How redistricting has changed our politics: Who benefits most from compact

Want more political news? Sign up for our weekly political newsletter, West of the Capital.

A lot of people who weren’t paying attention in the fall and winter of 2021 whenever they saw a news story with the word “redistricting” are going to be very surprised when they go to the polls this year.

That surprise will fall on both sides of our ideological divide.

Historically, legislative lines were drawn by whichever party was in power in the General Assembly, and those lines were specifically drawn to benefit that party and hurt the other one. Both Democrats and Republicans were equally adept at drawing weirdly shaped districts for political purposes — what we know as gerrymandering.

Now, for the first time, neither party had a say in the legislative maps. They were drawn by two “special masters” appointed by the Virginia Supreme Court. Their mandate was to ignore politics and draw geographically coherent districts. We’re already seeing the first fallout from that: a wave of legislative retirements, some of which might have happened anyway, but others brought on by legislators finding themselves in districts not well-suited to their politics.

Over the coming months, as both parties set about picking their nominees for the November elections, we’ll see even more fallout from the new lines.

I recently wrote about how Del. Matt Fariss, R-Campbell County, faced political difficulty returning to Richmond even before he was charged with two felonies stemming from a traffic incident. His new district is more Republican than his previous one, which you’d think would help but doesn’t. It includes a lot of new territory where he’s never run before, and now he has a challenger who might have more support in that new territory than he does.

Enough readers were surprised by that news that I’m prompted to take a closer look at some other districts. Fariss’ case is a perfect example of the new redistricting maps. His previous district was a clear case of gerrymandering: an elongated district that started south of Lynchburg and wound up at the Charlottesville city limits, specifically to disadvantage Democrats in Albemarle County:

This is the district that Fariss has represented since he was first elected in 2011. It includes part of Campbell County, all of Appomattox and Buckingham counties, and parts of Nelson and Albemarle counties. Courtesy of Virginia Public Access Project.

His new district is more geographically coherent yet more Republican (and not particularly advantageous to Fariss). The point: More compact districts don’t necessarily make districts more competitive; sometimes they make them less so. It all depends on which voters are being, well, compacted.