The Democratic Campaign That Begins With An Apology

Democrats in Virginia desperately want permission from voters to gerrymander the state beyond recognition. They also want Virginians to know how profoundly sorry they are to have to ask. “I believe that people should choose their representatives. Representatives shouldn’t choose their people,” State Senator Creigh Deeds declared on Friday, as he stood flanked by a dozen young Democrats at the University of Virginia.

This is typically the main argument against gerrymandering, but for Deeds, it was just the windup to a pitch for his party to cast aside its highfalutin principles and start hurling spitballs back at Republicans. “We’ve been pushed,” he lamented, “into a situation not of our own choosing.”

The situation to which Deeds so gravely alluded is the all-out redistricting war that Republicans started last summer in Texas. At President Trump’s behest, state lawmakers redrew congressional lines to bolster the GOP’s narrow House majority. Democrats, initially aghast but quickly emboldened, responded by matching Republicans with an equally aggressive gerrymander in California, which voters approved overwhelmingly in November. The battleground expanded from there, as Republicans added seats in North Carolina, Ohio, and Missouri.

With new opportunities to gain an edge dwindling, the two parties are waging an expensive campaign in Virginia that could prove decisive. The congressional map that Democrats have proposed is, in its ways, even more audacious than those enacted in either Texas or California. They’re asking voters to temporarily set aside a bipartisan redistricting system they approved just six years ago. Under their proposal, Democrats would be favored to win all but one of Virginia’s 11 House seats—a huge shift from the current districts, which are currently split between six Democrats and five Republicans. The boldness of Virginia’s plan stands out all the more in light of the reticence of neighboring Maryland, a stronger Democratic bastion where the senate president rebuffed a push from national leaders and Governor Wes Moore to draw a map that could have given Democrats the lone remaining House seat they don’t currently hold.

Just how far Democrats would reach in Virginia was the subject of weeks of internal debate within the party. Some had pushed for a slightly more restrained proposal that would have given Democrats the upper hand in nine of the 11 House seats. But advocates of a maximalist approach prevailed, and now Virginia voters will decide in an April 21 referendum whether to use the new maps this fall. The party has unified behind the 10–1 proposal—even if some Democrats seem to be bringing a touch of shame to their campaign.

“Nobody wants to do this. I don’t want to do this,” Michelle Maldonado, a Democratic member of the Virginia House of Delegates, told me after delivering a pep talk to campaign volunteers near her home in Manassas. But, like Deeds, she cited as a rationale Trump’s demand for Republicans to carve into Democratic seats wherever they had the power to do so. “We can’t sit back and wait.”

Democrats confronted the same ethical qualms last fall in California, another state where voters had previously acted to remove politics from redistricting. But that campaign took place in a far bluer state at a time when anger among rank-and-file Democrats over the GOP’s Texas gerrymander was raw and fresh. Five months later, the Republican redistricting campaigns have stalled in states such as Indiana and Kansas, where GOP lawmakers rejected pressure from Trump to redraw their maps. The Florida legislature will meet later this month to consider gerrymandering proposals, but there too, many Republicans have become skittish.

[Read: The state that handed Trump his biggest defeat yet]

The GOP’s struggles are welcome news for Democrats nationally, but they have complicated the “Yes” campaign in Virginia, where polls are close and some left-leaning voters are questioning whether their party really needed to gerrymander so audaciously. Deeds, who was the Democrats’ nominee for governor in 2009, is one of Virginia’s longest-serving state legislators. He said he’s tried to explain the stakes to Democratic critics, with mixed success. “Sometimes I’ve been able to convince them otherwise,” Deeds told me. But other skeptics of the plan, he acknowledged, haven’t budged. “Ultimately,” Deeds said, “if this isn’t successful, I think it will be because of people like that.”

Perhaps the biggest risk for Virginia Democrats is that their cutthroat approach to redistricting will wake up a state Republican Party that they thoroughly trounced in November. Abigail Spanberger won the governorship by 15 points and the largest raw-vote margin in state history. But Republicans have been heartened by strong early-voting turnout in conservative areas, along with a landslide victory in a legislative election last month. (The result was a rare overperformance by Republicans in a special election during Trump’s second term, which Democrats have been dominating across the country.)

Democrats “have overreached,” Eric Cantor, the former House majority leader who is helping lead the opposition to the amendment, told me. “There’s no doubt that gives us an advantage.” Representative Ben Cline, a fourth-term Republican whose conservative district would become a Democratic-leaning battleground in the proposed map, has launched another group to defeat the referendum. “Virginia had a Republican governor less than three months ago, but Democrats now want to take 91 percent of the House seats. That’s insane,” he told me.

A narrow majority of likely Virginia voters favored the redistricting amendment in a poll released last week by The Washington Post and George Mason University’s Schar School. But the same survey found that Republicans and other opponents of the measure were more enthusiastic about voting. “People understand the hypocrisy and are really angry,” Cantor said. Turnout for an April election “is a tough thing,” he added. “But when you’re angry, I think you win the turnout.”

Democratic ads have featured Spanberger and former President Obama urging voters to fight back against Republican efforts “to steal enough seats in Congress to rig the next election and wield unchecked power for two more years.” But opponents have tried to muddy the debate by reminding voters of Obama’s long history of campaigning against gerrymandering. Civil-rights leaders accused a dark-money group of engaging in a racist misinformation campaign by sending mailers to Black voters invoking the civil-rights movement and implying that Obama opposes the redistricting amendment. “It’s despicable,” Maldonado said. (The chair of the committee that sent the mailers, a Republican former state legislator who is Black, has defended the tactic.)

With tens of millions of dollars already spent on TV ads, Democrats have dwarfed Republicans in fundraising so far. But turnout has been robust across Virginia, even exceeding the early vote in the fall governor’s race. At the early-voting site in Waynesboro, a small city west of Charlottesville near Shenandoah National Park, cars pulled into the parking lot every couple of minutes on a recent Thursday afternoon. The area is a conservative part of Cline’s district, and most people I interviewed were voting no. Voters expressed more than the usual amount of disgust with both parties. “They’ve all let the power go to their head,” George Trent, a 56-year-old Trump voter who opposed the amendment, told me. J. Strickland, a 71-year-old independent who leans Republican and “reluctantly” backed Trump in 2024, told me he voted no because if the amendment passed, “Democrats would control the entire state.” Strickland, who did not want his first name used while talking about politics, said the whole gerrymandering war made a strong case for term limits in Congress. “This two-party system is crazy,” Strickland said. “Both parties are fighting against themselves.”

As they did in California, Democrats are trying to reassure voters about the redistricting amendment by emphasizing that it’s temporary. The new maps would be used through 2030, after which the state would return to a system in which a bipartisan commission draws House districts after the decennial census. Supporters have also noted that unlike Republican gerrymandering efforts that have won approval only from state legislatures, California and Virginia have each put their redistricting proposals before the voters, as state law required in both cases.

[Read: ‘California is allowed to hit back’ ]

Opponents of the Virginia amendment doubt the claims that these new maps are only a short-term response. Republicans have made no such promises about their own mid-decade redistricting plans, and because of population trends, blue states are likely to lose seats to GOP-controlled states after the 2030 census, putting more pressure on Democrats to maximize their advantage where they can. A Supreme Court ruling rolling back the Voting Rights Act, which could happen later this spring, would allow Republicans in southern states to draw themselves even more seats in the next few years.

If gerrymandering is a tough sell in Virginia, Democrats are also offering voters a simpler rationale for supporting the amendment. This, they tell them, is your chance to fight back against Trump, to “level the playing field” against the president’s many attempts to accumulate power for himself and for his party. The various messages from the “Yes” campaign have a choose-your-own-outrage feel to them. In addition to running commercials with Obama and Spanberger, the “Yes” campaign has released ads featuring military veterans warning about Trump’s threat to democracy. Another ad warns about the prospect of a national abortion ban if Republicans accrue even more power.

At the University of Virginia, “Yes” campaigners were using their own Trump-related controversy as motivation: the ouster last summer of UVA’s president, James Ryan, who resigned under pressure from the Justice Department in a dispute over DEI policies. During a press conference last week, Semony Shah, the president of UVA’s University Democrats, cast the referendum as an opportunity for students to stop what she called “federal overreach” into the university. “These are things that frustrate students, because their voices weren’t accounted for. Their voices weren’t heard,” Shah told me afterward. “This,” she said, “is your way to make your voice heard.”

Democrats acknowledged the strong start that Republican areas of the state have had in early voting, but they told me turnout was picking up among their target constituencies. The campaign is planning a surge of rallies and canvassing events this weekend, timed for the expansion of early voting to dozens more satellite locations across Virginia. At the canvass launch in Manassas, Maldonado warned volunteers that they might encounter concerned and even angry voters who were “worried that this is a power grab by Democrats.” The door-knockers themselves seemed more confident, suggesting that the party’s pearl-clutching over gerrymandering was not as widespread as politicians like Deeds and Maldonado feared. Dylan Saldano, a 24-year-old digital fundraiser from Loudoun County, told me he’s been canvassing regularly since early voting started. I asked him if he had encountered Democrats who planned to vote against the amendment out of a principled opposition to gerrymandering. “I haven’t found someone who’s said that yet,” Saldano replied, “which makes me think we have it in the bag.”