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Virginia GOP: Donors Didn’t Think We Could Stop Gerrymandering Until It Was Too Late

‘Until our side invests the same amount of money and enthusiasm in [get-out-the-vote], in canvassing …as it does with consultants and media buyers, we’re gonna continue to come up just short, and the country’s gonna really be damaged as a result.’

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Half of Virginians found out Tuesday that they are not allowed to have political representation in the U.S. House because Democrats in the state’s capital decided resistance to President Donald Trump was more important than the political concerns of their neighbors.

But the post-mortem assessment that Republicans and aligned organizations should have spent more, gotten involved more quickly, or been building a get-out-the-vote campaign well before the eve of the election season, which started March 6, was completely foreseeable.

Democrats pumped millions of dollars into the pro-gerrymandering race — mostly dark money from outside the commonwealth — engaged their base, ran incessant ads, and were ostensibly able to pull together the same coalition of Democrats who looked the other way and voted for now-Attorney General Jay Jones, who fantasized about murdering his Republican colleague and his children.

But it is not as if Democrats had a particularly strong showing, all things considered.

The pro-gerrymander “yes” campaign won with an unofficial count of 1,574,809 votes, while now-Gov. Abigail Spanberger, D-Va., got 1,976,857 votes — about 400,000 more. The “no” campaign lost with 1,486,594.

In terms of being a special election in April — a month in which Virginia has “never had elections before” — the turnout was enormous. The “no” campaign surpassed the number of votes Republican gubernatorial candidate Winsome Sears, who was the sitting lieutenant governor at the time, in the 2025 November general election against Spanberger.

Former Gov. Glenn Youngkin, R-Va., by comparison, got 1,663,596 in the 2021 election.

Why were Republicans not able to recreate the Youngkin majority for an election that has a greater effect on the midterms than essentially any other race this year?

“I don’t know that it can’t be recreated,” Jeff Ryer, chairman of the Republican Party of Virginia, told The Federalist, looking toward the midterms. “The Youngkin majority didn’t have the level of disadvantages that we were faced with — whether it’s outspending or having an election in April, a month when Virginia has never had elections before. … I just think that we need the right circumstances.”

For many observers, fundraisers and the Republican National Committee (RNC) seemed to let the election slip away, and now the extremely slim Republican majority in the U.S. House is likely to be four seats closer to Democrat control — and endless investigations, subpoenas, and impeachments for President Donald Trump.

“A lot of people invested in the legal effort early on, but not in the in the referendum........

© The Federalist