by Madison Hirneisen
An expanding list of lawmakers in the politically-divided Virginia General Assembly have announced they will not seek re-election or will seek another office under new district lines this election cycle.
Come this November, all 140 seats in the General Assembly will be on the ballot. The upcoming election cycle will be the first one under new maps drawn via the independent redistricting process in 2021.
The new maps drawn by consultants appointed by the Virginia Supreme Court in 2021 did not take into account where current legislators reside, resulting in several lawmakers either being drawn out of the district where they currently live or drawn into a district where they would have to run head to head against another one or more incumbent lawmakers.
As of Thursday, 18 members of the House of Delegates have announced they would not be seeking re-election this year, while an additional 14 have launched campaigns to fill a seat in the state Senate, according to the Virginia Political Access Project. On the Senate side, 10 lawmakers as of Thursday had announced their retirement.
As a result of redistricting, 46 lawmakers in the House of Delegates and 19 lawmakers in the state Senate were drawn into a district with one or more incumbents, according to tracking from VPAP.
Some lawmakers have indicated that going head to head with another incumbent was a primary motivator for retiring. In a statement announcing he would not seek re-election, Del. Glenn Davis, R-Virginia Beach, said the newly created 98th House of Delegates district ended up grouping he and Del. Barry Knight, a Republican from Virginia Beach and chair of the House Appropriations Committee, into the same district.
“While my desire would be to continue serving the citizens of Virginia beach in the House of Delegates and leading our education agenda, there is no doubt that the City I represent, as well as the Hampton Roads Region as a whole, has benefited greatly from having the Chairman of Appropriations as its representative,” Davis said in a statement Tuesday. “It is for this reason that I will not be running for re-election to the Virginia House of Delegates.”
Due to the new district lines, some lawmakers were drawn out of their original districts, leaving them to consider moving to a new area to continue representing their constituents.
That was a determining factor for State Sen. Emmett Hanger, R-Augusta, who released a statement Thursday announcing he would not be running for election in the new Senate District 3.
“While I currently represent, or have represented in the past, at least half of the new Senate District 3, I do not live within those boundaries,” Hanger said. “Where I have lived all of my life, went to school, college, commanded a National Guard Infantry Company, my Church, my Ruritan Club, my business where 6 of my 16 grandchildren live; in essence ‘my community,’ are all in Senate District 2.”
Hanger said he “went so far as to locate a house to purchase in SD3,” but said he “decided not to move away from my current community.”
A handful of lawmakers have indicated their decision to not seek re-election this year was out of a desire to retire after decades in the Legislature. In announcing his retirement, State Sen. Richard Saslaw, a Democrat from Fairfax who spent 48 years in the General Assembly, said: “Fish gotta swim. Birds gotta fly. And Saslaw’s gotta move on.”
New district boundaries represent ‘massive change’ to past maps
Before Virginians approved a constitutional amendment in 2020 that transferred power to a redistricting commission to draw new boundary lines, legislators used to control the redistricting process.
As a result, Virginia has a decades-long history of gerrymandering, where the party in charge of each chamber would “manipulate the district lines for political goals,” according to Alex Keena, an assistant professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University. Keena said the new district maps are “an example of a set of maps that doesn’t have gerrymandering bias.”
“This is a huge difference from the process we saw 10 years ago when it was just years and years of court battles, racial gerrymandering, partisan gerrymandering and vote dilution cases,” Keena told The Center Square, noting that the new maps represent “massive changes” to existing district boundaries.
Keena said in some ways, the new district lines “inject a lot more uncertainty into the elections than we typically have” because of the amount of incumbents who have chosen to retire instead of challenge another incumbent. But he also noted the new maps create new opportunities as the new boundaries are “reshaping the power that’s distributed in each of the parties.”
“Neither of the parties really have a baked-in advantage in the way that the districts are drawn,” Keena said, adding it is largely a “question mark” on how the balance of power could shift in the General Assembly after the upcoming election.
Heading into the election, Republicans hold a 52-48 majority in the House of Delegates and Democrats hold a 22-18 majority in the Senate. Given the slim majorities in both chambers and the new district boundary lines, it appears “control of both chambers is legitimately at stake this year,” said Kyle Kondik, a political analyst with the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.
Kondik, who writes about U.S. elections as managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, noted that seeing an increase in lawmaker retirements in Congress is “not uncommon” in the election cycle after redistricting. He said it’s likely the same applies at the state level.
“In years immediately after a redistricting cycle, you do just tend to see more open seats, partially because sometimes two members will get thrown in the same district with one another or there’s just more members who are retiring because they see their constituencies change,” Kondik said.
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Madison Hirneisen is a staff reporter covering Virginia and Maryland for The Center Square. Hirneisen previously covered California for The Center Square out of Los Angeles, but recently relocated to the DC area.
Photo “Virginia Supreme Court” by Morgan Riley. CC BY 3.0.
