Voters attend an Arlington Democrats redistricting-vote watch party on Tuesday.
Photo: Valerie Plesch/Bloomberg via Getty Images
On Tuesday, Virginia voters approved a constitutional amendment allowing the Democratic-controlled legislature to temporarily substitute a new congressional map that could flip as many as four U.S. House seats in the midterm elections. The vote was far closer than Democrats hoped, but the result should help offset the Republican gerrymanders engineered by Donald Trump in multiple red states, making it likely that Democrats will gain control of the House in November and break Trump’s trifecta hold on the federal government.
Unlike a similar gambit last November in California, Virginia’s redistricting initiative was never a slam dunk. Democrats gained a fragile hold on state government in 2025 by winning the governorship and flipping a legislative chamber, and had to race to enact the legislation that made the April 21 ballot measure possible. Newly elected Governor Abigail Spanberger, who was perceived as a centrist devoted to working across party lines, never seemed that enthusiastic about the gerrymander. And the Republicans opposing it cleverly sowed confusion about the wording of the initiative. They misleadingly suggested it was opposed by Democratic leaders like Barack Obama, using quotes from old speeches opposing gerrymandering as a matter of principle. It never quite became the simple referendum on an unpopular president’s power grab that Prop 50 represented in California.
But in the end Democrats managed to get the word out that this was a big deal (in part via a powerful pro-initiative message from Obama). Outside groups backing the gerrymander outspent opponents by a two-to-one margin. During both early in-person voting and on Election Day, pro-Republican areas of Virginia produced relatively high turnout. But a late burst of voting in Northern Virginia’s heavily Democratic suburbs made the key difference. “Yes” carried the state’s largest county, Fairfax, with 70 percent of the vote, producing nearly a 150,000 vote margin; outside Fairfax and the neighboring counties of Loudon, Arlington, and Prince William, “No” led statewide by about 175,000 votes with most of the vote counted (“Yes” leads statewide by 88,000 votes, or 2.8 percent, as of late Election Night). Mail ballots postmarked by Election Day will continue to trickle in until noon Friday and are likely to enhance the “Yes” margin. A New York Times estimate of the final tally is that “Yes” will win by 3.4 percent, just over half the margin predicted by late polls. By comparison, Kamala Harris carried the state by 5.7 percent in 2024, and Spanberger won by 15 percent last November.
So Democrats are as much relieved as enthused by the Virginia results. Republicans will make a lot of noise about a legal challenge to the referendum itself (a position accepted by a lower state court earlier this year but set aside by the state’s Supreme Court, which green-lit the vote). But that’s very unlikely to go anywhere.
Now the national gerrymandering battle begun by Trump last summer will shift to a final struggle in Florida, where Republican governor Ron DeSantis has scheduled a special legislative session to begin on April 28 with his own planned congressional gerrymander as a key part of the agenda. The Virginia results will redouble pressure on Florida Republicans to flip as many House districts as possible, though they face a legal obstacle in a state constitutional provision that purports to ban partisan gerrymandering. After a back-and-forth fight in red and blue states across the country, Florida will likely give Republicans a small net national advantage as compared to the pre-gerrymandering status quo, but nothing a good strong November Democratic wave cannot overcome. If Democrats do take control of the House this year, Virginia’s bold measure to counter Trump’s efforts to rig election maps will be an important landmark.
