On Election Day last week, I stood outside of my polling station in suburban Richmond, urging everyone who passed to vote against unfair gerrymandering. Most people nodded politely as they walked by, but one young man stopped to talk.
He said he was a Democrat but planned to vote against the ballot proposal, which would redraw Virginia’s congressional lines to all but guarantee the election of Democrats in 10 of the state’s 11 seats. Intrigued, I asked him to explain his thinking.
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He told me that while he supported the ballot proposal’s practical effects, he worried about the precedent. Wouldn’t red states, he said, just further gerrymander their own congressional districts in response? And what would happen, he wondered, when Republicans regain power in Virginia? He ultimately decided to play what he called the “long game,” recognizing that gerrymandering today could come back to bite his own party tomorrow.
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Alas, that young man was in the minority in our precinct and the state. Virginians voted, by a slim 3-point margin, to effectively disenfranchise vast swaths of the state. It was a narrow loss, considering Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) was elected last fall by more than 15 points. But that means this critical election could have been won. The reason we lost was because the “vote no” coalition didn’t turn out nearly enough voters like the man who stopped to talk with me — voters who Republicans and conservatives almost always ignore.
As a longtime policy advocate who cut my teeth fighting gerrymandering in Illinois, I was heavily involved in this election, serving as president and treasurer for the ballot committee Your Vote Matters. Our operation was small and unique insofar as we didn’t just focus on exurban and rural areas. We deliberately went beyond the typical get-out-the-vote strategy of rallying the base to talk to values-aligned voters in urban areas.
To be clear, the typical strategy is very important. Any successful campaign needs its most devoted people to show up — in this case, the GOP voters who largely live in rural Virginia. That effort paid dividends, helping explain why the election was so close. Yet while mobilizing the base is necessary, it’s not sufficient. The right needed to do far more outreach to potentially aligned voters in big blue cities and their collar communities. Some are people like the man I spoke with. Others are less ideological, more ambivalent, and usually don’t vote.
Either way, Republicans usually write them off, assuming the bluest areas are a lost cause. Yet there is a relatively small group of voters in areas like Virginia Beach, Richmond, and even the deep-blue suburbs of Northern Virginia that could nonetheless play an outsized role in swinging elections. Looking at data from preliminary returns, if the “vote no” camp had swung about 5% of voters in the state’s seven largest localities, the gerrymander ballot measure would have failed.
I’m far from the first to recognize this opportunity. In the 2016 presidential election, President Donald Trump famously asked black voters, many of whom live in urban areas: What do you have to lose? But then, as now, there wasn’t nearly enough of an effort to bring such potential voters into the GOP camp. The right has devoted more resources to suburban areas, but as a rule, they first spend their money further out. If your money is limited, you limit yourself to the people you absolutely have to turn out. Some groups want to extend their reach into the closest suburbs and urban cores, yet while the will is there, the wallet isn’t.
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The Virginia election is a case in point. Opponents of the gerrymander ballot measure were outspent by the left by a three-to-one margin, $62 million to $20 million. A few million dollars, spent entirely on outreach in blue city bastions, could have closed the three-point gap. Such an investment could still make the difference this November in states like Wisconsin, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and beyond.
The fight in Virginia now moves to the courts, but it should have been decided the right way on Election Day. Republicans and their allied groups can keep ignoring blue cities, thinking that most everyone who lives there is the same deep shade of blue. Or they can finally invest in turning out those urbanites and close-in suburbanites who are less ideological and more open to persuasion than you’d think.
Kristina Rasmussen is president and treasurer of Your Vote Matters.
