Democrats might finally win a civil war in Virginia — at least for now.
The political party that seceded from the Union to keep American blacks enslaved in defiance of a Republican president in the 19th century is taking a new tack in the Old Dominion to defy a Republican president in the 21st.
And the stakes in next year’s midterm elections are getting higher.
In late October, the Virginia Senate passed, on a party-line vote, a congressional redistricting proposal that would likely change the state’s congressional seats from a fairly even split of six Democrats to five Republicans to an overwhelmingly Democratic delegation of 8-3, 9-2, or even 10-1, WRC-TV in Richmond reported.
Democrats will pass a redistricting amendment in January that will then go to voters in April. If approved – Democrats will redraw the 11 congressional districts drawing 10 zones that will be predominately Democratic and 1 heavy Republican.
Virginia will go from a 6-5… pic.twitter.com/bz2L0CE9Qu
— Tim Anderson (@AssocAnderson) December 4, 2025
“10-1 is not out of the realm to be able to draw the maps in a succinct and community-based way,” Virginia House of Delegates Speaker Don Scott, a Democrat, said in a clip published to X on Wednesday by Punchbowl News reporter Ally Mutnick.
“I’m not joking.”
The proposal now goes to the House of Delegates where, after the November election, the party of the Confederacy will enjoy a near-supermajority status, with 64 Democrats to 36 Republicans, according to a post-vote report from The Virginian-Pilot.
Then it will go to the governor who, after November’s election, is also a Democrat, Abigail Spanberger.
In short, it’s a done deal, steamrolling a plan into place to all but erase Republicans from Virginia’s congressional representation. (That’s assuming all Democrats involved behave like Democrats do these days — with lockstep party loyalty aimed at destroying President Donald Trump.)
Fortunately, there’s one step more Virginia Democrats will have to make, according to WRC — and that’s convincing the state’s voters to go along, after the same electorate decided only five years ago that redistricting maps should be drawn by a commission rather than the state legislature.
That might be a tougher fight than a similar effort in California — where a November referendum shafted the state’s redistricting commission to support Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s efforts to redraw the Golden State’s congressional lines to favor Democrats.
Virginia is not California, thank the Lord. Still, it would be an unwise conservative who’d bet that the Democratic Party wouldn’t be able to pull off the same trick on the East Coast.
The heart of all of this is, of course, the upcoming midterm elections and the partisan control of Congress that will determine the course of the remainder of the second Trump term.
It started in Texas, with Republican lawmakers redrawing maps to enlarge the Lone Star State’s GOP delegation. Newsom’s California jumped in to increase its number of Democratic seats. Other Republican-led states are in the game.
These decisions count everywhere. After a GOP victory in a special election in Tennessee, Republicans hold a 220-213 majority in the House that will become a 219-213 majority again with the January departure of Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene.
That means a change in control of a handful of seats in the midterm elections could determine whether Republicans or Democrats are in control of the House.
(In the Senate, Democrats would have to pick up four seats to change the balance of power. But senators are elected on a statewide basis, so redistricting is not an issue.)
So congressional redistricting matters in every state, but if for history’s sake only, the case of Virginia is particularly compelling. Once firmly red, it now has a northern half stuffed with liberals from the Washington, D.C., metro area, which accounts for its incoming Democratic trifecta of the governor’s office and both chambers of the legislature.
This is the state where the Confederacy made its capital. And Virginia saw more bloody battles within its borders than any other state, by far.
Thanks to its Democratic lawmakers — and if enough northern Virginia Democrats play ball at the voting booth when referendum time rolls around — it could be playing a key role in determining whether Donald Trump’s last two years in the White House are spent with a supportive Republican Congress or a Democratic House dying to impeach the president.
Just one more time.
But there’s one more interesting thing about Virginia that could be worth remembering.
In the end, it was also the state where the Army of the Confederacy — an army of, by, and for the Democratic Party of its day — surrendered in defeat.
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