See below for video and some highlights from a fascinating discussion between former Virginia Redistricting Commission citizen member James Abrenio – who was, as he says, “a big fan [of the 2020 redistricting amendment]… I’m a good governance guy, you know, I bought into it” – and Del. Marcus Simon (D-Falls Church), who voted against the amendment – about where we go from here.
The biggest question right now on this front, of course, is whether Virginia voters will pass a new redistricting amendment that allows mid-decade redistricting as a way to counter “red” states like Texas, which have been busy attempting (at Donald Trum’s behest/command) to gerrymander Democrats out of their seats in an attempt to rig the 2026 midterm elections in Republicans’ favor. My view has consistently been that we SHOULD NOT have gerrymandering, because voters should pick their representatives and not the other way around, BUT that this needs to be done at the NATIONAL LEVEL, not on a state-by-state basis. And under no circumstances should Democrats unilaterally disarm, particularly while Trump et al are on a crusade to rig the system in their favor and destroy our democracy.
With that, here’s the video, followed by a few highlights/takeaways from the discussion between James Abrenio and Del. Marcus Simon.
James Abrenio: “We’re talking about redistricting today because you and I work together on the redistricting commission, which has surprisingly become a bit more high-profile than either of us expected.”
Del. Marcus Simon: “I served in the House when we were in a…33 to 67 minority, right? We were in a super minority. Couldn’t even sustain a governor’s veto. I was elected the same year as Terry McAuliffe for the first time and couldn’t do much. But persevered. I told everybody that first session I came in with very low expectations and they were all met. And then around 2017, we suddenly became relevant…after Trump’s first election in 2016, we got to 49 and I started to take on more of a leadership role within the caucus working with Eileen Filler-Corn and Charniele Herring…and then we took the majority in 2019. I ended up being appointed vice chair of Privileges and Elections. And then eventually when Joe Lindsey left to become a judge, I was chair of the House Privileges and Elections Committee, which is, by the way, the oldest committee in the House of Delegates…So that sort of got me involved in the election piece of it and I worked on the redistricting…Senate Democrats and House Republicans kind of created this scheme…to try and create some sort of a bipartisan legislator/citizen mixed commission to do redistricting. Everybody was sort of hedging their bets. Nobody knew it was going to happen. You know, we were at 51-49 Republicans in 2019. We had a pretty good idea that the election would help could help us, but but wasn’t certainly wasn’t a sure thing. And so what ended up happening was we ended up taking the majority and having the trifecta in 2020. And there was some surprise that Democrats kept up their end of the deal…the Republicans and I think seven Democrats ultimately…went ahead and voted to go ahead and create the redistricing commission on second reference as we call it. I kind of led the fight against it to be honest…I think you may remember my very first meeting. I’m like, listen, I’ve been opposed to this thing. I’ve said some terrible things about it. But I’m here to see if it can actually work… I’m gonna be as optimistic as I can and hope that I was wrong and that we can do some good work here on the commission. And so anyway, that’s how I landed there.”
James Abrenio: “I got to admit, I was a big fan. I’m a good governance guy, you know, I bought into it…look, you had real concerns but you also and I will tell the folks that you were probably the one that I worked with closest because as we went through the process and it proved just as difficult as everybody had concerns that once I looked back about what the problems were…you helped me keep centered about kind of the process, but you also were honest about feedback…I always appreciated that and I do think that you made a real effort to make it work. And I do think, and I’m telling people here sitting on this as a citizen member, it is effectively impossible to get maps through. I just want to be clear about that. And I went in hoping, believing that we’d get maps out and it just proved [impossible].”
Del. Marcus Simon: “Let me say, you know…I voted for this the first time in 2019. We were in the minority and I voted for it a lot of the same basis that you you you’re describing, right? Like look, I believe in nonpartisan gerrymandering. I believe in, you know, taking the ability of legislators to pick their voters away from them, right? It should be voters picking their legislators and not the other way around. And I believe those things are true. what what my 180 frankly wasn’t as political as it was, you know, working with folks like Delegate Cia Price, who’s the current chair of privileges and elections and Joe Lindsey and some others who said, you know, this this will never work. Like this is not a California independent truly independent redistricting commission where all kinds of people can apply to to be members and there’s a special sort of academic group of folks that that evaluates the quality of the applications and picks it. We didn’t have any of that, right? It was a mix of legislators and citizens, but it was also Democrats and Republicans…So my objections were really for the most part about the practical nature of what we were specifically trying to do, right? And I still think that, you know, ultimately I’d love to see some sort of national redistricting reform process, where every state’s playing by the same rules and rules that work and rules that take truly take the politics and the politicians out of it and come up with some objective criteria. But the system we got, as you mentioned, I mean it was set up to force compromise, but really all it took was one or two people to decide they weren’t going to compromise and that meant you were doomed to fail.”
James Abrenio: “So and just for folks watching, first of all it required supermajorities to get maps through…from day one we didn’t even have nonpartisan attorneys. We had two sets of attorneys, Democrat and Republican. We had two sets of map drawers, Democrat and Republican….and I’m just going to be straight up, Republicans objected to it, saying that it was too, you know, biased to to liberal. And so it became effectively what should have been a collaborative process into a litigation process.”
Del. Marcus Simon: “Let me start you out even remind you day one was worse than that. Day one was we had to elect a chairman. The first function of the commission our first meeting was to elect a a chairman from one of the citizen members – and we couldn’t do that, because we were deadlocked at 8-8 on Republicans and Democrats. So we ended up from the very beginning having to appoint co-chairs, one Republican citizen and one Democratic citizen. And that’s when we should have known that it wasn’t going to work, right? Like you know we couldn’t even come together to decide who was going to get the chair. There was not enough trust amongst group so we end up with co-chairs and I think you you my first interactions with you is like is that even legal?”
James Abrenio: But anyway, so we’re here today because we you all the Virginia Democrats – and I support this – are now pushing to have a fix to respond to what’s happening at the national level and the congressional maps. Talk about from your viewpoint, what is different about what’s happening now that’s ever happened before?”
Del. Marcus Simon: “…this constitutional amendment we’re proposing that’s gone through first reference does NOT disband the redistricting commission. It doesn’t abandon that process. It doesn’t repeal what we did back in 2021. What it does is it sets up a specific for these times sort of outlet that says for congressional districts only, IF another state does a midyear redistricting for any reason other than…a court-ordered redistricting…that the General Assembly CAN – you know, doesn’t have to but MAY – redraw our congressional districts from the period between 2025 and 2029, right? So come the end of then, we’re back under the old regime. And so it is unique in a couple of ways. One is we…haven’t generally done mid-decade redistricting in Virginia….There also was an effort in…beginning of 2013 when Barack Obama’s second inaugural…the Senate was close closely matched and one of the Democrats left…session to go to Barack Obama’s inauguration and the state senate tried to do a mid-year redistricting and redistrict their very own seats mid decade. So typically it doesn’t happen that way. Ultimately Republicans in the House shut that down and said no, we’re not playing along with that senators. But so what’s unusual about what we’re doing is, one, it’s a mid decade redistricting. We try and do it on the years ending in one or after the decennial census. And the other thing about it is it’s essentially got an expiration date in it. Which is a little unusual for constitutional construction…we also said by the way this amendment should it pass will only be in the constitution until it’s no longer needed and then it’ll be taken out automatically at the end of 2029. Which is again unusual, but speaks to what we’re trying to do, which is to address a very specific threat to democracy that exists right now, which is this push from Donald Trump and the Trump administration to encourage states to try and unfairly draw their maps to steal an election for him in 2026.”
James Abrenio: “Yeah. And I want to be clear for people watching this. Never has a president overtly called for mid-decade redistricting and demanding states to do this…And he even admits to find him additional seats. I mean, it’s just what we’re seeing here. Who would have ever dreamed we’re in here, right?”
Del. Marcus Simon: “I mean, there’s no stealth about it…I guess when people talk about Trump’s honesty, even though he lies all the time, I think this is sort of the quality that they’re talking about. He’s sort of unabashed about saying what he wants to do. Even if it’s a corrupt motive. He’s honestly corrupt about it.”
James Abrenio: “Authentically corrupt is [how] I like to think of it. He’s authentically a corrupt guy. It works for him because he’s authentically corrupt. I mean, this is who he is. And when you see it as you’re supporting it, you’re like, well, he’s being straight up with me. Well, maybe now that tariffs are kind of hitting, maybe it’s a little bit different…”
James Abrenio: “Was there a concern, if you’re able to share this, that introducing the concept of redistricting at that point could present a risk that just wasn’t necessary at that time?”
Del. Marcus Simon: “I mean, no doubt there were conversations about that, like, hey, you know, what are you guys doing? This is like the week before the election. You’re pulling folks off of the campaign trail to do this. There there were some folks that again, some of the same voices that we heard that are again, very committed to this concept of of you know, independent redistricting…anti-gerrymandering….thought that there could be a backlash to what we were we’re trying to do. Ultimately, I think the results showed that that wasn’t the case…I don’t think anybody, even the most optimistic modeling going in prior to our special session you get together had Abigail winning by 15 and had us picking up 13 seats in the House of Delegates. And so, you know, either the models were just off and it had no impact that we were there, or the models were not that far off, but it actually did energize the base. And that was my argument, I think, for what would happen. I think voters are frustrated with Trump get away with everything, and nobody seems to be pushing back or fighting back. And so I think even folks that were really steadfast anti-gerrymandering advocates and big advocates for the amendment, you know, five years ago said, ‘hey, listen, we like what you’re doing, it’s a measured approach, it’s not a wholesale repeal, we’re not going back on our word to the voters… So, I think we we did a good job. I’m you know, patting myself on the back for those that are watching the video, but you know, we did I think hit the right note, get the right tone to make sure we had as broad a coalition in support of this as possible. And I think ultimately voters responded positively to it. It was a risky move, no doubt…I didn’t speak to anybody in the Spamburger campaign, but I can only imagine, right, that you’re cruising to and everybody expects to be at least a 10-point victory. Why would you add any kind of variable at that point, right? I’m sure that they were not thrilled that that we were adding this bit of uncertainty to the process so late in the game. Again, I think it’s a gamble that paid off and ended up probably helping, but I could understand if I were running that campaign, I would have been frustrated with us, too. And you just leave well enough alone.”
James Abrenio: “Well, I’ll tell you as a voter, I was energized because my view is and still will be, even if we lose this effort, at least we stood up and said, ‘look, we’re not just going to lay down taking this.’ Because what Trump is doing is overtly anti-democratic. And I think it would be political malpractice and Democratic malpractice not to stand up now in this circumstance. And I like the way, and just so people are clear, if you didn’t articulate this already, we’re talking about congressional maps. We’re not talking about going in and dealing with the state districts and things like that. We’re talking about, and straight up, we’re dealing with the midterm and whether or not Trump can essentially effectively exclude our votes by getting more votes in Texas and Indiana and all those kinds of things. That’s what this really is trying to do is is shut our votes out.”
Del. Marcus Simon: “…the reason the timing was what it was was Virginia’s constitution can be amended two ways. One is we can have another constitutional convention. We’re not going to do that. The second way is by amendment. And then the amendment has to be introduced and then there has to be an intervening House of Delegates election. And then it has to be introduced again in the identical format word for word the same way after the intervening election and has to get a majority of the members in both houses. So, majority of senators elected, majority of delegates elected have to pass it once. You have to have an election of the House of Delegates. Then this new group of delegates, a new group of senators, sometimes it’s a new group of delegates, has to agree with what the last House did and say, “yes, we’re going to go ahead and go forward with that language exactly as they wrote it the last time.’ And then it goes to a referendum which can be held no closer than 90 days to the second passage of the amendment. So, we built in sort of a 90-day notice period to the public so that it can happen fast but not too fast. And that’s why this is all sort of…if we’re going to get this done in time for the 2026 midterms, the timing is really tight. We got to move the train along.”
James Abrenio: “Yeah. And what’s great about it, if the voters look at this and say we’re not accepting it, they have a chance to say we don’t agree and we think the Democrats are overstepping…I wish Virginia Republicans would do this. Indiana Republicans said, ‘Trump, we’re not doing this. We think it’s inappropriate.’ And then you have Trump essentially endorsing whoever will run against them now. I mean, it is remarkable seeing this…Have you obviously on the other side you hear Republicans complaining? I’m more interested about the good governance folks that have legitimate concerns about like are we walking down a slippery slope. How would you talk to the good-faith voter? Not the one that you know just a Trump acolyte, but but a good-faith voter truly concerned that we’re going to break the system here. What what’s your response to them?”
Del. Marcus Simon: “So a couple things. One is again, you know, like you said, we need to do what we did to to preserve the option of going forward, right? It could be that…this next General Assembly looks around and says, you know what, Texas is losing in court. Indiana’s backed off of what they were going to do. Some of these other states may be subject to challenge. We may decide we don’t need to do it and maybe we won’t. But you know, by the time January comes around, the playing field could look different. And again, the voters could look at it and say, ‘hey, listen, this isn’t something that we want to do now.’ So first thing I would tell them is, you know, nothing’s done yet, right? This isn’t, it’s a little different than what California did and Texas. They both already have maps. Like, look, we’re not even prejudging what we’re going to do with this authority yet, right? We’re not even saying how we would use it, if we would use it, and if so, how we would use it. All that’s still open, and that’s still going to be a transparent process, and the public’s going to have an opportunity to weigh in on that and how we do that. I would say to the folks that worry again about a slippery slope. It’s got this temporary period of time. And it is very much in response, the language of the amendment itself. Go read it. It’s only triggered by Republicans doing something similar in Republican states. So, it’s not intended to tilt the playing field in favor of Democrats. It’s intended to balance the playing field. So, if you’re worried about fairness and you know, everybody playing by the same rules, this is just a lever that we’ve got. It’s a tool that we have to to sort of un-gerrymander. I know it seems weird, but by drawing more districts in Virginia – and I get on the individual voter basis in some communities that might find themselves thrown in with with folks they don’t feel like they have a lot in common with politically, that’s a potential outcome here. But at some point you have to step back a little bit and look at a bigger picture and say, hey, just like in Virginia, you’ve got some districts, you remember this, that are super super blue. And that’s not to disenfranchise the Republicans in that district. It’s because we need to offset some of these places where they’e going to make it super red. Well, now you got sort of look at it on a state-by-state basis, right? And so maybe, you know, this state becomes a little more disproportionately blue than it otherwise would be because we’re looking at the national map. And on the whole, we want the national map not to favor one party or another. I think that’s frankly consistent with a lot of the anti-gerrymandering principles, at least the ones that we talked about, right when we were trying to draw those maps on the commission.”
James Abrenio: “Yeah. And for folks watching, you got to look at the entire puzzle. You can’t just look at Virginia, because you’re going to hear Republicans say that we’re trying to impact, you know, Virginia voters. But this is about the national map. And you said something that was interesting. You said that the goal here is to respond to Republicans doing something similar. They’re not doing something similar. They are intentionally gerrymandering at the direction of the president. They are not hiding it. They are not taking a measured approach where they’re presenting to the voters. Trump is saying, ‘fix this for me, get me more seats.’ And it’s just hard to imagine a president ever be willing to do this.”
Del. Marcus Simon: “No, I appreciate you calling me out when I make it sound even like there’s any kind of equivalency here because you’re right. That’s one of my pet peeves is when people just say, ‘well, we’re doing the same thing that they’re doing.’ What we’re doing is very much different. I agree with that 100%. We are responding to what they’re doing and trying to undermine the corrupt efforts of these Republican states.”
James Abrenio: “Are you hearing from any – and I don’t obviously there’s private conversations to be had, things like that – but are you hearing anything from Republican representatives saying, you know what, I disagree with what Trump’s doing, maybe encouraging, maybe even saying, look, I might be willing to help out. Is there any type of recognition about this time we’re in?”
Del. Marcus Simon: “So, no, I mean, for most part, the Republicans have been very process-oriented, right? All their arguments have been process-oriented. They’ve said one the first argument is well you’re too late, right? You know, the elections already started because voting already started…So, they filed this suit, trying to get an injunction against the clerk to stop the process by filing an injunction in Tazwell County in far southwest Virginia…they probably thought would be a sympathetic judge, frankly, make it difficult for anyone to appear…and the injunction was denied because there’s no merit to any of it. But no, anyway, their their opposition has been mostly process-oriented. So they started out saying it was too late. They argued that it exceeded the scope of the special session. Again, completely bogus arguments….That was their big arguments. We’re not Texas. We’re not. They didn’t say and what they’re doing in Texas is wrong. There’s not the and. They just sort of said, you know, we need to focus on what’s happening in Virginia and we shouldn’t, bringing in other states into our districting process is inappropriate. But they didn’t at any point try and maybe there’s one floor speech that might have said I wouldn’t if I were in Texas I wouldn’t do it but I don’t think so. For the most part they were just process stuff arguing that we somehow you know weren’t following the right procedure for doing it and then well we’re not those states. Let’s not let that let’s not be influenced by what’s happening there.”
James Abrenio: “And that’s what is so frustrating having served on a commission. I’m a lawyer. you’re a lawyer. To have these process arguments when you know it’s really this most cynical way to use process in a lot of ways bad faith…to not openly acknowledge to us the voters that this is wrong and then to say ‘process process process’…I don’t understand how, you know, there isn’t at least some open acknowledgement of look, Trump is messing things up, but we have a system here in Virginia. At least I would feel a little bit better, maybe. I don’t know.”
Del. Marcus Simon: “…I think they continue to fear the MAGA wing of their party more than facing regular voters. And I think there still – and again, maybe some of that will change now…maybe now that we found that…Trump’s grip on the party and on power isn’t as strong as they thought it was. I mean now the Epstein files have been released and he’s reversed himself on that…”
James Abrenio: “But to a certain extent, as an elected official, you have a duty to be honest to your public, especially when it comes to democracy itself. And that’s what I never could understand from our fellow Republicans, not being honest, at least about the process…”
Del. Marcus Simon: “Delegate Willlet was the patron of the resolution. I imagine he’ll introduce a new resolution that’ll get on the docket, you know, the first week of session. We can dispatch resolutions pretty quickly in the House…The Senate can do it in about a week. So, you know, we can get that piece moved through. It’ll be one of the very first things that we do that actually, you know, makes its way because it doesn’t have to go to committee and so forth. So that can come through in and out of the Senate and the House pretty quickly so that we can start the 90-day clock for a referendum. There’s some other work to do, right? There’s other things we’ll have to do. We’ll have to move the dates of primaries because primaries are supposed to happen in the third week of June. Well, if people don’t know what the districts are, you know, we have this referendum in April and people, you know, in May don’t even know what the districts are, how are they supposed to file to run for for Congress and so forth. So probably end up pushing back filing deadlines. And that’s one of the things that’s created the urgency about the Texas case, why it’s going straight to the Supreme Court. They have March primaries in Texas. And so their filing process has already started for 2026. But we typically in years where we redistrict, again, usually that’s years with one, but typically when we redistrict, we do push back primary filing deadlines and the primary date itself into the summertime. So there’ll be some of those bills will have to get introduced and hashed out and put in place so that if the referendum were to pass, we we’d have a plan for for dealing with that…It’ll be a special election. And again, we’ll have to set a date probably a Tuesday in April, mid to late April. And then are a couple other decisions that have to be made, too. We also have three other constitutional amendments that we passed during the regular session – right to abortion and women’s health, guarantee the right to marry, uphold same-sex marriage, and then the right to vote once you’ve served your prison sentence, even if you’re a convicted felon. So, we have those three things. And so there’s, you know, probably a strategic decisions to be had about whether we put all four constitutional amendments together for that April hearing or whether we just do the one that’s time-sensitive or more time-sensitive first and do the others in regular course. So there’s there’s still a lot to be decided…there’s going to be a special election, you’ll be contacted, particular if you’re a regular voter. You’ll be getting your calls, your texts. I suspect there’ll be some money put into this, too. I mean, I think that the no side, I mean, I think that that MAGA world has a lot of money. And I think probably Republicans that like having control of Congress are are going to put a lot of money into trying to defeat the referendum. So, you’ll see a lot of communication about it.”
James Abrenio: “…you get an opportunity to vote no if you disagree with it. So that’s the great thing about this.”
