On Tuesday, Virginia voters approved a measure that will allow lawmakers to redraw the state’s congressional lines to make ten of the state’s eleven districts more favorable for Democrats.
The new map is designed to allow Democrats to pick up as many as four seats in the upcoming midterm elections.
The newly passed constitutional amendment will temporarily bypass the state’s bipartisan redistricting commission to implement a new congressional map until 2030, when mapmaking responsibilities will return to the commission.
Throughout the campaign, Republicans called out Democrats for pushing a measure to bypass the bipartisan redistricting commission, which voters approved just six years ago by an almost two-to-one margin.
“No amount of money is going to let Virginians ignore what they saw when those maps were published,” Mike Young, the campaign manager for Virginians for Fair Maps, told NBC News ahead of the election. “And no amount of money is going to make them undo what was passed just five years ago, to take politics out of this process.”
Nearly $100 million was spent campaigning on the measure. Just one month ago, Virginians for Fair Elections, the pro-referendum group, had spent 17 times more than Virginians for Fair Maps on ads. By Monday, the pro-referendum group had only spent three times as much.
Democrats, for their part, argued that they were giving their party a fighting chance after Republicans moved to gerrymander districts in several other states.
“We’re giving Virginians a chance to vote — which Republican states have not done — about whether they want to have a congressional delegation that will stand up against Donald Trump’s tyranny if he tries to interfere with our elections,” Senator Tim Kaine (D., Va.) said last weekend.
Virginia is the latest state to redraw its maps to give one party an edge in the midterms. A back-and-forth between the parties began when Texas advanced a map favoring Republicans last year.
Both parties are looking to gain an edge in the November midterms to keep or gain control of the closely divided House.
Six other states approved new maps last year, including Texas, North Carolina, Missouri, Ohio, Utah, and California. Those new maps gave Republicans an edge in nine more seats, while six new seats now favor Democrats.
In Virginia, the new map’s approval comes after Democrats successfully won a trifecta of governmental control last November, taking over the governor’s mansion and both chambers of the state legislature.
Polling ahead of the election showed a tight race: 52 percent of likely voters said they supported the referendum, compared with 47 percent who opposed it, according to a Washington Post/George Mason University poll.
Both parties worried that the April special election, in which only the redistricting referendum was on the ballot, would have unpredictable turnout.
Big names on both sides of the aisle got involved in the Virginia campaign — President Trump called into a conservative talk radio show on Monday to encourage voters to reject the “unfair” map, while former President Barack Obama had been featured in pro-redistricting ads in the state. Republicans have run ads featuring old clips of Obama criticizing “political gerrymandering” because it makes political parties move “further and further apart and harder and harder to find common ground.”
Virginia is considered Democrats’ last chance to redistrict ahead of the 2026 midterms.
For Republicans, the final chance to redistrict will come in Florida, where state lawmakers are meeting for a special session next week to redraw its congressional map.