In yet another loss for president Trump and his floundering gerrymandering blitz, Virginia voters approved a Democratic-led redistricting measure on Tuesday that will likely give Democrats four additional congressional seats and a chance to take control of the U.S. House this year.
With 97% of the vote in, the measure had passed with 51.5% approving and 48.5% voting against it. State and national Democrats celebrated Tuesday’s win, which still has to face a number of hurdles as legal challenges to the proposal continue to play out in court.
“Virginia voters have spoken, and tonight they approved a temporary measure to push back against a President who claims he is ‘entitled’ to more Republican seats in Congress,”Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger said in a statement following Tuesday’s referendum. “Virginians watched other states go along with those demands without voter input — and we refused to let that stand. We responded the right way: at the ballot box.”
“Tonight, Virginians refused to let Trump play games with Americans’ right to fair representation,” DNC Chair Ken Martin said in a statement on Tuesday. “Voters are turning out in droves to put an end to Trump’s billionaire-first agenda and Republicans see the writing on the wall.”
Former president Barack Obama, who has been an outspoken supporter of the proposal, also cheered Tuesday’s Democratic victory.
“Congratulations, Virginia! Republicans are trying to tilt the midterm elections in their favor, but they haven’t done it yet,” he wrote in a post on X on Tuesday night. “Thanks for showing us what it looks like to stand up for our democracy and fight back.”
“Fairness won,” Democratic Majority Leader of the Virginia Senate Scott Surovell chimed in in a statement. “Accountability won. And the Commonwealth that gave America its constitution has once again reminded the nation what the Constitution is for.”
For months now, Virginia Democrats have been attempting to move forward with some sort of redistricting proposal to offset the impact of Trump’s nationwide mid-cycle gerrymandering campaign.
Trump’s aggressive redistricting crusade began last year, when Trump successfully pressured Republicans who control Texas’ state legislature to redraw its congressional district lines ahead of the midterm elections — as part of a nationwide crusade to convince other Republican-controlled state legislatures to gerrymander their congressional maps. He and other Republicans were transparent about their intentions: it was a way to ensure that Republicans maintain control of the U.S. House after the midterms; originally Democrats had to flip just a handful of seats in order to retake control of the U.S. House. Now, control of Congress is much more complicated.
Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott was the first to cave to Trump’s bullying. He approved a new Republican-favoring map in August 2025 after it passed out of the Republican-dominiated state legislature and after Democratic lawmakers in Texas fled the state in order to prevent their colleagues from reaching a quorum to pass the new maps. Ultimately the Democratic state lawmakers returned — after legal threats — and the new maps, drawn to flip five seats for Republicans, were approved. North Carolina and Missouri followed suit, approving new maps that would give Republicans additional U.S. House seats as well.
Virginia’s redistricting proposal, similar to a Democratic-led proposal in California, was introduced in direct response to Trump’s overreach.
Tuesday’s referendum will change Virginia’s state constitution, and gives the Democratic-controlled General Assembly the authority to redraw the state’s congressional district lines. Since 2020, this authority is typically reserved for the state’s nonpartisan redistricting commission. The referendum gives the General Assembly the authority to temporarily bypass that commission to redraw lines.
The new map will give Democrats four additional congressional seats — meaning Democrats are expected to hold 10 of the state’s 11 seats in the U.S. House after the midterm elections. This is a significant change: up until Tuesday, Democrats held six of the state’s 11 seats.
Although Spanberger has supported the proposal, she has also faced some pushback from Democrats who claimed she was not outspoken enough on the issue. As the political party that tends to be against racial gerrymandering — with many blue states developing their own version of Virginia’s independent redistricting commission to ensure the creation of fair congressional maps once a decade — Spanberger’s challenge is one Democrats across the country have faced while weighing how to respond to Trump’s attempt at a midterms power grab.
Spanberger’s office has both defended the governor’s support for her state’s redistricting commission while also campaigning for the referendum, telling Politico in February that she has been a consistent and outspoken supporter of the measure.
“There isn’t a Democrat in Virginia who has done more to encourage voters to support this referendum than Governor Spanberger,” a spokesperson for Spanberger told Politico. “She’s a particularly effective messenger because she’s meeting voters where many of them are — Virginians who supported the bipartisan commission in 2020 but understand that the ballgame changed when the President claimed he’s ‘entitled’ to more Republican seats in Congress, and states got to work to give them to him.”
On the other side of the spectrum, Republican efforts to campaign against the measure have been shrouded in dark money.
Last month, some voters, specifically Black voters, were targeted by highly offensive mailers, likening the state’s redistricting effort to Jim Crow laws in the South.
“Our ancestors fought to represent us. Now Richmond politicians are trying to take our districts away,” a mailed flyer, which contained Klan imagery, read. “Just like Jim Crow, they want to silence your voice.”
The mailers were reportedly sent by the Justice for Democracy Pac, established by A.C. Cordoza, a former Republican member of the Virginia House of Delegates and the only Black Republican member in the legislature, Mother Jones reported.
The Justice for Democracy PAC reportedly received, in the last couple of months, “9 million in donations from a conservative group known as Per Aspera Policy Incorporated, which was in the past funded by Trump ally and billionaire Peter Thiel.
“Peter Thiel, one of Donald Trump’s top billionaire backers, is spending millions in Virginia to push a campaign built on lies and racial division,” Democratic Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones said in a statement this month. “These ads deliberately exploit the history of Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement to mislead Black voters and suppress participation.”
Although the proposal was approved on Tuesday, the state Supreme Court has been waiting to see if the measure would pass before deciding on whether to rule on a handful of legal challenges brought against it by Republicans.
