Morning Digest, sponsored by FiftyPlusOne: Virginia Democrats reportedly have a surprise plan to redistrict—before 2026 They'd need to amend the state Constitution, but there's just enough time left David Nir and Jeff Singer Oct 24 Virginia Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell (D) (credit: Scott Surovell website) Leading Off VA Redistricting In a major surprise, Democrats in the Virginia legislature announced on Thursday that they’d convene a special session on Monday, likely to consider congressional redistricting. Such a move could result in the state using a new map as soon as next year and see Republicans lose up to three seats in the state’s delegation, which currently favors Democrats 6-5. “We are coming back to address actions by the Trump administration,” state Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell told the New York Times’ Reid Epstein, who confirmed a story first reported by Virginia Scope’s Brandon Jarvis about the possibility of a special session. A message from our sponsor, FiftyPlusOne.news: Polling data for hobbyists and businesses At FiftyPlusOne, we provide access to averaged and raw polling data that fills two big societal needs. First, we inform the public about what it thinks using rigorous statistical methodology that minimizes noise. And second, we give businesses—from campaigns and political consultants to participants in betting markets and financial institutions—access to raw, constantly updated data feeds that can guide decision-making and help hedge against uncertainty. Check out our data subscriptions at FiftyPlusOne.news. Surovell didn’t directly state whether Democrats would try to revisit Virginia’s map, but political observers believe the topic will be on the agenda. Any response to the GOP’s push to gerrymander the lines in red states before the midterms, however, will require speedy action, Democratic unanimity, and success at the ballot box—on two different dates. That’s because redistricting in Virginia is in the hands of an independent commission, which was enshrined in the state Constitution following a landslide vote in 2020. As in California, repealing or modifying those rules would require voters to approve a new constitutional amendment. That process, though, is considerably tougher in Virginia. In California, the legislature only needs to vote once to refer an amendment to the ballot. In Virginia, by contrast, lawmakers must approve an amendment twice—with an election for the House of Delegates in between. That’s why Democrats want to hold a vote before Nov. 4, when Virginia will host elections for statewide offices like governor and, crucially, the state House. Normally, Democrats wouldn’t be able to gather on such short notice, since two-thirds of members in each chamber of the legislature must agree to hold a special session. While the governor can also call a special session, Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, would never do so at Democrats’ behest. But as Epstein explains, Youngkin already called a special session—for May of last year. That meeting became necessary after the two parties failed to agree on a budget during the regular session, which had concluded a month earlier. Between the two gatherings, both sides hammered out a budget agreement, then passed it the very same day the special session began. That session, however, was never formally adjourned, giving legislative leaders the ability to summon lawmakers back to work whenever they desire. It’s precisely that power Democrats are deploying now. They currently hold a 51-49 majority in the chamber, as well as a 21-19 edge in the state Senate, so when they meet again, they’ll need the support of every member to pass a new amendment. They’ll also need to retain control of the House next month, which they appear poised to do (the Senate is not up until 2027). If anything, they’re likely to gain seats: Democrats have outraised Republicans better than 2-to-1, per Ballotpedia, and have spent three times as much on the airwaves, according to AdImpact. If all goes according to plan, the legislature would then need to greenlight the amendment a second time after it assembles for its regularly scheduled session in January. They’d also need to schedule a special election to put the matter before voters, which, under the state Constitution, could take place no sooner than 90 days later. That tight timeline would almost certainly require the state to delay its candidate filing deadline, which is April 2, and likely its June 16 primary as well. To alter the calendar, Democrats would likely need Abigail Spanberger to prevail in her campaign to succeed Youngkin, which she’s favored to do based on public polling and spending data. Should they have the chance to pass a new map, Democrats could target two or three Republican-held districts. Democrats were already seeking to flip the competitive 1st and 2nd Districts, but revamped lines could make that task much easier, and possibly create a third opportunity as well. They’re also defending Rep. Eugene Vindman’s swingy 7th District but could seek to shore it up, too. Our 22nd anniversary sale ends on Sunday! Jump on it now to take 22% off our normal subscription rate—instead of $60 per year, you’ll pay just $46.80. Not only will you be helping to support the best damn elections coverage anywhere in the country, you’ll also unlock special subscriber-only content and features. We’d love to see you join the team! The Downballot Justin Kanew’s inside scoop on TN’s big special election Democrats have the chance to pull off a huge upset in an upcoming special election in Tennessee, so we invited one of the best-known political analysts in the state to join us on this week’s episode of The Downballot podcast to give us the inside scoop: Justin Kanew, founder of the Tennessee Holler. Kanew, who ran for the previous version of the 7th Dis… Listen now a day ago · David Nir and David Beard Senate AL-Sen Former football player A.J. McCarron, who won two championships as quarterback for the University of Alabama, said Thursday that he would run for lieutenant governor rather than campaign to succeed Sen. Tommy Tuberville, a fellow Republican. ME-Sen Marine veteran Graham Platner posts a giant 58-24 lead over Maine Gov. Janet Mills ahead of the June Democratic primary to take on Republican Sen. Susan Collins, according to a new poll from the University of New Hampshire—but there’s a big caveat. The survey, which was in the field Oct. 16-21, was largely completed before Platner acknowledged he had a tattoo of a Nazi symbol on his chest. Platner, who had spent the previous days addressing his history of questionable online commentary, has said he was unaware of its meaning and has since covered it up with a new tattoo. But while UNH’s survey may not fully capture how Democratic voters feel about Platner following his week of rough headlines, Mills’ weak showing this far from the primary is a warning sign for such a well-known candidate. This poll is the first that anyone has released for this race. Observers will be watching to see if the school sampled a disproportionately high proportion of Mills’ skeptics—or if the governor has a problem with her party’s base that Platner or another candidate can take advantage of. Governors CA-Gov Rep. Eric Swalwell’s team isn’t tamping down new speculation that he could make a late entry into the busy race for California’s open governorship. Swalwell, Politico notes, generated attention last week when he expressed his unhappiness with frontrunner Katie Porter, a fellow Democrat and former House colleague who has spent the last several weeks dealing with unwelcome attention after she threatened to end a TV interview. “To what I saw with Katie Porter, when you’re taking on a fascist, you can’t get flustered, and as we’re looking to who’s going to replace Gavin Newsom, we need a fighter and a protector, and not somebody who gets flustered,” Swalwell told journalists. Politico further reports that an unreleased poll asked respondents if they’d support Swalwell in the packed June top-two primary. A Swalwell consultant told the outlet that the congressman didn’t have anything to do with the survey, but she wouldn’t say anything more about his interest in replacing the termed-out Newsom. Swalwell, who was first elected in 2012 to represent part of the Bay Area in Congress by unseating a longtime Democratic incumbent, sought an even bigger promotion in the spring of 2019 when he entered the Democratic primary for president. He ended his White House campaign a few months later after polls showed him with little support, but he had no trouble securing reelection after all the major candidates running to replace him in the House dropped out. House IL-08 Cook County Commissioner Kevin Morrison has publicized an endorsement from former Rep. Joe Walsh, who was elected as a Republican during the 2010 tea party wave to a previous incarnation of Illinois’ 8th District—the seat Morrison is now seeking as a Democrat. Walsh, who joined the Democratic Party this spring after spending years as a vocal anti-Trump Republican, took the opportunity to urge his new party to reject former Rep. Melissa Bean, who is waging a comeback 15 years after losing to Walsh. Morrison echoed Walsh by tweeting, “He DEFEATED our Wall Street-backed opponent Melissa Bean in 2010, and knows she is not the fighter we need to meet this moment.” IN-01 Porter County Commissioner Barb Regnitz said Wednesday that she would seek the GOP nomination to take on Democratic Rep. Frank Mrvan in Indiana’s 1st District, a competitive constituency that Donald Trump and his allies are still hoping to gerrymander. Regnitz, who is the first notable challenger to enter the race, argued she was the right candidate to flip a northwestern Indiana constituency that last elected a Republican in 1928. Current trends, though, give the GOP a chance to end a losing streak that began during Herbert Hoover’s presidency. While Joe Biden carried the 1st 53-45, Kamala Harris won it by a much tighter 49.4 to 49.0 spread. Mrvan, however, won reelection last year by a considerably stronger 53-45 margin. But Trump is hoping to bring about a political shift even more quickly by pressuring Republicans to pass a new map that would make it difficult for both Mrvan and Rep. Andre Carson, the only other Democrat in the state’s nine-member House delegation, to win again. Those efforts stalled on Wednesday when an aide for Rodric Bray, the top Republican in the state Senate, said that “[t]he votes aren’t there for redistricting.” GOP hardliners, though, haven’t given up trying to compel reluctant legislators to do Trump’s bidding. MA-06 State Rep. Tram Nguyen announced Thursday that she was entering what has quickly become a busy primary for the reliably blue House seat that Rep. Seth Moulton, a fellow Democrat, is giving up to run for the Senate. “My family fled an authoritarian regime in Vietnam in search of freedom and a better life,” said Nguyen, who arrived in the United States as a 5-year-old refugee. “We found that better life here in Massachusetts, but it is now under serious threat.” Nguyen, whose 2018 election made her the first Vietnamese American woman to serve in the Massachusetts legislature, would make history again as the first Asian American to represent the Bay State in Congress. First, though, she has to get past several opponents in next September’s primary for the 6th District, which includes the region north of Boston known as the North Shore. The field includes software engineer Bethany Andres-Beck, who was challenging Moulton before the congressman announced his Senate campaign last week; attorney John Beccia; former state Rep. Jamie Belsito; and former White House official Dan Koh. MT-01 Matt Rains, a rancher and Army veteran, became the first notable Democrat to announce a campaign against Republican Rep. Ryan Zinke in Montana’s 1st District with his kickoff on Thursday. “My neighbors were promised lower prices and a government that said it cared about them,” Rains says in his launch video of western Montana voters who supported Donald Trump. “Instead, they’re getting tariffs that crush our ranchers and farmers, [and] higher prices on everything.” Rains previously ran for Congress in 2020 when Montana had just one U.S. House seat (it would gain a second one after that year’s census), but he struggled to raise money. He dropped out and launched a campaign for the state House but lost in the primary. The 1st District favored Donald Trump 54-43 last year, according to calculations by The Downballot. Zinke, though, turned back a well-funded opponent by a smaller 52-45 spread, and Democrats are hoping to give him another tough challenge this cycle. Inside Elections reported last month that smokejumper Sam Forstag, a member of an elite team that fights wildfires, is considering running. NC-03, NC-01 Republican Rep. Greg Murphy said Thursday that he’d seek reelection in North Carolina’s revamped 3rd District, which shares a number with the constituency he currently represents, rather than campaign for the 1st District. Murphy had mulled whether to switch districts after Republicans in the legislature unveiled a new gerrymander that makes the 3rd District less conservative in order to push the neighboring 1st District to the right. Punchbowl News, though, reported that Donald Trump’s team pressured Murphy to stay where he is. It remains to be seen whether Murphy will face Democratic Rep. Don Davis, who was reelected to the 1st District last year but now lives in the redrawn 3rd. GOP mapmakers ensured that either constituency would be tough for Davis to win, though: The new 1st would have favored Trump 55-44 last year, while the 3rd would have supported him by a larger 56-43 spread. OH-09, OH Redistricting State Senate President Rob McColley is considering entering the Republican primary to take on Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur in the 9th District, Signal Ohio reports—a move that comes as McColley is set to play a key role in drawing a new congressional map. But while McColley will soon be able to use his influence to make the 9th, which supported Donald Trump 53-46 last year, even more conservative, Democrats are looking at using the state’s referendum process to keep the current boundaries in place. Morning Digest: How Democrats might stop the Ohio GOP from gerrymandering again David Nir and Jeff Singer · Jul 21 Read full story A new round of redistricting is required because, under the convoluted constitutional amendment Ohio voters passed in 2018, new maps can only be used for a full 10 years if they win bipartisan support. Maps that pass without approval from both parties, however, remain legal for just the first two elections of the decade. Republicans took advantage of this loophole, adopting gerrymandered lines that were used in 2022 and 2024. Now they have the chance to fine-tune that gerrymander and take it to new extremes. (Under the state Constitution, lawmakers have until the end of November to draw new boundaries.) Democrats, though, may try to place a veto referendum on the ballot for November of next year. Such a campaign would have 90 days after a new map becomes law to collect just over 248,000 valid signatures and hit targets in at least 44 of Ohio’s 88 counties. That’s a potentially tough task for Democrats in a state where liberal voters are largely concentrated in a few large urban counties, but it’s one they’ve managed before. If they succeeded in qualifying a referendum, the new map would be blocked until voters weigh in. In such a scenario, it’s not clear whether the map that was used during the last two elections would remain in place for 2026, so the question would likely wind up in court. State Senate Minority Leader Nickie Antonio tells the Ohio Capital Journal that he’s spoken to Hakeem Jeffries, the top Democrat in the U.S. House, about such an undertaking. “They’re looking at every option and every opportunity to be supportive of, should it come to a referendum, what that would look like,” Antonio said. TX-29 Former state Rep. Jarvis Johnson said this week that he would challenge Rep. Sylvia Garcia in the March Democratic primary for Texas’ 29th District, a constituency that Republicans overhauled as part of their new gerrymander. The GOP increased the district’s Black population as part of their plan to reduce the number of Democrats representing the Houston area, a decision that also lowered the proportion of Latinos in the 29th. Garcia, who warned that the plan could leave populous Harris County without Latino representation in the next Congress, said in August she would run again, but Johnson thinks that he’d do a better job serving the new constituency. “When you look at the new numbers, you have to realize that the largest voting bloc in the new 29, for the Democratic Party, is going to be the Black vote,” Johnson told the Texas Tribune’s Gabby Birenbaum. Johnson, who is Black, added, “I think it’s important that my community has a voice.” Johnson, 54, refrained from criticizing Garcia’s voting record, nor did he suggest that the 75-year-old incumbent was too old to do her job. He did, though, argue that, even though Kamala Harris would have carried the revamped constituency by a 65-34 margin, Garcia couldn’t be depended on to keep the 29th in Democratic hands. “We have to be clear that the Latino votes have been leaking over the years to the Republican side,” he said. “We can’t count on Congresswoman Garcia being able to pull them back in, because it’s evident she was not able to do that in her old 29th, because the number of votes that she gets historically have been the lowest in the state, in terms of voter turnout.” Johnson begins his new campaign after losing back-to-back races for a seat in the state Senate. Johnson first lost 57-43 to fellow state Rep. Molly Cook in an all-Democratic special election to succeed John Whitmire, who had been elected mayor of Houston the previous year. Cook then fended off Johnson just 50.2 to 49.8—a margin of 62 votes—less than a month later in the Democratic primary runoff for a full term. Garcia, whose long career in local politics includes stints as Houston’s city controller and as a member of the county commission and state legislature, believes she’s proven time and again that she can win no matter the 29th’s demographics. “That’s truly a coalition district,” Garcia told Birenbaum. “That’s what I put together to win a citywide campaign in the city of Houston, before we were even 20% of the Houston population. I’ve put coalitions together a number of times for different causes and campaigns, so this will just be another one.” Mayors & County Leaders New York, NY Mayor Outgoing Mayor Eric Adams on Thursday endorsed former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, whom he’d denounced just last month as “a snake and a liar,” as part of a last-ditch effort to stop Democrat Zohran Mamdani. Polls show Mamdani far ahead of Cuomo and Republican Curtis Sliwa, who has ardently refused to drop out to help Cuomo consolidate the anti-Mamdani vote. Poll Pile VA-Gov: Suffolk University: Abigail Spanberger (D): 52, Winsome Earle-Sears (R): 43 VA-Gov: Washington Post/George Mason University: Spanberger (D): 54, Earle-Sears (R): 42 (Sept.: 55-43 Spanberger). Fieldwork for this poll was carried out by Braun Research VA-LG: Suffolk: John Reid (R): 45, Ghazala Hashmi (D): 45 VA-LG: WaPo/GMU: Hashmi (D): 51, Reid (R): 44 (Sept.: 49-45 Hashmi) VA-AG: Jason Miyares (R-inc): 46, Jay Jones (D): 42 VA-AG: WaPo/GMU: Miyares (R-inc): 46, Jones (D): 46 (Sept.: 51-45 Jones) ME-02: University of New Hampshire: Paul LePage (R): 49, Jared Golden (D-inc): 44 (June: 50-47 LePage). The survey did not ask about state Auditor Matt Dunlap, who is challenging Golden in the Democratic primary. Thank you so much for being a paid subscriber to The Downballot! If you’d like to further support our work, you can donate on our ActBlue page.