Gov. Abigail Spanberger is telling House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and the national Democratic Party to drop the redistricting obsession and focus on…
The bottom line
Gov. Abigail Spanberger is telling House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and the national Democratic Party to drop the redistricting obsession and focus on November’s midterms. Democrats who lost a $100 million referendum gamble are furious. None of this makes Spanberger the good guy. She signed HB 40, SB 749, and the rest of the most aggressive gun-control package in Virginia’s history.
This article is based on analysis from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. This is commentary, not legal advice.
There’s a New York Times piece out this week that should make your blood boil. The headline: “Partisan Mud Fight, or Focus on the Midterms? Redistricting Divides Democrats.” Cute framing. What it actually describes is Abigail Spanberger telling Hakeem Jeffries to back off his redistricting crusade, and the national party going full scorched-earth on her for it. Meanwhile, the people of Virginia are stuck living under the laws she already signed.
The redistricting disaster recap
If you’ve been following Virginia politics, you know what happened. Democrats spent somewhere north of $100 million pushing a constitutional amendment through a statewide April 21 referendum that would have let the General Assembly redraw Virginia’s congressional districts mid-decade. The existing 6-5 Democrat delegation would have flipped to something approaching 10-1. They wrote ballot language that asked voters if they wanted to “restore fairness,” which is about as neutral as asking someone if they want to stop being hit. Judge Hurley of Tazewell County Circuit Court correctly called it “flagrantly misleading.”
Voters approved the referendum 51.68% to 48.32%. Then the Supreme Court of Virginia threw it out anyway, ruling 4-3 in Scott v. McDougle that the legislature had violated Article XII, Section 1 of the state constitution in two distinct ways: early voting had already started before the first legislative passage, and Democrats gave the public 46 days of public notice when the constitution requires 90. Void ab initio. As if the whole thing never happened. The court was right.
Spanberger’s approval ratings cratered during the campaign. Polls showed her near 47%, with her favorable declining roughly 10 points from where she stood the day after her inauguration, making her one of the weakest first-year governors in recent Virginia memory. She was so radioactive to the yes campaign that they stopped running an ad featuring her just six days after a Washington Post/Schar poll came out showing how underwater she’d gone.
What Spanberger is actually saying
Post-SCOVA ruling, the Times runs a story on the rift between Spanberger and Jeffries. He wants to keep the redistricting fight going nationally, squeeze blue-state legislatures to redraw congressional lines before 2028, and grab every partisan advantage on the map. She’s telling him that’s a distraction and the party needs to win in November first.
Her exact quote, from an interview this week: “It is outrageously premature of us to be talking about any sort of redistricting or map-changing effort when we have to win the most consequential midterm of my life this November.”
She did not say she opposes a partisan gerrymander in Virginia before 2028. She did not walk back anything she tried to pull in April. She said the timing is wrong. Her objection is purely tactical. If you’ve watched Spanberger for any length of time, you know her mode: never tell you what she actually wants to do until she’s positioned to do it. She ran for governor as a centrist ex-CIA officer who valued bipartisanship. Then she signed the most sweeping gun-control package in Virginia’s history, with provisions far outside what most Virginians knew they were voting for.
So Jeffries is furious that she’s pumping the brakes. And some Virginia Democrats reportedly floated the idea of simply replacing the Supreme Court of Virginia’s justices to relitigate the redistricting case. Spanberger said no to that too, which is about the one thing she’s done right in recent memory, though it says something about how far off the rails this party is that replacing state Supreme Court justices to overturn an inconvenient ruling was floated as a serious idea. Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell eventually told Virginia Scope that the idea “did not pan out.” Of course it didn’t.
The lesson she drew, and why it’s wrong
Spanberger learned the wrong lesson from the redistricting failure. Her takeaway wasn’t “gerrymandering is unpopular and I shouldn’t do it.” Her takeaway was “I campaigned too visibly on an unpopular issue and paid a polling price.” Her solution is to stop talking about redistricting until after November, then try again when she’s in a better position.
She’s been operating this way on guns the whole time. She signed HB 40, which bans unserialized “ghost gun” components and creates a Class 5 felony for homemade firearm manufacture, effective 2027. She signed the April gun package: red flag law expansions, a 72-hour waiting period, changes to handgun purchase permits. And on May 14, she signed SB 749 and its House companion HB 217, the assault weapons ban. That bill prohibits the manufacture, sale, transfer, or import of any semiautomatic firearm capable of accepting more than 15 rounds, effective July 1, 2026. No grandfathering on new purchases. Existing owners can keep what they have, for now.
The NRA filed twin lawsuits in federal and state court within 24 hours of her signature. Those suits are going to matter, particularly in the Eastern District of Virginia where Bruen provides solid footing. But that’s a separate fight.
What makes Spanberger more dangerous than most
Most politicians in either party are mostly interested in getting elected and staying that way. Their ideology is soft and adaptable. They do what’s popular, drop what isn’t, and move on. That’s not a flattering description, but it’s not the worst outcome either.
Spanberger is different. She has a specific policy agenda she wants to impose on Virginia, and she’ll do whatever she needs to get it done. That means misleading voters about what redistricting would actually produce. It means signing gun bills (HB 40 turns ordinary Virginians into overnight felons for possessing components of firearms they already legally built) with full knowledge those bills are deeply unpopular with a large share of her constituents. And it means being honest about redistricting’s political timing while never abandoning the underlying goal.
She’s not lying about her values. She’s lying about her tactics and her calendar.
HB 40 and SB 749 were not popular with Virginia gun owners, and gun owners here aren’t a marginal constituency. Virginians bought over 500,000 firearms in 2024 alone. Nobody was asking for this. She wasn’t elected on a platform of banning AR-15-pattern rifles and turning semiautomatic pistols into contraband. The legislature passed it, she signed it, and if you object you’re invited to take your chances in court.
This is an agenda on a deadline. And that’s why, even when Spanberger is momentarily on the right side of a fight with Jeffries, I can’t credit her for it. She’s regrouping, not retreating.
The infighting doesn’t help gun owners
I don’t particularly care which direction the Democratic Party tears itself apart. If Spanberger and Jeffries want to spend the next six months fighting over redistricting strategy, I’ll read every story. A party busy fighting itself has less time to fight gun owners.
But this is not a win for Virginia gun owners. The laws are already signed. SB 749 takes effect July 1. HB 40’s possession ban takes effect July 1, 2027. The redistricting fight being in chaos doesn’t repeal a single bill. SCOVA striking down the referendum didn’t restore the rights that were taken.
What this rupture shows is how badly the redistricting gamble went. Spanberger spent enormous political capital on a constitutional amendment her own base barely understood, watched her approval ratings fall off a cliff, and still lost in court. Jeffries is furious because Virginia was supposed to deliver four or five House seats toward the majority in 2026. That’s gone. The existing 6-5 delegation map, drawn by the bipartisan 2021 commission, governs this fall. And Spanberger is telling him that relitigating it right now is a mistake.
She’s right about that narrow tactical point, and completely wrong about everything else she’s doing in Virginia.
What’s actually at stake this November
With the existing commission maps in place, Republicans have real shots at competitive seats that would have been buried under a 10-1 gerrymander. And the gun laws Spanberger signed are heading toward legal fights that will shape Second Amendment jurisprudence in the Fourth Circuit for years.
The NRA litigation over SB 749 in the Eastern District of Virginia is the one I’m watching. Post-Bruen, federal courts have consistently required the government to show a historical tradition of regulating weapons in common use. Semiautomatic rifles and pistols that hold more than 15 rounds are in common use. That is not even a close question. There’s no founding-era tradition of banning them. If the court applies Bruen honestly, SB 749 doesn’t survive.
The intraparty fight between Spanberger and Jeffries is entertaining. The legal fights over the bills she signed are what will actually matter. I’ll watch both. Democrats eating each other alive over redistricting timing changes nothing for the gun owners of Virginia who have July 1 circled on the calendar.
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