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Republicans sound alarm on Democrats’ ‘power grab’ as Virginia votes on redistricting shake-up
LEESBURG, Va. — Virginians head to the polls on Tuesday to vote on a congressional redistricting referendum that, if passed, could give Democrats a significant boost in the battle for the U.S. House majority in this year’s midterm elections.
If the ballot measure is successful, it would give the Democrat-controlled Virginia legislature — rather than the state’s current nonpartisan commission — temporary redistricting power through the 2030 election. It could result in a 10-1 advantage for Democrats in Virginia’s congressional delegation, up from their current 6-5 edge.
That would give the Democrats four additional left-leaning U.S. House seats ahead of the midterms as the party tries to win back control of the chamber from the GOP, which currently holds a razor-thin majority.
“It’s the most partisan map in American,” former Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin told supporters at his final campaign stop on the eve of the election in this northern Virginia town on the far end of Washington, DC’s suburbs.
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Pointing to the Democrats pushing new maps, Youngkin charged, “What they are doing is immoral.”
Teaming up with Youngkin to crisscross the state in leading the GOP opposition to the ballot initiative was former Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, who told the crowd the Democrats’ map is one that “you draw when you’re drunk with power.”
Speaking with Fox News Digital ahead of their final election eve rally, Miyares charged that Democrats want to take away the voices of millions of Virginians and gerrymander the state.
Youngkin, pointing to the duo’s relentless campaigning in recent weeks, said “what we’re hearing over and over and over again is Virginians want fair maps. And what the yes vote represents are unfair maps.”
And the two Republicans reiterated their charge that the referendum was an “unconstitutional power grab” by the Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger and the Democrats who control the state legislature.
As Youngkin and Miyares were speaking in Leesburg, President Donald Trump took to the airwaves on a popular Virginia-based conservative talk show and later teamed up with House Speaker Mike Johnson to urge voters to defeat the referendum.
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Pointing to congressional Democrats, Trump warned that “if they get these additional seats, they’re going to be making changes at the federal level.”
Democrats counter that the redrawing of the maps is a necessary step to balance out partisan gerrymandering already implemented by Republicans in other states at Trump’s urging.
“By voting yes, you have the chance to do something important — not just for the Commonwealth, but for our entire country,” former President Barack Obama said in a video released Friday on the eve of the final day of early voting. “By voting yes, you can push back against the Republicans trying to give themselves an unfair advantage in the midterms.”
“By voting yes, you can take a temporary step to level the playing field. And we’re counting on you,” the former president added.
The video by Obama was the former president’s latest effort tied to the referendum. He has previously appeared in ads released by Virginians for Fair Elections, the Democrat-aligned group working to pass the ballot initiative.
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But Virginians for Fair Maps, the leading Republican-aligned group opposing redistricting, used past comments by Obama against political gerrymandering in its ads opposing the referendum.
“Because of things like political gerrymandering, our parties have moved further and further apart, and it’s harder and harder to find common ground,” the former president said in an old clip showcased in the spot.
Republicans are also pointing to comments from Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine, a former Virginia governor and former chair of the Democratic National Committee, who acknowledged this past weekend in a Fox News Sunday interview that the new maps don’t represent Virginia’s partisan breakdown.
“Ninety percent of Virginians are not Democrats, that’s true,” Kaine said.
But Kaine added that “about 100% of Virginians want election results to be respected.”
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And Republicans are also taking aim at Spanberger, who won last November’s gubernatorial election by over 15 points as Democrats also captured the lieutenant governor and attorney general offices.
“Abigail Spanberger told everybody last summer that she had no interest in redistricting and then the first bill she signs is a bill to enable the gerrymandering of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Virginians don’t like this and that’s why independents and a lot of Democrats are voting no too,” Youngkin told Fox News Digital.
Minutes later, Youngkin told the crowd that Spanberger is “trying to disenfranchise million, millions, of Virginians.”
Republicans have trained their redistricting firepower on Spanberger since a poll two weeks ago from The Washington Post indicated that the new governor’s approval rating was barely above water, with the highest unfavorable rating for a new Virginia governor in two decades.
“She’s an unpopular governor with an unpopular agenda and she lied to the voters,” Miyares charged.
And Miyares and other top Republicans have accused Spanberger of pulling a “bait and switch.”
Spanberger, in an ad in support of the referendum, said she’s backing the measure because “it’s directly in response to what other states decide to do and a president who says he’s quote entitled to more Republican seats before this year’s midterms. Our approach is different. It’s temporary. It preserves Virginia’s fair redistricting process into the future.”
Supporters of redistricting have dramatically outraised and outspent groups opposed to the referendum, with Virginians for Fair Elections outraising Virginians for Fair Maps by a roughly three-to-one margin. Much of the funding raised by both sides came from so-called “dark money” from nonprofit public policy groups known as 501(c)(4) organizations that are not required to disclose their donors.
Despite the Democrats’ funding advantage, recent polling suggested support for the ballot initiative was only slightly ahead of opposition amid a surge in early voting, which ended on Saturday.
“They have outspent us three to one. They’ve raised over $70 million. And yet this is a close vote,” Youngkin said.
Pointing to the ads in support of the referendum, Youngkin said Virginians “aren’t believing the mistruths. They aren’t believing the lies on TV. They’re actually doing the work themselves and understanding that a no vote is for fair maps and a yes vote is for the most gerrymandered maps in America.”
And Miyares emphasized that Democrats “outspent us but we have the truth.”
Virginia is the latest battleground in the high-stakes fight between Trump and the GOP and Democrats over congressional redistricting.
Aiming to prevent what happened during his first term in the White House when Democrats reclaimed the House majority in the 2018 midterms, Trump last spring first floated the idea of rare, but not unheard of, mid-decade congressional redistricting.
The mission was simple: redraw congressional district maps in red states to pad the GOP’s fragile House majority to keep control of the chamber in the midterms, when the party in power traditionally faces political headwinds and loses seats.
When asked by reporters last summer about his plan to add Republican-leaning House seats across the country, the president said, “Texas will be the biggest one. And that’ll be five.”
Republican Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas called a special session of the GOP-dominated state legislature to pass the new map.
But Democratic state lawmakers, who broke quorum for two weeks as they fled Texas in a bid to delay the passage of the redistricting bill, energized Democrats across the country.
Among those leading the fight against Trump’s redistricting was Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom of California.
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California voters in November overwhelmingly passed Proposition 50, a ballot initiative that temporarily sidetracked the left-leaning state’s nonpartisan redistricting commission and returned the power to draw the congressional maps to the Democratic-dominated legislature.
That is expected to result in five more Democratic-leaning congressional districts in California, which aimed to counter the move by Texas to redraw their maps.
The fight quickly spread beyond Texas and California.
Republican-controlled Missouri and Ohio and swing state North Carolina, where the GOP dominates the legislature, have drawn new maps as part of the president’s push.
In blows to Republicans, a Utah district judge late last year rejected a congressional district map drawn by the state’s GOP-dominated legislature and instead approved an alternate that will create a Democratic-leaning district ahead of the midterms.
Republicans in Indiana’s Senate in December defied Trump, shooting down a redistricting bill that had passed the state House. The showdown in the Indiana statehouse grabbed plenty of national attention.
Florida is next up.
Two-term Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and state lawmakers in the GOP-dominated legislature are hoping to pick up an additional three to five right-leaning seats through a redistricting push during a special legislative session that kicks off April 28.
Hovering over the redistricting wars is the Supreme Court, which is expected to rule in Louisiana v. Callais, a crucial case that may lead to the overturning of a key provision in the Voting Rights Act.
If the ruling goes the way of the conservatives on the high court, it could lead to the redrawing of a slew of majority-minority districts across the county, which would greatly favor Republicans.
But it is very much up in the air when the court will rule and what it will actually decide.
Donald Trump has been written off a thousand times and always managed to bounce back.
He hung on when he first got in the race and was mocked as a sideshow. When the “Access Hollywood” tape came out. When his supporters attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6.
He outlasted two impeachments and four criminal cases. He won reelection when that seemed like a long shot. He’s the Harry Houdini of Washington.
And on Saturday night, he survived his third assassination attempt. At a dinner that was expected to feature the president mocking the media, his calm response to being targeted by a heavily armed shooter generated enormous sympathy for him. It’s a dangerous job, he said.
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In fact, he “fought like hell” to continue with the Correspondents’ Association dinner, but the Secret Service – one of whose members was shot but saved by a protective vest – insisted on clearing the room.
At the same time, Trump has such mounting political problems that it’s hard to avoid the conclusion he’s in a free fall.
The president is bogged down in an unpopular war and canceled the latest talks. Rising gas prices are inflicting pain at home. He may be losing the redistricting wars. Some of his most prominent supporters in the conservative media have turned on him with a vengeance, even apologizing for having supported him.
That’s not all. The Democrats are virtually certain to win the House. They are talking about impeaching Trump the day they’re sworn in. Sure, he’d be acquitted in the Senate, but his last two years would be a blizzard of investigations and payback.
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What’s more, the president can’t run again. He’ll still have the power of incumbency, but the House can block most of what he wants to do (and this is beyond the media fantasy that the opposition party could take the Senate as well).
In the ever-present polls, Trump has dropped as low as 33% approval in an AP survey, his worst numbers ever.
More eye-popping is a new survey with a large sample, from Strength in Numbers/Verasight, which says 21% of Republicans support impeachment, with 72% opposed. Among independents, 50% back impeaching the president.
And a Fox News poll found more respondents trusting the Democrats over the Republicans on the economy, by four points, for the first time in 15 years.
This comes against the backdrop of Trump having fired three women in his Cabinet, creating a sense of disorder, and his wife giving a televised speech to deny any involvement with Jeffrey Epstein.
But let’s have a reality check.
Trump’s relentless attacks on the press have taken their toll, with many dismissing the coverage as fueled by personal hostility. And Democrats, with few exceptions, aren’t helping themselves by appearing to root for the Iranian terrorists when our service members are at risk.
By November, the Iran war could be a distant memory. The economy might enjoy an uptick. Even now, with the ceasefire collapsing over the Strait of Hormuz blockade, the stock market has hit record highs.
Trump will use his media mastery to dominate the news agenda. He already takes calls from reporters at all hours.
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The Democrats, meanwhile, are leaderless. Even if Hakeem Jeffries is speaker, the president will make far more news. That won’t change until the 2028 primaries, when a front-runner or two emerges.
Trump can make news with executive orders, such as moving marijuana to a lower classification and boosting research into psychedelic drugs.
The betrayal being voiced by his onetime allies on the right, who embraced his pledge of no new foreign wars, may be less important for those not immersed in the online world. But it is a bellwether for the splintering of the MAGA coalition.
Now some of its leading members are calling him erratic and reckless.
No one is loving this more than the Democrats and the Never Trumpers, who say wait, you’re just noticing this now? We’ve been telling you this for years.
“Trump looks desperate to run for the hills,” says New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. “He constantly says he has defeated the mullahs and ‘obliterated’ their military power, and yet Iran refuses to be subdued.”
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What’s obvious, says veteran columnist Andrew Sullivan: “Trump is completely out of his depth. He went to war impulsively. He never expected the Iranians to close the Strait of Hormuz; and then they did. And he can’t re-open it. In fact, he decided to close it again. Or something.”
Throw in the AI image of Trump as Jesus, which offended many Catholics, and the list of unforced errors just grows. He’s even attacked the Supreme Court, a third of which he appointed.
And there is growing concern about the health of the president, who will soon turn 80, with television running footage every time he closes his eyes at a meeting.
Trump regularly talks about building his massive ballroom, which reminds people of his surprise demolition of the East Wing and plans for a monument that would dwarf the Arc de Triomphe. He brought it up after the gunfire on Saturday night, saying the ballroom would be bulletproof and extremely secure.
Trump also used the gunfire at the Washington Hilton to underscore his own importance. Having studied assassinations, he said, “the most impactful people, the people that do the most… they’re the ones they go after.”
Politically speaking, Trump is clearly struggling. But anyone who rules out a rebound for this president is ignoring history.
There will be all kinds of twists and turns in the remaining six months before the midterms, and the Democrats are unpopular as well.
But here’s a moment of rare consensus: We can all be grateful that the Secret Service did its job well.
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New York woman convicted for throwing dynamite at boyfriend, blowing off his hand as he tried to get rid of it
A New York woman was convicted after authorities said she threw a handmade stick of dynamite at her boyfriend while he was sleeping, causing his hand to be blown off as he attempted to get rid of the explosive.
Keyonna Waddell, 35, of Deer Park on Long Island, was found guilty by a jury on Friday of first-degree assault and first-degree criminal possession of a weapon in connection with the March 2024 incident.
Waddell had threatened the victim with dynamite several times in the months leading up to the incident, according to the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office.
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“Domestic violence can escalate to deadly levels, and this case is a sobering reminder of that reality,” Suffolk County District Attorney Raymond Tierney said in a statement.
On March 22, 2024, Waddell and her boyfriend were involved in an argument inside his apartment, according to the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office.
After the dispute, the man left the apartment and told Waddell to leave. When he arrived back home, Waddell did not appear to be there, and he went to sleep.
He was later woken up by a hissing sound and noticed a flame on the floor of his bedroom. He then realized that a stick of dynamite had been thrown into his bedroom and attempted to toss the explosive device out of the window, but it detonated and blew off most of his hand before he was able to throw it out of harm’s way.
The victim then ran out of his home to the driveway, at which point he saw Waddell running away.
He was subsequently rushed to the hospital, where the remainder of his hand and part of his arm were amputated.
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Waddell was arrested the following day, officials said. Her sentencing is scheduled for May 27, and she could face up to 25 years in prison.
“Thanks to the outstanding work of our prosecutors and the Suffolk County Police Department, a dangerous individual has been held accountable and will face a lengthy prison sentence for this horrific act,” Tierney said in his statement.
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Diego Pavia accepts Ravens rookie minicamp invite after making unfortunate NFL Draft history: reports
Diego Pavia, the polarizing former Vanderbilt quarterback who was runner-up in Heisman voting last season, has reportedly found a home in the NFL after going undrafted this weekend.
Pavia accepted an invitation to the Baltimore Ravens’ rookie minicamp on a tryout basis, per multiple reports. He doesn’t have a spot on the roster yet, but it’s a start as he looks to crack into the NFL with Baltimore.
Of course, Lamar Jackson, the two-time MVP quarterback, is cemented as the team’s starting quarterback, but perhaps Pavia can stand out enough in rookie minicamp to earn an invitation to training camp this summer.
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Pavia was not expecting to be undrafted this weekend, but he became the first Heisman Trophy finalist since 2014 to not hear his name called through the seven rounds in Pittsburgh.
Pavia won the SEC Offensive Player of the Year and the Johnny Unitas Golden Arm award for best upperclassman quarterback after throwing for 3,539 passing yards and 29 touchdowns, both of which single-season school records, to give the Commodores its first-ever 10-win season.
Vanderbilt just missed out on the College Football Playoff after finishing 10-3.
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Pavia ultimately finished second in Heisman voting to Indiana quarterback Fernando Mendoza – the No. 1 overall pick in this year’s draft by the Las Vegas Raiders. So, what ultimately led to Pavia not getting drafted?
While his personality may have factored in, Pavia’s official height at the NFL Scouting Combine turned some heads. Vanderbilt had him listed at 6-foot, but he was measured at 5-foot-9 7/8, which would make him the shortest quarterback in the NFL if he were to step foot on the gridiron today. The average height is 6-foot-2 for an NFL quarterback.
However, those shorter than the average have seen success, including Minnesota Vikings newest member, Kyler Murray, who went first overall to the Arizona Cardinals in 2019 coming out of Oklahoma. He’s listed at 5-foot-10.
Pavia barked back at critics during the Senior Bowl in January regarding his height.
“Yeah, my size has been doubted my whole life,” he said at the time, via AL.com. “I feel like the only thing the NFL cares about is can you win, and I view myself as a winner. I’ve been fortunate with all these great teams that I’ve had — we’ve never had a losing season. So that’s something to look forward to, I hope, for the rest of my career, that’s how it’s going to be.
“I feel like God has blessed me in so many ways to be a connector, and I feel like that’s one of my superpowers that I’ve got — I can connect. We unite, and then once you unite, you want to play for one another, and once you give 120% effort, there’s no one that can stop your team.”
Pavia’s personality, viewed by some as more cocky than confident, may have played a factor as well. After finishing runner-up to Mendoza in Heisman voting, Pavia was spotted at a New York City nightclub next to a sign that read, “F— Indiana.” Then, he posted on social media a photo with friends and a caption that read, “F— ALL THE VOTERS, BUT…FAMILY FOR LIFE.”
Pavia later apologized for his decision to post that on his socials.
No matter the case, Pavia has a shot now with the Ravens and new head coach Jesse Minter, as he aims to show enough to join the quarterbacks group in training camp. Other than Jackson, the Ravens have Tyler “Snoop” Huntley on the roster to start the season.
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