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Virginia voters are deciding Tuesday whether to approve a referendum to redraw their state’s congressional districts to favor Democrats by a 10-1 margin, the latest battle in the nationwide scramble by both parties to increase their chances of winning control of the House.
Polls will be open on Tuesday until 7 p.m. ET. Early voting began on March 6, and turnout so far has been high, especially for a special election. As of Monday, more than 1.35 million people had voted early, almost as many as the total 1.48 million who voted in last fall’s statewide races, according to Virginia Public Access Project.
The referendum is seeking to amend the state constitution to allow a mid-decade redistricting using the Democratic-controlled Assembly’s redrawn congressional maps, which will give Democrats an advantage in all but one of the state’s 11 House seats.
According to the referendum, the maps would only be in place until the 2030 election, after which the standard redistricting process will resume. Normally, states redraw their congressional maps once every 10 years, following the decennial Census.
Democrats currently control six of the state’s 11 House seats, and the current map was drawn by a bipartisan commission. The new map would break up the northern part of the state, which includes the D.C. suburbs and has trended more and more Democratic over the years, into several districts that extend into the more conservative southern and western parts of the state. It would also emphasize Democratic Richmond and Virginia Beach.
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President Trump on Monday and Tuesday urged Republicans to vote against the referendum, posting on social media, “VOTE ‘NO’TO SAVE YOUR COUNTRY!”
Democrats “even say it’s unfair,” Mr. Trump said Monday on the John Fredericks radio show. “They say, ‘oh, they’ll do it once, and maybe they’ll go back to what it was.’ It’s — the whole thing is ridiculous.”
A similar ballot measure shepherded by California Gov. Gavin Newsom sailed through that state last year, shifting five GOP-held seats toward Democrats. Newsom and Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger are seeking to even out the redistricting balance sheet after Mr. Trump ordered Texas’ GOP lawmakers to redraw their congressional maps to give Republicans up to five more seats. Missouri and North Carolina also redrew their maps to edge out one Democratic lawmaker apiece.
Virginia Democrats pushed forward with the new maps in the 2026 legislative session, buoyed by the party’s statewide successes in 2025. Last November, Spanberger won by 15 points, Democratic Attorney General Jay Jones defeated incumbent Jason Miyares despite violent text messages that emerged and Democrats swept both the House of Delegates and the state Senate.
But despite those victory margins, a Washington Post/George Mason University poll in March had the yes vote only leading by 5 points.
Brian Cannon of Fair Vote Virginia said he has been a Democrat for 25 years. But he is publicly opposed to the redistricting referendum, pointing to the work he did previously to create a bipartisan commission to draw the state’s congressional maps. He said that although he agrees with Republicans against the referendum, the party as a whole is “not willing to say Trump was wrong to start this fight in Texas.” He said he is working with Virginians from both parties who are opposed to this measure.
Cannon said he believes that Democrats would have had the momentum in November, and “it’s ridiculous, given that Abigail Spanberger won the state by 15 points — they can just win fair and square two more seats under the fair maps that we have.”
But now Cannon said he has seen that Republicans are “fired up, in a way they certainly were not in November of last year, and that’s evident in the early voting, even in deep-red spots.” He said he has spoken to Democrats, on the other hand, who say: “I hate Trump and I hate gerrymandering, and I really am torn and I’m just not going to vote.”
Complicating matters in Virginia is that the referendum is asking voters to essentially overturn a constitutional amendment that was enacted only five years ago and was pushed by Democrats at the time.
While some Democrats nationwide have been fired up by countering Mr. Trump’s redistricting push in red states, Mark Rozell of George Mason’s Schar School of Policy and Government noted that it’s more of a “risky gamble” for Virginia Democrats because it “sets a precedent. And Virginia is more of a purple state.”
But Democrats have sought to cast the Virginia redistricting as a nationwide referendum, with ads featuring former President Barack Obama for the yes vote. Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder, the chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee who previously had advocated against partisan gerrymandering, told “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” on Sunday that the referendum is not a “fight only about Virginia.”
“We need to deal with the crisis that we have right now, come up with a way in which we deal with that crisis, and then get back to the redistricting commissions in California and in Virginia,” Holder said. “And one thing I think it’s really important to understand is that the people have the ability to make this decision in Virginia, as they did in California, as opposed to …being imposed upon them in Texas and in Missouri and in North Carolina, which proved to be wildly unpopular, but Republican politicians ignored the will of the people in those states and put in place these mechanisms.”
Although the GOP won the Virginia governor’s mansion as recently as 2021, the state’s Republicans have suffered from connections to Mr. Trump and the federal government, especially as the region continues to deal with the fallout from the Trump administration’s federal jobs cuts, soaring gas prices and high inflation.
Nearly $100 million has been poured into the race already, with 95% of that money donated coming from dark money groups. Virginians for Fair Elections, a group supporting the referendum, has donated $64 million, while an anti-redistricing group Virginians for Fair Maps has poured in nearly $20 million, according to data from the Virginia Public Access Project.
There are some signs that the redistricting scramble that started last summer in Texas is starting to cool. In December, despite Mr. Trump’s attempts to intervene, a map that would have given Indiana Republicans a 9-0 advantage failed in the GOP-controlled state Senate. And earlier this month, the Maryland legislative session ended without a vote on a map backed by Democratic Gov. Wes Moore to try to edge out the state’s lone Republican member of Congress.
But Kyle Kondik, the managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at University of Virginia Center for Politics, said that “basically, as of right now, the overall House map hasn’t really changed all that much in favor of one side or the other” despite so many states redrawing their maps.
Florida Republicans could still take up redistricting in a special session. But if Republicans aren’t able to push through new maps in any other states and Virginia Democrats succeed, nationally, “Democrats can actually come out ahead on redistricting,” according to Kondik.
“It’s funny, the themes about saving democracy and quote-unquote fairness, like both sides could make that point and make it in a valid way,” Kondik said. “And so in some ways, it’s kind of a muddle. I mean, is it a quote-unquote fair map in Virginia? Of course it’s not. But in the broader context of this redistricting war that’s going on, then maybe the fairness argument makes more sense.”
