Danville in the 9th District? Or Staunton? Population projections show how much rural congressional districts will need to grow.

Today we’re going to play a variation of Texas Hold ’Em. This one is called Virginia Make ’Em Up.

Texas is redrawing its congressional lines to produce five more Republican seats. In this column, we’re going to play around with redrawing legislative lines, as well. The difference — other than the fact that my mapmaking has no legal effect — is that I’m not going to try to find some partisan advantage the way Texas, and now California, are trying to. I’m going to take the latest population projections from the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia and try to look ahead to see how congressional maps will have to change in Virginia in the future.

Trigger warning: A legislator from rural Virginia called me after reading my recent columns on those population projections, which show most rural areas losing population, and said he found them depressing because they portended a further loss of influence for Southwest and Southside. That legislator may need to stop reading now because it all gets worse.

We’ll begin with some basic facts: Virginia’s constitution now mandates that redistricting be done by a bipartisan commission. When that commission, with equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans, predictably deadlocked in 2021, it fell to the Virginia Supreme Court to draw the lines. The justices appointed two “special masters,” one from each party, and they drew the lines we now have. 

One of the things those special masters did — which previous mapmakers, be they Democratic or Republican, rarely did — was to respect natural boundaries and county lines as much as they could. That produced more geographically logical maps. Specifically, one of the things those special masters did was to vow that no districts, at the congressional or state level, would cross the Blue Ridge Mountains unless it was absolutely necessary to make population numbers work out. That avoided some strangely shaped districts in the past, where one piece was on the other side of the mountains from the rest of the district.

I’m going to try to adhere to the same principle as I try to redraw lines using the projected 2030 population. We’ll start with the 6th Congressional District (now represented by Ben Cline, R-Botetourt County). The mapmakers started in the Winchester area and simply went south until they had enough people. I’ll do the same.

In the last redistricting, the goal was to have 784,672 people in each district. I’m going to assume that Virginia’s number of congressional districts will remain the same — 11. If we divide Virginia’s projected 2030 population of 9,060,433 by 11, we get 823,675 in each of them. 

6th District: It’s easy to keep this district intact

With that goal, we barely need to redraw the 6th District at all. It currently contains part of Roanoke County; we can make the future 6th District work just fine if we take 69,421 of Roanoke County’s 96,811 residents, which leaves 27,390 to put into a neighboring district. (Hold that thought!) Right now, about 60% of Roanoke County is in the 6th; this would bump that percentage up to about 72%. For our mathematical purposes today, it doesn’t really matter which precincts those are, but if we want to be geographically coherent, it would mean the 6th would pick up some precincts in southwest Roanoke County — the Cave Spring area, for instance.

This is simple! This is easy! This is fun!

This is also not typical of the choices that future mapmakers will face.

It’s easy to keep the 6th in virtually the same configuration as it is today because of rapid population growth in the Shenandoah Valley and slower population growth elsewhere. The only parts of the 6th that are losing population are the lightly populated ones in the Alleghany Highlands. When we move to the 9th District, our mapmaking becomes a lot harder.

9th District: Will it have to expand as far east as Danville?

Roanoke County is currently split between the 6th and the 9th. To make the numbers in the 6th work, we just reduced the part of Roanoke County that’s in the 9th. 

There’s another split county: Most of Bedford County is now in the 9th, with the Forest suburbs west of Lynchburg in the 5th. I don’t have the fancy mapmaking software that political parties (or judicial special masters) have access to, so it’s hard for me to slice and dice counties. For our figuring purposes today, I’m going to put all of Bedford County into our future 9th District and see what happens.

Imagine the sound of a machine whirring as it processes numbers.

Ding! Ding! Ding!

Even with the Forest suburbs added in (and the portion in Roanoke County reduced to make the 6th work), the 9th District in almost its present configuration adds up to 767,368 people — so we’re still 56,307 people short.

We now start to confront the problem: A shrinking population in Southwest Virginia — when the state overall is growing — means the 9th District is going to have to become geographically bigger. If we want to respect county lines as much as we can, the logical solution is to add Campbell County, population 58,775. 

That’s not ideal for the same reason that putting the Forest suburbs in the 9th isn’t ideal; it’s starting to break up a “community of interest” around Lynchburg. In a more perfect plan, we’d keep everything around Lynchburg in the same district. So what can we do?

We don’t have many options, not under these rules. But we do have some.

Here is one of those options:

• Leave Campbell in the 5th.

• Take Bedford County out of the 9th and put all of it in the 5th District. That avoids breaking up the Lynchburg metro but also takes our initial numbers down to 685,130.

• Now we go east and add in Pittsylvania County (56,340) and Danville (41,951). 

That puts us at 783,421 — and we’re still 40,254 people short, so maybe we do need to go back and take part of Bedford County to make up the difference. Or we push farther east, add Halifax County (31,079) and still find ourselves short. So, picture this map and then grab 9,175 out of the nearest county of your choice. For my mapping purposes, I’ve added Charlotte County, which works out almost perfectly, population-wise.

I don’t think any of these options are ideal, but ideal may no longer be possible. The 9th has historically been a Southwest Virginia district. It’s already pushed out of Southwest some, but taking it further into Southside only dilutes the Southwest component further — and also dilutes the Southside vote by splitting it between different congressional districts. On the other hand, if the 9th does have to take in more of Southside, at least it’s taking in territory with somewhat similar economic characteristics. Both Southwest and Southside have had to deal with the economic trauma of seeing traditional employers decline or die.

There is, however, another way to look at potential maps, so let’s do it.

9th: What the district would look like if it absorbed the Roanoke Valley

We started this exercise by starting around Winchester and working our way south. What if we started in Lee County and worked our way east until we filled up a district? There’s an argument for drawing the map this way. Given Southwest Virginia’s triangular shape, there aren’t many ways you can go and still stay in Virginia. To draw the 9th District map this way, we have to be open to a controversial option: absorbing the Roanoke Valley, particularly the city of Roanoke, into the 9th.

The argument against that: Putting the urban core of Roanoke in the 9th makes the district less rural, thus changing its fundamental characteristic. However, as we just saw, if we don’t do this, we’re forced to draw the 9th farther east in ways that may not make sense. Over the years, the 9th has taken pieces of the Roanoke Valley (for a time, Salem was in the 9th; now it’s not, although the district is still represented by a congressman who lives in Salem, Morgan Griffith).

Let’s just see what happens if we start drawing the 9th first.

If we try to keep the 9th’s borders much the same as they are now (except for taking all of Bedford, not just part), we don’t need the whole Roanoke Valley, just part of it — 56,307, to be precise. Adding Salem back to the 9th reduces the deficit to 31,447 people. That’s about the size of Botetourt County, but we can’t take Botetourt because that isolates Roanoke and part of Roanoke County — districts have to be contiguous. We could reach up and take in Alleghany County, Covington, Bath County and Highland County. That map would look weird — and we’d still be 5,613 people short.

Let’s just confront the issue head-on: What if we brought the whole Roanoke Valley into the 9th District — the rest of Roanoke County, plus all of Roanoke, Salem and Botetourt County. If we did that, we’d have 993,783 — well above our goal of 823,675. That means we can start shedding territory.

We can give Bedford County to the 5th District; that gets us down to 911,545. We could give Franklin County back to the 5th, too. Now we’re down to 858,977, but still too high. We could give Henry County and Martinsville to the 5th. That puts us at 800,083 — oops, too small. However, if we moved Alleghany County, Covington and Bath County from the 6th into the 9th, now we’re at 823,678 — almost exactly what we need.

However, if we wanted to be sticklers for geography and keep the 9th entirely west of the Blue Ridge, that means Patrick County would need to go. We could make that up by taking in Highland County and most of Rockbridge County.

6th District: Back to the future?

We’ve now just drawn a 9th that’s the ideal size, and it’s also entirely west of the Blue Ridge with the possible exception of Patrick County. The tradeoffs: By adding the Roanoke Valley, the 9th becomes less rural. By taking back Bedford County, Franklin County, Henry County and Martinsville, the 5th becomes more Southside-oriented. However, we just chopped a lot of people out of the 6th District, which means that district is going to have to cross the Blue Ridge to make them up. If we use the 9th District map above, the 6th is now at 573,665 people, so we’re short 250,010 people. If it crosses the mountains and slurps up Albemarle County and Charlottesville, that’s 179,277 people, so we still need 70,773 people. If we roll up U.S. 29 and add in Greene County, Madison County and Rappahannock County, that adds 44,248 people, so we’re still in need of 26,525 people. If we want to stay reasonably compact, they’ll have to come out of Fauquier County.

At this point, our redrawn 6th District looks a lot like the 7th District did decades ago when it was represented by J. Kenneth Robinson in the 1960s and ’70s.

This is where I will stop. All this is fanciful, but based on real math — and some of the real choices that our mapmakers will face in a few years. The 9th will have to get bigger, and there are only so many ways it can grow. The more that it takes territory from the 6th, the more it forces that district into some very different designs. The more it takes territory from the 5th, the stranger the 9th looks, and well, it’s really hard to speculate on what happens to the 5th District from there. That’s why I haven’t attempted to draw any potential 5th District maps. The 9th is relatively easy, because it’s constrained by the triangular shape of Southwest Virginia. It can’t grow into Kentucky or Tennessee or West Virginia, so there are only so many ways it can expand. The 6th is restricted by the West Virginia state line — and, potentially, the Blue Ridge Mountains if we want to make them a factor. The future shape of the 5th, though, depends much more on how other districts are drawn. We have, at least, seen where some parts of it, such as Lynchburg and Danville, could wind up depending on how a future 9th District gets drawn.

We do have one more scenario to look at, though.

2050: A future 9th Ditsrict could stretch north almost to Staunton — or take in Lynchburg and much of Southside. 

The year 2050 is now as close to us as the year 2000 is, and drawing nearer all the time. How big will the 9th District have to be in 2050? That depends partly on how many congressional districts Virginia has, and that depends on how fast we grow vis-à-vis other states. Do we gain a 12th district? Do we have to drop back to 10 if others grow a lot faster? The simplest thing today is to assume we still have 11 congressional districts. If that’s so, these projections say each congressional district will need to be about 940,316 people.

Let’s start with the current 9th District map. Even if we add in all of Bedford County, plus all of Roanoke County, Roanoke and Salem, we’re still short, at 935,373 people. Those additional people can easily be found by reaching into a neighboring locality, most likely southern Botetourt County. To avoid splitting both the Roanoke and Lynchburg metros, the logical thing would be to put all of Botetourt County in the 9th to keep the Roanoke Valley intact, and then take about two-thirds of Bedford, leaving the Forest suburbs with Lynchburg in the 5th as they are now. That would get us a filled-up 9th that looks like this:

That map makes a lot of sense to me.

There are, of course, lots of configurations possible. For every 9th District resident east of the Blue Ridge you want to shed, you’d need to add one west of the Blue Ridge. 

Just to show the possibilities, here they are. This is the 9th District in 2050 if you want to keep it entirely west of the Blue Ridge:

Or, if you want to avoid ever putting the Roanoke Valley into the 9th District, you’d wind up with something like this:

If this map looks strange to you, you’re right. The point is while mapmakers in 2030 will have the option of whether to include the Roanoke Valley in the 9th District, mapmakers in 2050 won’t.

The political consequences of these maps

Sorry, Democrats, none of these maps improve the party’s chances in the 9th, the most Republican districts in the state. While Roanoke votes about 60% Democratic, that’s obviously not enough to turn the 6th blue now and wouldn’t be enough to turn the 9th blue, either, if someday Roanoke winds up in that district. Keep in mind that there are more Republican voters in Roanoke County (34,453 for Donald Trump) than Democratic voters in Roanoke city (25,737 for Kamala Harris) and the only way mapmakers can get to Roanoke is through Roanoke County. What Democrats in Southwest and Southside need is a fundamental realignment in voting patterns, because under the current ones, there’s simply no way to draw a competitive congressional district in this part of the state.

The 6th is more of a wild card. Subtracting the Roanoke Valley and adding Charlottesville and Albemarle County would produce a net gain of Democratic voters in that district (assuming our current voting patterns hold). Whether that’s enough to make the 6th more competitive is harder to predict because there’s something we simply can’t know: The political orientation of the new residents flooding into the northern part of the Shenandoah Valley.

Frederick County has added 39,768 new residents since 2000, but its politics haven’t really changed; it voted 65.1% Republican in the 2000 presidential race and 63.37% last year. It’s projected to add another 35,906 over the next 25 years. That will be far more new people than in any of the other localities currently in the 6th District; it will also be slightly more new people than are expected to move into Albemarle County, which I mention in case that county gets drawn into a future 6th District. Put another way, Frederick County and Shenandoah County, the bright red county next door, are projected to add more new residents than bright blue Albemarle County and Charlottesville, so Democrats probably shouldn’t count on redistricting to help them that much. Instead, both parties need to pay attention to who’s moving in.

Will the politics of these new Frederick County residents be the same or different than the ones who already live there? We have no idea. What we do know is that the largest locality in the current 6th District is Roanoke, with 100,011 in the last census and an estimated 99,504 now and projections that it will grow to 103,345 by 2050. By that year, however, the largest locality that is in the current 6th is estimated to be Frederick County, with 98,977 now and 134,883 then. If we knew the politics of those future Frederick County voters, we’d have a better sense of where the 6th is headed.