican states to draw maps that would help his party hold its majority in the U.S. House of Representatives in this fall’s election. States such as Texas and North Carolina have done so, while Virginia joins California, Maryland and others in seeking to counter those moves.
A circuit court judge in Tazewell County put the redistricting effort on hold Tuesday by ruling that the General Assembly violated state law in the process used to approve it, but Democrats responded Wednesday by filing a notice of appeal. They predicted the ruling would be overturned and a statewide referendum on the matter scheduled for April 21 would move ahead.
The Wason Center survey was conducted through interviews of 807 Virginia registered voters reached on cellphones or landlines, with a margin of error of plus or minus 4.4 percent.
Scott Clement in Washington contributed to this report.
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