See below for some video and highlights from last night’s Falls Church Democrats redistricting forum, with Del. Marcus Simon, former VA Redistricting Committee citizen member James Abrenio, and a representative from Virginians for Fair Elections…
- James Abrenio: “This has never been done. What Donald Trump has done…let’s be clear about what’s happening. Usually you have redistricting every years ten years. Donald Trump is reaching the midterms, first time in the 250-year history of our country decided I’m going to force multiple states to redistrict mid decade solely to benefit myself. So you’re going to hear a lot of people say, ‘well, doesn’t everybody redistrict? Democrats are just as bad.’ No. This is the first time a sitting president has ever done this. And what also I think is galvanizing Republicans is the General Assembly passing…there’s a lot of regulations that they’re really not happy about. Looks like we may be banning the assault rifle, AR type weapons, and they are running off that, and so they’re saying we’re all communists and all that kind of stuff. So they’re using that to get turnout for this, which I mean it’s good marketing on their side. So, this is not a easy win. I think that we need to be clear about that. And so, when you’re like, should I get out this weekend or not? This is not a given thing. And I don’t like to say, let’s run scared, but like the fear needs to motivate us, because I find fear oftentimes gets me off my butt. So that’s my point”
- Del. Marcus Simon: “I think that’s exactly right. I do have to say it’s interesting. So, you know, last last big election after Trump was our Virginia state elections, right? We won big, right? We picked up a bunch of seats…every seat we targeted and somewhat more than we didn’t expect we picked up, because people were were frustrated and angry and upset about Trump’s policies, and this was our chance to do something about it. And I think Republicans at the state level are feeling a little bit like that, we have to concede…we’ve been able to impose our will on them, including policy, particularly those around around gun violence prevention and these extended magazines and the gun fetishist stuff. And so they’re mad, they’re upset they don’t have any levers left, right? They don’t have the governorship. They don’t have the Senate. They don’t have the House. What do they have? They have the next election coming up, which is unfortunately for this cause their April 21st election, right? So, this is their opportunity to to register their disapproval of everything generally in Virginia. We can be feeling a little complacent as Democrats say, ‘wait a second, we just won the trifecta. We’ve got a Democratic governor. We’ve got a Democratic attorney general, Democratic Lieutenant Governor. We control everything up and down. We’re in pretty good shape right now.’ And so, we can’t let that kind of complacency sit set in. That’s sort of a recipe for a type of election where we had just elected Joe Biden and we were feeling pretty good and all of a sudden this guy Glenn Youngkin who just squeaks out a win. So I think that’s a plausible scenario if we don’t take it seriously and get out and do the things we need to do. I think it could go half a percent either way and I wouldn’t be terribly surprised. [I’d be] disappointed [but] I wouldn’t be terribly surprised. So we got four weeks though to to make sure that doesn’t happen and make sure we stay highly motivated.”
