Southwest Virginia will lose seats in the General Assembly in the next redistricting. Here’s how much the delegation will shrink over the next 25 years.

Remember the year 2000? “Mission: Impossible 2” was the top-grossing movie. Faith Hill topped the charts with “Breathe.” It doesn’t seem like that long ago. Most of us still remember 2000. Where did a quarter of a century go?

Now, instead of looking backwards, let’s look forward — to a quarter-century from now.

The year is 2050. 

Barring some cataclysm between now and then, a new governor will be taking office in Virginia that year. We’ll also have a census, and, depending on how quickly the numbers get transmitted to the states, and how quickly Virginia’s redistricting process works then, those new legislative lines might be in place by the next year’s General Assembly election. 

We can tell you right now what one of the questions for the election year of 2051 will be: Who will win the state Senate seat for Southwest Virginia?

Not seats, plural. Seat, singular.

The University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service recently produced new population projections for every county and city in the state out to the year 2050. When we look at those through the requirements for drawing new district lines, here’s what we see:

House of Delegates

In 2000, there were nine House members from west of the Roanoke Valley. Today, that number is down to seven as Southwest Virginia loses population and the rest of the state gains. After the next redistricting, brought on by the 2030 census, one of those seats will be gone — Southwest will be entitled to just six delegates. 

After 2040, the number will drop to four, and that’s only if someone rounds up — the math works out to 3.36, so picture three House districts wholly in Southwest Virginia and a fourth where one-third of the district is west of the Roanoke Valley and the rest isn’t.

By 2050, Southwest Virginia will have just three members in the House of Delegates. If we don’t have passenger rail to Bristol by then, those three legislators could carpool together — an electric car? a flying car? an electric flying car? — and still have room for luggage.

State Senate

In 2000, there were three state Senate seats wholly in Southwest Virginia and two others that were partially in the region, so Southwest could count on five votes out of the Senate’s 40. Today, the region west of the Roanoke Valley has two senators who live there and two others (Bill Stanley of Franklin County and David Suetterlein of Roanoke County) who live elsewhere but represent districts that are partially west of the Roanoke Valley. 

After the 2030 census, the number of senators west of the Roanoke Valley will drop to 2.4 — so two districts fully there and a third that’s half in the region, half out. 

After the 2040 census, that number will drop to 1.3 — so one Southwest district and another where one-third of the district is in the region and two-thirds isn’t.

After the 2050 census, the number will be 1.18 — so one Southwest district and a smidge of another district that, depending on how it’s drawn, will mostly be either in Southside or the Roanoke Valley. 

Southwest Virginia has had trouble this year attracting the attention of the statewide candidates. Neither candidate for governor has responded to an offer to hold a debate in the region, breaking a budding tradition that had taken hold in the three previous campaign cycles. Some of the candidates — notably Democratic gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger and Democratic lieutenant governor hopeful Ghazala Hashmi — have apparently never been to some of the state’s westernmost counties. (The Republican candidates have; Democratic attorney general hopeful Jay Jones says he was in Lee County as a child when he accompanied his father, then a state agency head, on a trip there.)

Now imagine how hard it will be for the region to get attention when it has just a single voice to speak for it in the 40-member State Senate and just three in the 100-member House of Delegates. 

Southside is harder to define than Southwest — at least when we’re defining Southwest as “west of the Roanoke Valley” — but the same trends apply there as well. Districts, which are already geographically big, will have to get bigger and, at some point, they become so big that the region loses seats.

Here’s another way to visualize things. Let’s look at Northern Virginia, which we’ll define as having its outer limits at Loudoun County and Prince William County. In 2000, that part of Virginia was entitled to 25.6 members in the House of Delegates and 10.2 members in the state Senate — almost exactly one-quarter of each chamber. By 2030, those numbers will rise to 30 delegates and 12 senators. By 2050, Northern Virginia will be entitled to 32.5 delegates and 13.0 senators.

You can see from those numbers how Northern Virginia’s once-rapid population growth is projected to slow in the coming decades — yet still grow, all while the population in most of rural Virginia is shrinking.

Can anything be done to reverse rural Virginia’s inexorable loss of political power?

Realistically, no. 

The pandemic has helped reverse one long-running demographic trend: out-migration from rural Virginia. Most rural communities in the state now have more people moving in than moving out. However, their populations are so old that the number of people moving in can’t balance out the deaths — and the deaths to come. Even with favorable in-migration trends, most of Southwest and Southside (and many rural areas along the Chesapeake Bay) will continue to lose population.

Demographer Hamilton Lombard at the Weldon Cooper Center says these projections scale back forecasts for future immigration, but it’s still possible that even those numbers are on the high side. Immigration has mostly involved metro areas, particularly Northern Virginia. If immigration continues to fall beyond what’s been projected, that could slow Northern Virginia’s population growth below these numbers. However, if immigration were to run higher — we have no idea what future presidential administrations might do — then Northern Virginia’s population growth would likely accelerate, further reducing the share of the population in rural Virginia.

A higher birth rate would also change population projections, but, given the older median ages in rural areas, a higher birth rate would probably disproportionately affect metro areas.

Absent some development we can’t imagine now, there is no realistic scenario by which either immigration growth or a higher birth rate drives population growth in rural areas while not driving it even more in urban areas. 

President Donald Trump has been pushing for a mid-cycle census because he believes the new numbers would be politically advantageous for Republicans. They likely would be advantageous for some Republicans — red-voting Texas would gain congressional seats at the expense of blue-voting California, for instance. However, in Virginia, what we’d see is a preview of what’s coming anyway: rural Virginia losing seats to Northern Virginia until there’s just one Southwest Virginia state senator left and the entire Southwest delegation could fit in a single car.