The Daily Signal’s Virginia Correspondent Joe Thomas is out with a new podcast breaking down Virginia Democrats’ effort to redistrict the commonwealth.
Now that Democrats are fully in control of the commonwealth, they are moving forward with a plan that could add four Democrat seats and ultimately determine the balance of power in Washington after the 2026 midterms.
Thomas called the move, which could change the Virginia congressional delegation from six Democrats and five Republicans to 10 Democrats and just one Republican “reactionary.”
The Democrat redistricting proposal would allow the Democrat-controlled government to redraw their districts if a red state decides to redistrict. “If another state changed their districts, Virginia could invoke this constitutional amendment to recreate theirs.”
?“Now, what’s happened in Virginia is that they’ve pulled some rabbits out of the hat,” Thomas said.
“In Virginia, the law says that in order to amend the Virginia Constitution, you have to pass the amendment through both the House and Senate,” Thomas explained. The governor is not involved in that process, though Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger has said she backs the effort.
But, to amend the constitution, the Virginia legislature has to wait until after an election cycle, and the amendment “has to pass another general assembly session and then be brought to the voters,” Thomas continued.
In a special session late last year, however, “Virginia budget Speaker Don Scott used the parliamentary procedure to convene another meeting of that same special session in December to pass the constitutional amendment for a second time, just days before the culmination of Virginia’s 2025 election cycle.”
If voters approve of the proposed amendment to the constitution, it would “?overturn an election that went down 65% in favor of a non-partisan redistricting commission that each 10 years would redraw Virginia’s districts based on population shifts,” Thomas said.
The Democrats’ proposed 10-1 map look to stretch districts such as VA-1, VA-10, and VA-11.
“They’re all along what is called the Blue Crescent in Virginia, that [go] from the Washington, D.C. suburbs all the way down to the Hampton Roads,” Thomas said of these districts.
But stretching these districts to the west and south is not without risk, Thomas claimed.
“What they’re going to do with these districts is they’re going to take these 20% and 40% Democrat districts by election results, stretch them to the point of breaking,” Thomas said. The 10-1 map would “stretch them to the point where they’re going to be right at the edge of being maybe 52%, maybe 53% Democrats by election results, historically.”
“And that’s the peril in this,” Thomas added. “They’re putting themselves in a position of taking all of those safe districts along the Blue Crescent from Northern Virginia” and “stretching them to the point of them being perilously close to a 50-50 split.”
A Republican with a good ground game in these new districts could prove redistricting was more trouble than Virginia Democrats bargained for.