Virginia Democrats’ proposed redraw of the state’s House map would effectively strip the state’s rural communities of federal representation, a conservative group argues in a new study.
The lopsided gerrymander backed by Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger and former President Barack Obama would most likely change Virginia’s House makeup from six Democrats and five Republicans to 10 Democrats and just one Republican — if a majority of the state’s voters back it on April 21. In a policy brief first obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation, Defend Forgotten America (DFA) calls the plan a “structural demolition of rural representation,” noting that its passage will lump residents in Virginia’s rural areas into districts overpowered by Washington, D.C., suburbs.
“Five congressional districts would originate in Northern Virginia’s Fairfax County and stretch their tentacles hundreds of miles south and west, through the Shenandoah Valley, the Blue Ridge, and deep into communities that have nothing in common with the D.C. suburbs except the misfortune of being attached to them on a map,” the brief titled “Drawn Out” states.
“Communities that share an economy, a culture, and a crisis, rural healthcare collapse, broadband gaps, agricultural decline, would be scattered across districts whose dominant constituency is congressional staffers and tech-industry commuters,” DFA’s analysis continues.
The brief explains that the map splits deep-blue Fairfax County “into five separate congressional districts that then extend southward into rural Virginia.” The county gave 66% of its vote to 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris. One of these proposed districts, numbered the Seventh, has been widely likened in shape to a lobster.
“The result: rural constituents in places like the Shenandoah Valley, the Piedmont, and Tidewater could end up represented by Democrats who reside in the Washington suburbs and whose electoral base has little connection to farm country, rural healthcare, or coal-impacted communities,” the brief adds.
DFA’s study argues that the dismantling of Virginia’s rural districts under the gerrymander will be detrimental to residents in the area receiving vital health care.
“When the Shenandoah Valley functioned as a single coherent congressional district, its representatives had every reason to fight for rural hospital preservation, maternity care funding, and rural health workforce investment. The proposed map would divide that same Valley into four or five districts, each anchored by a suburban or urban population center where these issues are not constituent priorities,” the brief notes.
“No representative whose political survival depends on Northern Virginia commuters will show up to fight for a birthing center in Harrisonburg. The map doesn’t just split counties. It splits the political will to keep rural hospitals open,” it adds.
Currently, most of the Shenandoah Valley is in Virginia’s Sixth District and is represented by Republican Rep. Ben Cline, the vice chair of the conservative Republican Study Committee and a member of the House Freedom Caucus. President Donald Trump carried Cline’s current seat, which the new map eliminates, by 24 points in the 2024 presidential election.
“This map isn’t about fairness; it’s about power. Backed by Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger and her radical Left allies, their redistricting plan dismantles representation across the Commonwealth – splitting counties, stretching districts across hundreds of miles, and subordinating local communities to distant suburban power centers,” DFA Action President Jenn Pellegrino told the DCNF in a statement.
“Defend Forgotten America Action is fighting to ensure rural Virginians, from the Southwest to Southside to the Valley, aren’t silenced, sidelined, or treated as an afterthought in their own state,” Pellegrino added.
DFA also states in its brief that the Democratic-backed gerrymander would undermine a 2020 state constitutional amendment establishing a bipartisan redistricting commission that passed with 66% of the vote.
“The map was produced in weeks, in secret, by the legislative majority with no public input and no community testimony,” the study says. “This amendment, rushed through a legal gray zone and placed before voters who may be voting on a voided measure, undermines not just the map but the credibility of Virginia’s democratic institutions.”
DFA’s mission is to “empower state and local leaders—the true engine of self-government—and ensure Washington elites can no longer ignore the voices of America’s heartland,” according to the group’s website.
If given the green light by Virginia voters, the gerrymander would likely result in 10 out of 11 Congressional districts being represented by Democrats in a state Harris won with shy of 52% of the vote. By comparison, Texas’ Trump-backed mid-decade redraw of its Congressional map — which prompted blue states to gerrymander in retaliation — will at most put 79% of the Lone Star state’s House seats under GOP control in a state where Trump won over 56% of the vote in 2024.
Democratic Virginia Senate candidate Mark Moran told the DCNF in a Monday interview that “when you look at the gerrymandered map, it is so morally offensive to anyone.” He pointed to the “totally preposterous” fact that the plan draws rural areas that favor the GOP 80% to 20% into the same district as “one of the wealthiest, if not the wealthiest, neighborhoods of Arlington.”
“If we’re saying that this is fair because we have to fight back against Donald Trump. OK, well, one wrong plus one wrong doesn’t make a right,” emphasized Moran, who is challenging Democratic Virginia Sen. Mark Warner — a supporter of the gerrymander — in the party’s open Aug. 4 primary.
If Virginia voters approve the gerrymander, it would not be the first time this election cycle that a Democratic-backed proposal to split heavily Republican rural House seats passes at the ballot box. California’s new House map, which passed via the state’s Proposition 50 in November 2025, carves up multiple deep red areas of the state that have had federal GOP representation for decades and places them in heavily Democratic districts.
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