A few years ago, while mowing the yard one Saturday, I mowed over an underground nest of yellow jackets.
To say that they were unhappy is to put it mildly.
I’ve got no particular ill will against yellow jackets, as long as they leave me alone and don’t interfere with what I’m doing. I suppose they serve some useful function in the ecosystem, otherwise they wouldn’t be here, but I really don’t know because I’ve never given much thought to yellow jackets. On this particular day, my goal was simply to cut the grass. If that disturbed the entrance to their underground nest, that was not really my concern. My desire for a decent-looking yard outweighed the security of some insect.
The outraged yellow jackets made it my concern, though.
As soon as I mowed over the entrance to the nest, a hole in the ground about the size of my thumb, the yellow jackets swarmed out, furious and ready to sting.
I did my best impression of Usain Bolt as I sprinted back toward the house, with some yellow jackets still clinging to my shirt.
No more mowing took place that day. The enraged yellow jackets also covered the mower, flying around the offending machine until sunset finally drove them back underground. Even the next day, a few persistent, and seething, yellow jackets kept watch over the mower to make sure no one started it up again.
This column is not about yellow jackets. It’s about last week’s special election on redistricting that has resulted in a new congressional map intended to knock out four of the state’s five Republican members of the U.S. House. That map does so by “burying” many Republican-voting rural areas in elongated Democratic-dominated districts stretching out of either Northern Virginia or the Richmond metros, just as those yellow jacket nests were buried in my yard.
One of the main talking points for the “no” side dealt with the potential loss of rural influence (which, with the amendment’s passage, is no longer potential but actual). Parts of the Shenandoah Valley that were about to be drawn into districts coming out of Fairfax County saw signs pop up that declared “Don’t Fairfax Me.” Others in Southwest Virginia warned of a “Northern Virginia power grab.” Others more generally urged “Don’t Redistrict Rural.”
The election saw a surge of voters in rural Virginia, who, not surprisingly, voted “no” by wide margins.
Rural voters were more engaged in this special election than they were in last year’s choice for governor. That’s not anecdotal; that’s mathematical: In some counties, the overall vote in this special election was higher than it was in last year’s governor’s race. Meanwhile, Northern Virginia localities came in lower than last year. That’s how the “no” side was able to come so close, although, in the end, that wasn’t enough. As I showed in a column last week, while Republicans can produce margins out of rural Virginia to balance out many more populous parts of Virginia that deliver Democratic margins, they just have no equivalent to Northern Virginia, which, even in a lower-voting environment, still produces Democratic margins big enough to carry the day statewide.
As often happens in politics (or other aspects of human life), the two sides spent a lot of time talking past one another. “Yes” voters fear President Donald Trump and felt gerrymandering Virginia was necessary to counteract his automatic impulses. For them, this was about nothing less than saving democracy. Most rural voters (who begin with different views of Trump anyway) were more concerned about getting subsumed into metro-based districts where they’d have no influence.
In a speech on the state Senate floor last week, state Sen. Mark Obenshain, R-Rockingham County (whose county will now be split between three different congressional districts and whose legislative district will now be in four different congressional districts), warned Democrats that rural voters are incensed and will not soon forget what just happened. “There will be a reckoning,” he said. “There will be a price that will be paid.”
As someone who lives in a county that voted 76.08% “no” (which is actually on the low side compared to many counties in rural Virginia), I can testify that Obenshain is correct about public feelings. Those on the “no” side are angry, as angry as those yellow jackets I mowed over.
The difference is that the yellow jackets had an easy way to seek their revenge — they could sting me (and they did!). The rural voters who are livid that they are now in suburban-based districts that intend to elect Democrats have little to no recourse.
That’s because they have so few Democrats whom they can punish at the polls, either directly or indirectly. Philosophically speaking, this is the hazard of politics being so sharply divided along geographical lines; the majority party has little to fear from voters who support the minority party.
Rural voters can’t hurt state Sen. Louise Lucas, D-Portsmouth, who pushed for this map — they don’t live in her district.
They can’t hurt Gov. Abigail Spanberger, who signed the enabling legislation. Virginia governors can only serve one term; it’s only if she sought some future office — say, Tim Kaine’s Senate seat should he retire in 2030 — that they’d have a chance to vote against her. Even then, as we’ve seen, it’s hard for rural voters to make a difference in a statewide election unless there’s a corresponding increase in the Republican vote share in Northern Virginia. That math also complicates the 2029 race for governor. Rural voters would have to hold a grudge for three years (which is possible), but then would need help from elsewhere if their goal is to hold the Democratic candidates that year accountable for redistricting. It’s hard to know what the political dynamics that far off will be.
If those who want to even the political score want something sooner, they can look to next year, when Virginians vote for all 140 seats in the General Assembly. However, if rural voters want to punish the Democratic legislators who voted for the redistricting plan, they’re mostly out of luck because there are very few Democrats who even have rural constituents anymore. The most obvious target would be Del. Lily Franklin, D-Montgomery County, whose district does have a lot of rural voters. However, the Democratic base in that district is in Blacksburg. In some Blacksburg precincts last week, the “yes” vote won with 73.83%, 74.98% and 81.01%. Rural voters in the Roanoke County portion of her district will have to be the ones to deliver any political retribution, although they’re still in a Republican congressional district, not a Democratic one.
Rural voters could make a point to come out en masse to vote for Republican congressional candidates this fall, but these congressional districts are drawn to advantage Democrats. Their best shot would be in the redrawn 6th District, the so-called university district that goes from Radford to Charlottesville to Harrisonburg. It’s drawn with a slight Democratic tilt, but the “no” side carried it last week, so a Republican win is possible here under the right situation, which would turn the Democrats’ intended 10-1 map into a 9-2 map. However, there will be lots of other political dynamics at play come November in what essentially is a national election, as many congressional midterms are.
So who would rural voters go after if there are no targets within reach? The best they may be able to do is to deny Democrats further gains in the legislature. Democrats, buoyant after winning 13 of 14 targeted House of Delegates races last fall, have already set their sights on expanding their numbers. Can they? The one targeted race they lost was in Harrisonburg and Rockingham County, where Andrew Payton fell short. Democrats think that with more votes out of James Madison University, they might be able to flip that district. Perhaps they can mobilize those JMU students, but how many other voters in the district will they lose with an argument that Democrats are responsible for splitting Rockingham County between three congressional districts, two of them anchored in Northern Virginia?
Other Republican-held seats that Democrats think they could take are those belonging to Del. Joe McNamara of Roanoke County (he won with 52.86%, a smaller vote share than Franklin) and Del. Wendell Walker of Lynchburg (he won with 55.78%). Neither of those districts is exactly rural, but they are in the western part of the state, which feels most aggrieved by redistricting. McNamara and Walker would likely be quite eager to pin redistricting on whoever their Democratic opponents might be.
The bottom line is that Virginia Democrats have politically enraged one part of the state, but the voters there have no obvious means of recourse.
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