Steve Helber/AP Photo
Voters enter a polling station in Richmond, Virginia, November 6, 2018.
Next Tuesday, Virginians will go to the polls to elect every member of the state’s legislature—and the outcome will determine whether the next decade of Virginia public policy will be subject to majority rule. In a state where Republican gerrymandering in 2011 gave the GOP a decade-long legislative majority, even as Democrats were winning every statewide election, control of the legislature has enabled the Republicans to block popular gun control legislation and hold out on Medicaid expansion.
But Tuesday’s election is being fought out on a somewhat different playing field. After a succession of courts ruled that the 2011 redistricting was racially discriminatory, 11 districts were redrawn last year, and are now more competitive. Two years ago, due to a steadily more diverse electorate and the revulsion against President Donald Trump, Democrats turned a host of legislative seats from red to blue, so that they’re only two votes shy in each house of a majority. Should they win control next Tuesday, they’ll control redistricting following next year’s census. It’s also possible, however, that the state will soon create a nonpartisan commission that would supplant the legislature, at least partly, when it comes time to draw the new lines.
On the eve of the election, several districts that weren’t redistricted nonetheless have very competitive races, as do a number of the newly corrected ones—probably. “We know because of the court-mandated redistricting that happened this year, it’s kind of a shifting landscape,” says Ryan Quinn, a political analyst at Swing Left. “Some of these districts have never voted for either of the candidates that they’re seeing in their districts right now. There are a lot of open questions that are still yet to be answered about some of these districts.”
This election’s unknowns, especially in Virginia’s purple parts, have complicated the tasks confronting candidates like Democrat Sheila Bynum-Coleman, who is challenging Republican Speaker of the House of Delegates Kirk Cox in the 66th District in the Richmond area, which was formerly racially gerrymandered to advantage the Republican. Cox has been in the House of Delegates since 1989, and a Bynum-Coleman win in the new, more diverse 66th would signal a huge rebuke of the past.
“You’re talking about people who have been in office 30 years. They haven’t had to answer the call of people in the district because—guess what?—they’re safe,” Bynum-Coleman said of her opponent after a canvass kickoff event at a Chesterfield home last Saturday. “They’ve drawn the lines to make sure that no one could take them out—so people woke up and started fighting back.”
The significance of this race has not been lost on national organizations that are focusing their attention on Virginia. From Moms Demand Action to Crooked Media and Data for Progress, outside money and volunteer recruitment have flooded into Bynum-Coleman’s campaign. But after many years in a gerrymandered, noncompetitive district, voters in the 66th are unaccustomed to competitive races, and many in the 66th District are still minimally engaged.
“I haven’t even heard nobody talking about voting in this neighborhood,” George Hill, a middle-aged voter from a working-class neighborhood told me during a precinct walk last Saturday. “I haven’t seen any signs up. In other neighborhoods you’ll see signs on people’s grass.” Hill said he feels like there has been progress in making his vote count this year, but voters in his predominately black neighborhood could be engaged much more, he says.
When she met him during a precinct walk two weeks before Election Day, Bynum-Coleman became the first candidate Hill had seen in person. He and his neighbor, Gregory Coleman (no relation to the candidate), said they follow the news of the election through the local news stations and social media, but retail politics has yet to reach their Watermark Townhomes neighborhood.
Like other newly redistricted voters, Hill and Coleman also have to keep up with the logistics of voting within their fluctuating district lines. Hill, who works a minimum-wage job, said voters already busy with their work schedules “gotta find out on [their] own” where to vote. If you don’t, he added, “then you’re like, ‘Where do I go? Well, I cannot be late for work.’ And boom, now you just missed your vote. And you could’ve been the one vote that could have pushed it over the top.”
This confusion is not at all unique to the 66th District. Brian Cannon, executive director of the nonpartisan organization OneVirginia2021, is fighting for fairer and more compact districts through a constitutional amendment that would establish an independent commission to supplant the legislature in drawing Virginia’s districts. Oddly shaped gerrymandered districts, Cannon says, not only reduce competition in the political system, but also present voters with obstacles that may look small on district maps but loom large on Election Day. “Not only do we see split precincts, [we see] where the communities are carved up so much that there are thousands of misaligned voters that come to vote and get the wrong ballot,” he says. “We’ve got to do something different in Virginia from the way we’ve always done it.”
Though the surest way to eliminate gerrymandering would be a completely independent commission that “boots” the legislators out of the map-drawing room, Cannon says, OneVirginia2021 is willing to work with a constitutional amendment that’s already gone through a first read in the General Assembly. The proposal, if passed, would create the Virginia Redistricting Commission, composed of a mix of state legislators and citizens, with a citizen chairperson.
“We can’t scrap the amendment and start over,” Cannon says, “there’s not enough time.” Whatever its shortcomings, he adds, “this one will get passed just in the nick of time” for the 2021 redistricting. “There’s a lot of ways to take this from an ok commission to a really good commission,” he concludes.
Redistricting is not the biggest issue on the ballot this November (polls show it’s gun control), but Susan Swecker, chairwoman of the Virginia Democratic Party, says it’s a bigger part of the conversation than it was ten years ago. The one-party districts that gerrymandering created, she says, have led to rigid partisan polarization in the legislature. “If you don’t have something that is a semblance of fairness, how can you reach consensus on getting anything done?” she asks. “That’s why we’ve had partisanship in Virginia now that we didn’t use to have.” Nonetheless, Swecker would not commit to supporting any specific fair-redistricting mechanisms if Democrats take power.
Another obstacle to a fair redistricting after the 2020 census is the census itself. President Donald Trump and his administration demanded the Census Bureau ask recipients to disclose their citizenship status in 2020. Although the Supreme Court blocked the added question, a test census with that question was sent to 240,000 households this year and fear of retaliation within immigrant communities threatens accurate results.
Democratic Governor Ralph Northam has established the Complete Count Commission with an allocated $1.5 million from the Economic Contingency Fund to help ensure a more accurate count. But special attention will be needed in immigrant communities—and Virginia is home to one million immigrants, most of them clustered in Northern Virginia’s Washington, D.C., suburbs. An undercount there could affect not only Democratic representation in government but also federal funding for those areas. Making matters more complicated yet, the greatest number of those foreign-born residents come from El Salvador, a community singled out for deportation threats by the Trump administration.
The administration’s politicization of the census, Cannon says, “could have a significant impact. It’s going to require all the more work on those groups that are already doing work in communities of color to make sure they’re counted and make sure their rights are protected.”
Despite the confusion of redistricting and the absence of competitive politics in the 66th District for many years, Coleman feels nothing but enthusiasm about next week’s election. He had his voting rights restored three years ago and has voted in every election since. “I’m following [the race] because I never had the opportunity to vote because of my prior [conviction],” he said. “So when I got that opportunity I took advantage of it. You’re not going to deprive me of this anymore.”
