A referendum to drastically redraw Virginia's congressional maps is coming down to the wire, with Democrats confident they will narrowly succeed despite millions of dollars spent on GOP ads designed to confuse voters about where Gov. Abigail Spanberger and former President Barack Obama stand on the issue.
If it passes, Tuesday's vote would give the Virginia General Assembly the power to draw a map that would likely elect 10 Democrats and just a lone Republican to the House of Representatives, compared to the six Democrats and five Republicans who currently make up the state's congressional delegation.
It's the latest battleground in a fight, instigated by President Donald Trump, to redraw congressional lines ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
"Please get out and vote and vote no. It's very simple," Trump said during a tele-rally with supporters on Monday night. "Just vote no."
While Virginia has become a solidly if not overwhelmingly blue state in recent decades, operatives working on the referendum have warned for months that the vote would be close, an assertion backed by public polling.
"It's going to be close because Virginia is a purple state and Republicans have spent tens of millions of dollars to lie to the people in the Commonwealth of Virginia because they can't defend their position," House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said at a press conference on Capitol Hill on Monday.
Jeffries specifically pointed to GOP ads suggesting Spanberger and Obama were opposed to the referendum and referencing past comments they've made condemning gerrymandering, even though both politicians have said the proposed new lines in Virginia were necessary to counteract GOP-drawn maps elsewhere.
"Republicans have spent tens of millions of dollars trying to convince the people of Virginia that President Obama and Governor Abigail Spanberger are urging a 'no' vote," Jeffries said. "That's a stone-cold lie. The 'no' vote position is Donald Trump's position."
The ads, Democrats conceded, have had a real impact and forced the party to spend additional resources explaining to voters where both Spanberger and Obama actually stand. They even released a video on Friday with Obama reiterating his position:
"If the situation were reversed, we would have called them hypocrites for changing their position on the issue," said one Democratic strategist who requested anonymity to frankly discuss party strategy. "Instead of calling hypocrisy, they just did misinformation. And it's been effective."
While the current political environment is sufficiently poisonous for Republicans to lose the House in 2026 even with existing maps, the four Democratic seats that would come with victory could free the party to spend money in other close races and to potentially expand the map into even more traditionally Republican territory.
"Republicans have tried to stack the deck in other states," said Jared Leopold, a Democratic strategist based in the Old Dominion. "but this is a way we can [get] back to even."
He also noted that another Republican-leaning state was discussing eliminating Democratic seats en masse.
"This is a real concern with Florida still looming out there," Leopold said.
The key is whether a chunk of the voters who backed former Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 will vote against drawing the new maps. If the number is 10% or less, Democrats are confident they'll prevail. As it approaches 15%, Democratic operatives said Republicans are more likely to triumph.
Another Democrat who was briefed on the race but did not have authorization to speak to the press said internal polling showed stubborn resistance to new maps among many white liberals in Northern Virginia - a bloc of voters long attracted to "good government" positions on issues like gerrymandering - even as Black voters throughout the state quickly got behind the new maps. But more recent polling has shown that resistance to drawing new lines is fading in the heavily Democratic suburbs of Washington, D.C.
In many cases, voters simply did not understand why Democrats needed to draw the new maps - a sharp contrast to a successful November referendum in California, where voters understood the state's new maps, eliminating five GOP-held seats, were meant to be a direct response to Texas' elimination of five Democratic-held seats.
This has given Republicans room to portray the Democratic plan as an unnecessary overreach, while Democrats try to place it in the context of mid-decade GOP gerrymandering in North Carolina, Missouri, Ohio and, potentially, Florida.
"There is a chance, and that's because it is viewed as being such a gerrymandered grab of power," former Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) said Monday on Fox News. "What we're seeing is not only Republicans coming together but independents and a lot of Democrats. So this is going to be close."
Polling has shown the GOP rhetoric has succeeded in firing up their base, who have been lethargic in many other elections around the country this year, as Trump's approval rating slumped.
The other major GOP strategy has been to simply confuse voters. Two groups pushing for a "no" vote, Justice and Democracy and Virginians for Fair Maps, have spent more than $5 million on digital and television advertising pretending Obama and Spanberger - both of whom support a "yes" vote and redrawing the lines - actually oppose the redraw by citing past comments they've made condemning partisan gerrymandering.
Justice and Democracy, which is funded by a conservative nonprofit with ties to GOP megadonor Peter Thiel, has targeted Black voters in particular, using the language and imagery of civil rights to argue against the new maps and bombarding them with text messages and mailers urging a "no" vote.
Black leaders in the state are confident their voters won't be fooled.
"We already know who they are and why they're against us," Virginia House Speaker Don Scott said on a livestream intended to whip up support for the referendum on Thursday, citing houses in the state with "Confederate flags waving and 'no' signs in the yards."