The Virginia House of Delegates voted 62-33 on Wednesday to advance a resolution that would allow state leaders to redraw our congressional districts ahead of the 2026 midterms.
What this means for our local readers: we’d no longer be buried in a sea of red.
Waynesboro voted Democrat in the November gubernatorial election, marking the first time my base of operations went D in a governor’s race since way back in 1985.
ICYMI
Staunton, Harrisonburg, Charlottesville, Albemarle County, all traditionally vote Democrat for governor and for president.
So does Roanoke, 100 miles south.
But our cities – the economic engines of our region – are encased in swaths of Republican voters in the Fifth and Sixth congressional districts, which translates to: no voice for us in DC.
MAGA voters out our way have long since signaled that they don’t care that the likes of John McGuire and Ben Cline don’t even pay lip service to representing their interests.
We used to have what we called Mountain Valley Republicans west of the Blue Ridge, folks who were the heirs to the Republicans of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, who weren’t interested in being rubberstamps for the planter-class Democrat elites over in Richmond.
The Mountain Valley Republicans are dead and gone, replaced by garden-variety MAGAs who are like MAGAs anywhere else – akin to how every interstate exit around a populated area looks the same, no matter where you are.
Democratic voters in the cities in the western half of the state actually want something more from our folks in DC than the same old, same old.
We’ve got issues with the lack of affordable housing, and resulting increases in the number of unhoused; with families not being able to afford healthcare.
The healthcare thing is also a problem for rural MAGA voters, but for some reason, they’d rather own the libs than be able to afford health insurance.
That’s on them.
We recognize that we need help upgrading our public K-12 education system so that our kids can get good-paying jobs.
Again, that’s also an issue for our rural neighbors, and I don’t get why they don’t care about their kids’ futures, but that’s between them and their kids.
I am fully aware that the way we’re going to get either one or two Democrats to represent those of us out here in the west in Congress is because Democrats in Richmond are fighting a different battle – aimed at countering moves by Team Trump to gerrymander MAGA-led states into giving Republicans more U.S. House seats by gerrymandering our state to give us more U.S. House seats.
ICYMI
- Virginia Democrats fighting gerrymandering fire with gerrymandering fire
- Virginia Republicans cry foul over Dems’ congressional redistricting move
Yes, it does bother me a teensy bit that Richmond only cares about giving us proper representation as a side effect of their fight with power elites in DC.
At the end of the day, most of us out here are still going to be voiceless at the state level – Charlottesville will still have a Democrat representing the city in the House of Delegates and State Senate; Roanoke will still have a Democrat in the House of Delegates; here in Waynesboro, in Staunton, in Harrisonburg, we get MAGAs like ambulance-chasin’ Mark Obenshain, who appears to be hanging on in politics for a couple more years so he can get that nice government pension.
Richmond Ds giving us either one or two congressional seats pretty much by accident is an example of a broken clock at least being right twice a day.
Beggars can’t be choosers.
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Chris Graham
