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How Virginia Democrats are coping with their redistricting defeat

Three takeaways from a key swing district in Virginia.

Virginia’s plan to redraw its congressional maps to create as many as four new Democratic seats is dead, struck down by the state supreme court. Its impact on Virginia politics, though, is still being felt — and nowhere more visibly than in Virginia’s First District.

The district, which covers much of Virginia’s coastline and includes parts of the Richmond suburbs, is one of the few in the country that is actually competitive, and it’s been thrown into chaos due to the ongoing gerrymandering wars that have consumed the 2026 midterm cycle.

To learn more, I traveled there last month for the latest episode of Vox’s video podcast, America, Actually.

Originally, Virginians voted to redraw their maps to be more favorable to Democrats in response to Republican efforts to do the same in Missouri, Texas, and elsewhere. But a court effort threw out that result, restoring the state’s original maps and sowing uncertainty for candidates and volunteers who had been advocating for the change.

The glaring error in the Virginia Supreme Court’s gerrymandering decision

This Democratic governor won in a landslide — and is now at war with her own base

Even more, Virginia has become a place where the underlying tensions in the gerrymandering battle have begun to bubble up to the surface. Newly elected Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s approval rating has taken a hit since endorsing the Democrats’ campaign to draw new maps, and she recently admonished........

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