No one had more riding on mid-decade redistricting than Virginia’s new governor, Abigail Spanberger. Staking everything, she went for broke to impose the nation’s most highly leveraged partisan House redistricting map. Now, following Virginia’s Supreme Court decision striking down her effort, Spanberger’s left with nothing to show for it… especially her credibility.
Last November, Spanberger won a resounding 57.6 to 42.2 percent victory, far larger than Kamala Harris’s 2024 51.8 to 46.1 percent win a year earlier. She swept the entire Democratic ticket into office, even the controversial (reprehensible) Jay “two bullets” Jones as attorney general. With Democrats already controlling Virginia’s legislature, Spanberger gave her party full control of the state’s legislative process.
Spanberger ran as a moderate on the issue of affordability. Democrats trumpeted both. To showcase them, national Democrats tapped her to give the rebuttal to this year’s State of the Union address, in which she asked: "Is the president working to make life more affordable for you and your family?"
Spanberger was flying high, the sky was the limit, and suddenly, just four months after victory, she was flying nationally.
Then her wings began to melt.
Spanberger appointed Stan Meador, the former FBI agent who led the field office that investigated “traditional Catholics” as threats across Virginia, as her Secretary for Public Safety.
Democrats in the statehouse proposed over 50 tax increases (including on gyms and dog walking), despite Virginia having run $10 billion in surpluses over the previous four years.
However, Spanberger’s biggest break with her pretense of moderation—and her pledged focus on affordability—was her attempt to undo Virginia’s bipartisan congressional district map with a blatantly partisan one.
Virginia’s current congressional map was designed by a nonpartisan process Virginians had overwhelmingly passed in 2020. This map had resulted in a 6-5 Democratic advantage, one reflecting its light-blue 2024 outcome.
Democrats’ new map was projected to give them a 10-1 majority by essentially disenfranchising the rest of the state to Democrat-heavy northern Virginia. Democrats spent enormously (at least $64 million) on ads, at least one of which featured Barack Obama.
Put to voters on April 21, it narrowly passed by just 1.4 percentage points (50.7 to 49.3 percent)—far closer than Democrats’ 2024 presidential margin and far closer than Spanberger’s 2025 margin.
The process and the referendum’s language were immediately challenged in court, and the case rapidly went to Virginia’s Supreme Court. On May 8, the state Supreme Court ruled the Democrats’ redistricting map unconstitutional.
The defeat was a severe blow to Democrats nationally, who coveted the four seats Spanberger’s partisan map would have delivered—sufficient by themselves to give Democrats control of the U.S. House. However, the defeat is far more damaging to Spanberger personally.
Spanberger’s transparently partisan redistricting attempt had already clearly proved her claims of moderation and affordability focus were empty rhetoric. The referendum’s narrow margin attests that many Virginians saw it so.
Now the process’s mishandling makes Spanberger look incompetent to boot. It is one thing to be blatantly partisan and succeed: At least the fruits of your partisan subterfuge are enjoyed. It is another to appear blatantly partisan and fail.
Democrats come away with having spent tens of millions and without having gotten the four seats they coveted—ones even more needed now following the U.S. Supreme Court’s Callais decision and Republican states' resulting moves to redistrict more districts into their column.
However, Spanberger comes away with even less. She comes off looking not just rankly partisan, but incompetently so. Virginians are unlikely to ever forget the former; national Democrats are unlikely to ever forget the latter.
In just six short months, hubris has claimed another victim, as Icarus crashed in Virginia.
J.T. Young is the author of the recent book, "Unprecedented Assault: How Big Government Unleashed America’s Socialist Left," from RealClear Publishing. Follow him on Substack.