Pinwheels and the ‘lobster district’: How Virginia Democrats drew up a US House map to all but lock out Republicans
By Renée Rigdon, Ethan Cohen, CNN
(CNN) — Virginia Democrats hope the new congressional map they’re asking voters to approve Tuesday will flip four Republican House districts, delivering 10 of 11 seats in a state former Vice President Kamala Harris won with just 52% of the vote in 2024.
Here’s how they drew it up.
The plan dramatically reworks entire sections of the state, slicing up deep blue districts in the Washington, DC, suburbs and around Richmond, and creates a new district running along the Blue Ridge Mountains that connects liberal cities.
Virginia’s current map, which was drawn by a pair of court-appointed redistricting experts in 2021, is compact and produced six districts that lean towards Democrats, four that lean towards Republicans, and one which is highly competitive. Opponents of Tuesday’s referendum have run ads noting that Gov. Abigail Spanberger and former President Barack Obama backed nonpartisan redistricting then.
The proposed map is a jagged puzzle specifically drawn to help Democrats win as many seats as possible.
The vote is just the latest volley in a redistricting battle that kicked off last year, when Republicans redrew Texas’ map with the goal of flipping five Democratic seats. Spanberger and Obama now argue the new map is necessary to counter President Donald Trump’s push for new Republican seats.
After some internal disagreement over how aggressively to draw their new map, Democratic leaders in Virginia took a maximalist approach. The resulting map creates several seats that appear more competitive than the new Republican-leaning districts drawn in Texas.
While Texas Republicans drew a map where none of their targeted seats voted for Trump by less than 10 percentage points in 2024, five of the districts on the proposed Virginia map supported Harris by single digits.
Northern Virginia and the ‘lobster’
Heavily Democratic northern Virginia would be carved into five separate districts, with districts that pinwheel from outside Washington to hoover up conservative rural areas of the state. The new 7th starts in northern Virginia and stretches so far that it splits in half to avoid picking up more Democratic turf around Charlottesville that can go into a different district. The result resembles a lobster with a long skinny tail and two wide claws.
College towns
The proposed 6th District runs alongside the Blue Ridge Parkway through central Virginia, connecting Democratic towns from James Madison University in Harrisonburg to Charlottesville, home of the University of Virginia, to Lynchburg (including the very not-Democratic Liberty University) through Roanoke to Blacksburg, home of Virginia Tech.
Harris won this prospective district by just 3 points, a far more competitive district than any of the ones Texas Republicans designed to flip their way.
Richmond area
Under Virginia’s current map, the Richmond area is largely contained in the 4th District, which reaches down from the capital to the North Carolina border and voted for Harris by 32 points.
The proposed map splits part of the Richmond area into the 5th District, resulting in one district that voted for Harris by 16 points and one that supported her by nine.
Norfolk
The subtlest change is in the Norfolk region, around the highly competitive 2nd District. The proposed map shifts the district from one which was a virtual tie at the presidential level in 2024 into a district that voted for Harris by about five percentage points by replacing rural Republican areas with heavily Democratic areas near Norfolk.
The-CNN-Wire
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