Hi everyone, I’m Sam Shirazi and this is Federal Fallout the 2025 Virginia Elections. This episode, Ben Tribbett will be joining me again. he is a Democratic consultant at his firm Pocket Aces and I wanted to bring him back because we had him earlier in the year and I think he had some really good insights. So Ben, thanks for joining me.

Ben

Hey, thanks for having me, Sam.

Sam Shirazi

Yeah, so as I mentioned, you were here in April, one of the first guests on the podcast. And I still remember you were saying some things that I think ended up happening. So I wanted to do one quote from you in April when you joined our podcast. You said, quote, so far it feels bigger than 2017. The wave we are likely to catch this year’s this year feels like it will be absolutely massive. So Ben, what did you see coming in April and why did it end up happening?

Ben

Yeah, I think that the for the for the Democrats, the big question of the year was, is this going to be an election that is fought on Virginia issues, or is this going to be an election that is fought on what’s happening at the federal level?

01:10.70

Ben

And the one thing that has been consistent in the Trump era, since he first started running and 2015 and then 2016, 2016, is a huge spike in civic engagement. I joking jokingly call him the greatest president in history for civic engagement because voter turnout has gone through the roof in every election that he’s been involved in because he brings out both supporters and opponents to his agenda.

01:41.46

Ben

And when you’re looking at a state that is a narrowly blue state to begin with, that could be the focus of some of his attacks, particularly on the federal workforce.

01:53.97

Ben

The way the election was shaping up was this was going to be something that was fought on the federal issues and the environment that you would get from that versus just fighting it out on on state issues. Let’s say like the example of that being like the 1997 race for where Jim Gilmore ran on no car tax, right, was something that was fought on Virginia issues.

02:17.29

Ben

And every time the Republicans tried to shift the focus from federal to state, they failed spectacularly because Donald Trump just won’t allow for anyone anything else to get oxygen besides what he’s talking about.

02:33.87

Ben

He’s going to take actions and do things that just suck the life out of anything else happening in the world to where he’s the only thing being discussed on the news.

02:45.69

Ben

And that was really just a disaster for both Winsome Sears, but the entire Republican ticket throughout the year, because every time Trump was on the news, he was doing something that was vastly unpopular, not only nationwide, but even more so unpopular in Virginia.

03:01.94

Ben

And so at that point, You know, the question is, do you have a candidate that can run an error-free campaign that can pick up voters as that’s as there’s availability and possibility, but but otherwise can get across the finish line with as broad of a coalition as possible?

03:21.33

Ben

And i don’t think you could build a better candidate for an environment like this than Abigail Spanberger because she was disciplined. She stayed focused on her message.

03:31.42

Ben

And she never allowed herself to get knocked off of that message while voters just flocked to her for the stability and sanity that she was offering.

03:41.84

Sam Shirazi

Yeah, I mean, I think that that’s a helpful explanation about what happened. And, you know, obviously, there was a reason the podcast was called Federal Fallout. I wanted to kind of unpack some of that. So on Election Day, you were doing a lot and posting a lot about how turnout was looking really great for the Democrats and Republicans were a lot of trouble.

03:59.88

Sam Shirazi

And, you know, I think some people were like, oh, he’s just saying that. But then obviously, when the results came in, it was pretty obvious what was happening. Were you surprised by the scale of what happened? Or was this kind of what you were thinking was goingnna end up happening even even before Election Day?

04:14.14

Ben

Yeah, you know, I was i was thinking at ballpark 400,000. So she beat my number by a little more than 100,000. So it was a little bit bigger than what I was expecting. But I think when I when i said 400,000 online at one point, people thought that was hilarious.

04:29.79

Ben

So I think 400 was probably a much higher number than than most people kind of had in mind. You know, there’s a few factors that, you know, go into that of,

04:41.01

Ben

of how does she get such a big margin. and you can see them on election day because there are precincts that over represent certain voters or types of voters, that tell you a lot in how they’re behaving on election day, in the turnout numbers, but also if you have people standing there that, giving you feedback of,

05:06.30

Ben

what people are saying at those polls, right? And so, you know, firstly, i thought one of the things that jumped out at me on election day was there was kind of an Asian revolution going on where you could tell early on on election day and and some of the early vote numbers had had hinted to watch for this, but you never know until election it’s happening.

05:29.73

Ben

that some of the exodus of the that came from the Democratic Party in 2024 of Asian voters was coming back really, really strong, both in turnout and in the percentage of voters coming home.

05:43.05

Ben

And some of that you know is in 2024. Obviously, the Democrats had some numbers lost amongst the Muslim community because of what was going on with foreign policy.

05:55.55

Ben

I think Kamala Harris, despite being Indian, did not necessarily inspire a record Indian turnout in support of her candidacy. I think there’s a bunch of things that could be explored as to why that is. But so, you know, there’s precincts like, for example, in Loudoun County, where there’s one that jumps my mind, I can’t remember the name of it, where in the when we had a lieutenant governor’s primary,

06:21.71

Ben

and it was Anish Chopra against Ralph Northam, Anish got 98% of the vote because the precinct is so overwhelmingly Indian. And so the neighborhoods around there are telling you a lot about what the South Asian community is doing. Obviously, they’ve elected now both Suhas to Congress and Cannon to the state Senate. So they’re successfully electing people from the community that You can look at those elections to see what precincts are kind of spiking in support of of those candidates.

06:51.48

Ben

And so when I start hearing early on in the morning that there’s lines out the door of minority voters in those precincts, it’s telling me a lot of information about what’s to come on election day, right? And the same way that if I want to know what’s going on with senior citizens,

07:13.29

Ben

I’m gonna take a look at a precinct like Greenspring in South Fairfax County because it votes in a senior a senior center that 100% of the voters live on campus and and they vote in the cafeteria at lunch, right?

07:27.72

Ben

And so in primaries, I’m always looking at Greenspring for, sometimes the candidates will get 95, 96% of the vote there that are the older establishment candidates because it really runs like a a machine and it tells you a lot into what’s going to happen there. i It’s probably a longer answer than what you wanted, but like you know i think of like you know the 2017 primary when we had a governor and a lieutenant governor’s race.

07:56.64

Ben

When Greenspring reported in you could tell a lot about how the election was going to go because Ralph Northam was north of 90% over Tom Perriello at Greenspring. What that tells you is is that, well, that’s all senior citizens.

08:12.52

Ben

Every other precinct in Fairfax County has 20%, 30%, 40% of the electorate, depending on which one it is, that are senior citizens. And if they’re breaking 9 to 1 for Ralph, that’s going to tell you that it’s going to be virtually impossible for Perry Eller to win almost any precincts in Fairfax County, And if he does, it’s going to have to be a place like in Centerville with extremely low turnout that he just nips by, right?

08:38.53

Ben

And so that told you right then and there, Northam was going to be your nominee for governor. Susan Platt carried Greenspring by five votes or something over Justin Fairfax. I’m trying to remember the exact results. But that came in, and it’s very clear that Susan’s from Northern Virginia, Justin’s getting a huge vote downstate in the African-American community.

08:58.80

Ben

So if if the best that Susan is accumulating is a five-vote margin at a senior center, she ain’t going to make up Richmond, Norfolk, Portsmouth, Newport News, downstate, right?

09:11.18

Ben

And so a lot of times these precincts really give you different clues. If you’re looking for what’s happening in the, you know, we’ll call it the kind of Karen community Democrats, look at what the turnout is in in North Arlington.

09:23.63

Ben

If you’re looking for what’s happening with young people, you look to what’s happening on the metro line in Arlington, or you look to the silver line running out to Fairfax. And so what I was seeing in the in the early returns as the you know numbers were coming in from where there was turnout was you were seeing huge spikes in all the places where different types of Democratic voters were overrepresented. And that’s why I kind of kept live tweeting it throughout the day of adding on new pieces of, I started with, well, it looks like there’s a huge Asian turnout. Then it was like, no, the young voters are really coming out. Well, we were hearing from college campuses that at 1, 2 p.m., they were coming at the number in which they had in the last gubernatorial and were on pace to hit the same number they had in the presidential. okay like

10:12.78

Ben

That tells you a lot about what’s going to happen at that precinct that day, unless you want to you know, sit there and just say like, well, it’s possible that there’s a huge conservative revolt on campuses for the Republicans.

10:27.18

Ben

You know, like nobody saw that coming. No one who is standing there saw it happening on the polls. So you kind of get a feeling of, okay, the Democrats are surging among young voters. They’re surging among Asian voters. They had higher participation rates in their early vote.

10:41.59

Ben

Arlington is performing really well. They’re doing very well with the with kind of the middle-aged people in in in Fairfax County and those precincts that are sort of the suburban middle-class precincts. Downstate, you’re hearing that the black turnout is doing very well. The people that are at the precincts and the kind of swingy areas are all reporting that, you know, Fredericksburg around there, like Stafford and Spotsylvania, people at the polls are saying, I feel is really competitive. I’m seeing more minority voters than I normally see. All those things go into

11:11.61

Ben

you know the The factor of being able to see everything here lines up with what you see in a democratic sweep. And so that’s the stuff that I see on election day where it’s not necessarily – people think of it as anecdotal. But when it follows a pattern, it’s not anecdotal. It is a it’s it’s it’s a precursor to what’s goingnna happen.

11:30.72

Sam Shirazi

No, that’s a really good explanation. And I think kind of is a good breakdown of what election day looks like and why sometimes you can tell what was going to happen based on election day.

11:41.55

Sam Shirazi

And so I want to.

11:42.92

Ben

Sam, can I jump in and just say like in 2021, 2021, the reports I was getting was they were running out of ballots in all the rural precincts in Southwest Virginia.

11:50.60

Sam Shirazi

Yeah, I mean, that didn’t happen this this time. And I think, you know,

11:53.84

Ben

Yeah. And it I think it told us all, like, I think you could know what was going to happen, right? Like it wasn’t, where the where the was Southwest Virginia showing up in massive numbers to, you know, come back to its ancestral home of the Democratic Party?

12:05.20

Ben

Sure. I could have argued that on election day, but I think it was pretty obvious what was going on. And And in this case, same thing this year.

12:11.80

Sam Shirazi

Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, and the results certainly i made that clear. Well, I did want to follow up about something more so about the midterms, because I remember last time you were on, you kind of talked about how 2017 was really helpful for Democratic campaigns to message and target in 2018 because they found out what worked in Virginia And we’re able to use that in 2018. You know, what lessons do you think the Democrats can learn for the midterms? You know, is it targeting Latinos, Asians, you know, young voters trying to bring them out? Or is it trying to win over the moderate suburban voters? I mean, what do you think campaigns in 2026 learn from

12:49.96

Ben

Yeah, so we certainly made gains in almost every group. So, I mean, that was really positive for the Democrats of no matter what kind of district you’re running in 2026 around the country, you probably could find some positive signs that came out of Virginia.

13:03.90

Ben

i think two things happened to the federal midterms that helped tie it to the Virginia elections. One is candidate recruitment. In most states, the filing deadline hasn’t passed. And so candidates are looking at these Virginia results and frankly, New Jersey also.

13:18.12

Ben

And if they’re wondering, should I go put my throw my hat into the ring into this Harris plus two district or this Trump plus three, and it seems marginal, they’re looking at our results going like, yeah, I should.

13:30.62

Ben

This is absolutely in play. So it’s going to help recruit more candidates and a higher level of candidates, which obviously you saw with Spanberger this year, candidate quality does matter.

13:42.47

Ben

I think you probably win the gubernatorial election by a substantive margin. with any of the Democratic candidates that could have run this year. I’m not sure that anyone would have won by as much as Abigail did.

13:53.58

Ben

You see that she way overperformed in suburban areas around the state where they really connected with her. She did a good job of bringing out younger voters, much more so than other Democrats have been able to do. I think that that partly factors into being a very reasonable,

14:11.76

Ben

mom type of candidate, like that’s her brand. I think that actually has some appeal to a lot of mainstream younger voters. You saw her overperform in her two congressional districts, and I say two, because while she was numbered the seventh district in both of them, those districts only overlap by a handful of precincts.

14:32.54

Ben

And so, whether it’s the 95 corridor precinct that she represented in 2022, or whether it’s the Richmond based district that she represented in 2018 and 2020, you can look at a map of where she overperformed and it had a heavy overlay with those districts. So, you know, she added a lot as a candidate. If you, if you were saying like, well, how do we measure that?

14:57.96

Ben

The, the scientific way to kind of measure it is to look at it and say, what is your sort of median Democrat doing versus what is Abigail doing?

15:08.38

Ben

And what I found was, I’m looking at the results, the House of Delegate candidates tended to track, with the exception of the ones that were against incumbents that might have been slightly behind this, about where the LG race was.

15:21.27

Ben

So it felt like the LG race and the delegate races kind of became generic D versus generic R. that the AG’s race became a place where the Republicans could overperform a little bit with some crossover, some lack of vote for Jay, but not nearly by the numbers needed to win.

15:39.27

Ben

And that that margin between what you saw in the LG’s race and the Gouvernot Troll race is probably what you got as added bonus for having Abigail Spanberger as your candidate, which by having that expanded margin...

15:54.55

Ben

opened up a lot of doors in a lot of places.

15:56.92

Sam Shirazi

Yeah. And I mean, to to follow up on that, I think it was a surprise how many seats the Democrats flipped in the House of Delegates. I guess, one, did you think they were going to flip 13? And in terms of the midterms, do you think there could be these unexpected pickups that, you long term incumbents, you heard a lot about Bobby Oroch. Oh, there’s no way Bobby Oroch is losing. He’s been there forever. Obviously, he went down. So do you think that can be replicated in the midterms?

16:23.14

Ben

Sure. So I had two different predictions for the house races. I had one that was public that I said 61. And i had one that was private that I said 62. So both of those were a little bit short of the number.

16:35.60

Ben

And I decided to say 61 publicly couple days before the election while I was telling people professionally 62 because honestly, some of the people on Twitter are a little annoying. And I knew the moment that I put up a number, they were going to want me to break down each one individually one by one by one.

16:51.73

Ben

And I was like, I’m just going to keep this number slightly more generic. It’s already going to kind of blow people’s minds to say 61. And I’m just going to like, you know, for purposes of my sanity of having to to kind of respond to all of them, I’ll keep it there.

17:08.97

Ben

I thought 62 was really the number we were going to hit. And I felt like it’d be 62 because I felt like 65 to 66 were in I felt that... i felt that five or six were almost certain pickups, putting us that at a 56 to 57 range as a minimum, and then kind of split the difference in the competitive races of some breaking our way, some breaking theirs.

17:32.55

Ben

and And the reason for that is is that when you have a wave like this, kind of the definition of a wave is that the water is going to be a little bit higher in certain places than in others.

17:44.58

Ben

So calling each individual race is harder because it’s going to vary a little bit. And what you saw that variance happen in was a big overperformance in those areas where there were some specific types of voters that really liked Abigail Spanford.

18:01.66

Ben

And we just went through what those are. And so Bobby Orrick is the perfect example of he is a 95 corridor Republican. who heavily overlapped with Abigail’s two congressional districts. A little bit of it overlapped with the old 7th. A lot of it overlapped with the new 7th.

18:19.64

Ben

I think he might even have a couple precincts that were in both versions of the 7th. But he’s right on the line where people would kind of know her from all of the campaigns. And then you combine that with that the 95 corridor for the Republican vote is very heavily military,

18:36.46

Ben

there’s a lot of people that work at the Pentagon or in defense contracting that are Republican voters that live in the 95 court or that were negatively impacted by the shutdown and by what Trump was doing. I mean, let’s not forget contractors when there’s a shutdown don’t get paid when they come back.

18:53.73

Ben

And so there were a lot of them that if their employer was not agreeing to eat those costs were went for a month without pay during that shutdown. And you could see the Republicans. So those two factors happening simultaneously was enough to go crater the numbers in his district for him to lose, where Democrats came up a little bit short in the Valley District in a really narrow contest because there probably were a lot less people that were affected by the specifics of that shutdown that you know they got very close with the JMU vote, but

19:27.97

Ben

the Republican vote was slightly more solid than it stayed in those areas, which was just enough for that candidate to hang on, right? And so, you know, how does that affect 2026? I think that you’re you’re looking at, no matter where you’re running, there’s some positive news.

19:45.22

Ben

I would want to be in those so emerging suburban districts, the exurbs, because they look like places that might have voted for Trump in 2024, but probably will vote for somebody different in 2026.

20:00.72

Sam Shirazi

Yeah, and that makes sense. And I wanted to follow up specifically about one group of voters because this is called, the podcast is called Federal Fallout, specifically military voters like Hampton Roads. You mentioned them in House District 66. I won’t name the person, but you you had a little bit of a a previous discussion with someone about how I think Republicans often think of Federal employees as, you know, all Democrats. Obviously, if you’re in the military, you’re technically a federal employee, or if you’re a contractor, you were ex-military, your your your job is tied the federal government. A lot of districts across the country have heavy military presence.

20:36.24

Sam Shirazi

How do you think that’s going to play in the midterms?

20:39.26

Ben

Yeah, so we’ve seen a split in recent years. I think there was some really good polling on this in 2020 where enlisted members of the military are now pretty overwhelmingly Democratic and officers are fairly overwhelmingly Republican still. And I think that also plays into, are you talking about retired military communities, places like you know, where you’d see a lot of people retire to?

21:23.93

Ben

But if you’re a Spotsylvania dad that works at Northup Grumman and, you know, your contract isn’t paying while while they’re on while they’re out and and that and so the company’s notified you that, like, all the members of your team, you know, aren’t going to be paid until the government reopens because you can’t report to work,

21:48.66

Ben

you’re not going to be real enthusiastic about coming out to vote for the Republicans in this election. And so, you know, voters like that, the Republicans just miss out. that’s It’s a huge part of their base. right I’ve been doing politics here for a long time and That is Northern Virginia Republicans.

22:07.18

Ben

you know The activists are one thing, but their actual vote, I would say there’s no group that’s more important than the military. In the rest of the state, I think that social conservatives make up the core of the Republican Party.

22:22.59

Ben

But I would say in Hampton Roads in Northern Virginia, it’s the military. And so I think the more that they see that chaos, you see that the military is becoming very much a swing a swingier vote overall.

22:36.37

Ben

But, you know, i don’t think that you’re going to get the kind of Republican turnout that you would want from those. Officers that, you know, and and part of the the reason that there’s such a difference between officers and enlisted is there’s a huge demographic difference between officers and enlisted also that’s partly driving that.

22:55.38

Ben

i don’t think you’re going to get those Republican-leaning voters to be real enthusiastic about voting Republican when the Republicans are failing to deliver for them things that make their quality of life better either for them, their families, or their communities. And I think that fundamentally is you know makes Jen Kagan’s job to get reelected very hard. It makes Rob Whitman’s job to get reelected very hard.

23:19.74

Ben

because they have their districts are packed full of exactly those kinds of voters and and probably makes eugen Eugene Vindman’s chances of getting reelected a lot easier.

23:28.38

Sam Shirazi

Well, you got to my next question, which was going to be about the midterm, specifically in Virginia. So you mentioned those districts. I wanted to talk about kind of redistricting You know, if you think the Democrats are still going to go through with it, let’s say, let’s assume Texas Supreme Court doesn’t intervene and Texas gerrymander doesn’t happen. do you still think Virginia Democrats move forward? And, you know, under that scenario, do you still think it will pass in a referendum? Because I think Democrats think, oh, it’s a slam dunk.

23:58.01

Sam Shirazi

You know, theoretically, if the facts on the ground change, people might not want to move forward with redistricting. But as you mentioned, a lot of this stuff just becomes federalized and they might view it as a way to vote against Trump.

24:08.43

Ben

Yeah. So starting with Texas, I don’t know if there’s new news on Texas, but the last that I read a couple days ago was the Supreme Court had lifted the stay on the new districts, meaning that as filing is opening there, they are in the newly redistricted Texas.

24:27.56

Ben

They’re moving forward with those new districts as of right now.

24:31.51

Sam Shirazi

Yeah, I think that’s technically correct. I mean, it’s it’s a lot of kind of legalese stuff, but I think, long story short, I think the Supreme Court will make a a final decision. Like that was kind of a temporary one to let it go forward, but like it’s it’s possible like they’ll make the final decision that yes or no. and And that was, this was kind of like a temporary decision, if that makes sense.

24:49.40

Ben

Yeah, I think that though would i the way I view this stuff when it involves elections is that the filing deadline is really important because people have – when you disqualify all the candidates who have already filed to a filing deadline that’s closed, there’s a lot of legal problems with that. And so I think that because they’ve now opened the filing for the new districts, the window for the courts to come in and and say, no, we’re going back to the old districts, is really the clock is ticking before that filing closes.

25:29.62

Ben

And you have a lot of people that have legally qualified themselves for Congress who you’re going to have to tell you’re no longer eligible to run in the district you filed in. And obviously Congress is complicated in this because people can choose to file in any district in their state that they want.

25:48.06

Ben

And so you’re not really a candidate for Congress unless you have picked a district. There’s no way to file at the federal level that says, I’m a generic candidate for Congress. You just have to say, I’m a candidate in blank district.

26:03.70

Ben

And so, so long as the new districts exist, I think the case for them in terms of overturning them, it gets stronger by the, each time these deadlines pass, right?

26:16.09

Ben

So my feeling was that by keeping this open for right now, that the Supreme Court is really limited and needing to act fast if they’re going to strike down these districts. Right.

26:26.50

Ben

Now, how will that affect Virginia? The Virginia Constitutional Amendment, as it was proposed and passed before the election, said that Virginia can institute this if any state moves forward with a midterm redistricting. Well, we know that certainly there’s a bunch of them that are doing so.

26:43.36

Ben

So I would assume that the General Assembly is going to pass that a second time in in January. and that what voters are going to get an opportunity to weigh in the, let’s say, March, April, May referendum, whatever that is, is going to be what’s happening in the rest of the country, and do you want to give legislators the opportunity to counteract that?

27:06.41

Ben

So I think of the Texas thing as being less of something that people would... I saw Marcus Simon was on a podcast where he was talking about, like, well, maybe this will pull people back. I think... I think he was kind of you know bloviating a little bit there of like, you know, speaking out of both sides of mouth, like, you know, well, maybe that could happen. I haven’t heard anyone say they’re interested in that happening. i think that’s really something that’s more up to the voters in the referendum as to whether they think it’s justified.

27:33.52

Ben

I don’t see the members of the General Assembly going through all the work they did and then just saying in January, crumbling it up and saying, eh, not enough people are doing it. We’ll take it off the table.

27:44.69

Sam Shirazi

Yeah, I think ultimately, you know, it’ll be up to the voters. and i I suspect that’s going to be the Democratic line. Like, you know, we’re we’re moving along. The voters get to decide. And, you know, it makes sense because in most of the Republican states or all the Republican states, there hasn’t been an equivalent referend referendum. I did want to ask, like, let’s assume the voters pass it.

28:03.62

Sam Shirazi

Obviously, there’s a lot of talk about what the masks will look like. Currently, Virginia has a 6-5 delegation, so six Democrats, five Republicans. you know I’ve seen a lot of numbers thrown around. i think I’ve heard i’ve seen you know they’re going to go for 7-4. I think logically...

28:21.16

Sam Shirazi

9.2 is probably the cleanest way of doing it If you really want to go kind of crazy, you can go 10.1. You know, there’s all sorts of different formulations. What do you think the maps would actually look like if it passed?

28:35.78

Ben

Well, first of all, Sam, I know we’re probably all going to go down to the inaugural in January in Richmond. And for your safety, don’t say that in front of Senator Lucas. Because she’s...

28:46.63

Sam Shirazi

That’s why I’m asking you because you have the inside scoop, right?

28:50.23

Ben

I mean, like, if she hears you talking about 9 to 2, like, she’s going to get thrown out of a window. But in all seriousness, I think the... Here’s kind of how I see the maps playing out.

29:01.62

Ben

And going to use another state as the example to what’s happened around the country and then how that might get unpacked in Virginia. So in the 1990s, Georgia had 10 members of Congress.

29:15.58

Ben

They had Newt Gingrich as a Republican, John Lewis as a Democrat, and eight fairly conservative Democrats that represented districts with decent-sized African American populations that had been put in their districts.

29:32.46

Ben

So they had a nine-to-one delegation of Democrats. when districts first got drawn under the Voting Rights Act to create more majority-minority districts.

29:43.12

Ben

By 1994, 1994, Georgia had picked up one seat in redistricting. They had gone from nine to one Democratic to eight to three Republican, and the delegation now was three black Democrats and eight white Republicans.

30:00.63

Ben

And Republicans across the South sort of took advantage of this moment. It’s a lot of the reason why the whole South fell to Republicans on a legislative level, because the placement of black voters into their own districts was essentially a dilution of black voter influence in a majority of the districts.

30:24.78

Ben

And so, yes, it sent more black elected officials to the legislature, but it really didn’t allow for black voters to play a meaningful part in creating majorities or coalitions that would allow the legislators they were sending to be part of governing groups.

30:43.98

Ben

And you saw this happen all over the South. And so, you know, in Virginia at one point, we got as far as, I think when Jerry Connolly narrowly won re-election in 2010 by like a thousand votes, had he lost, it would have actually been nine to two Republicans.

31:01.52

Ben

So packing all those minority voters downstate into a district was devast had a devastating impact to the Democratic Party as a whole.

31:13.92

Ben

And the Black Caucus continued to argue for this nationally for quite some time after it was pretty obvious that it was diluting their influence. And I’d give a big shout out here to Bobby Scott, who I think was the first and the most vocal voice in the Black Caucus nationally as this was happening to, say,

31:51.99

Ben

He had lots of African-American voters, but he he went and was able to pull together a coalition and get himself elected. And then when the district was district was drawn in 1992, it was not a super-packed black district. It was a district with a lot of black influence. I think it might have been majority black district, but it was not gerrymandered to just include black voters.

32:14.57

Ben

It wasn’t until the second iteration of that district in 2002 that which was drawn to take him into Southampton Roads in addition to decimate the black voter influence in the fourth district, which had been held by Norm Sosisky, and the second district, which had been held by Owen Pickett, that the Republicans taking all those black voters and stuffing them all into one district created a period of The fourth district stayed Republican until it was redrawn by court order in 2016. And the second district was Republican that entire period, other than one one term that came down ballot from President Obama in 2008, all the way until Elaine Luria won it in 2018, was Republican all the way through.

33:00.87

Ben

Because they removed all the black voter influence in those districts. So what I think you see now, what has changed in our politics in the last 20 20 years, is that white suburban voters will no longer vote against a candidate because the Democrats put up a black candidate.

33:20.11

Ben

In fact, there’s a lot of evidence that black candidates overperform in swing districts. If we look at this year’s House of Delegates election, how many of those pickups were African-American candidates?

33:31.75

Ben

and quite a number of our swing seat pickups were were black candidates, right? So you you look at it and and see that now and say, okay, we don’t need a super-packed district in order to have the black community, one, have an influence in who’s elected, and two, even be able to elect a candidate of their choosing from their community in that district.

33:55.26

Ben

It’s not just necessarily going to produce a white Democrat to have a district that’s 30% black. And I think the reason for that is it’s a mathematical thing. If your district is 30% black, it’s probably majority black in terms of the primary electorate.

34:13.93

Ben

And so if you have willing white voters that are willing to vote for Democratic candidates in the general, which is what we’ve seen the change in the last 20 years of of those suburban voters being willing to do that,

34:25.57

Ben

and in primary electorates, the black voters are getting the biggest say in who the nominee is, that allows for you to have much more diverse districts and so and ensure that black voters have influence in more seats.

34:40.43

Ben

This fundamentally is what produces more Democratic elected officials. Republicans require gerrymandering to win seats,

34:52.19

Ben

Democrats require communities of interest to be drawn together. And I think this is why the Democrats will be successful in court if they do have to redraw these seats. Because you look at some of the different districts, and if it’s okay with you, Sam, i’m gonna could I just go into a little bit of detail on that?

35:08.28

Sam Shirazi

Yeah, sure.

35:09.17

Ben

So like the 2nd District of of Virginia. You know, the special masters who drew that map, and I used to have respect for the the one guy who was the Republican in that, I forget his name, but I’ve seen him on social media. and Prior to him being selected as that special master, I used to think this guy is a reasonable person who had reasonable takes.

35:31.58

Ben

I’ve not said a positive word about him since he had that role because what he did to Hampton Roads was to try to determine the outcome instead of allow the community to have a voice in who they wanted.

35:47.05

Ben

by that I mean you have the eastern shore in Virginia Beach, which comprises about 75% of a congressional district. The city of Norfolk, which, by the way, is divided by rivers and bays from the peninsula and Western Hampton Roads. You know, like you drive from Norfolk to Portsmouth in a tunnel, you go to the peninsula in a tunnel, and so would have actually made up a perfect-sized congressional district.

36:16.21

Ben

They share, Norfolk and Virginia Beach share all sorts of economic things. Lots of people on the beach work in Norfolk, vice versa. It’s an obvious, easy community of interest, right?

36:29.09

Ben

And instead of allowing that to be the district, district, the special masters determined that they wouldn’t like the political composition of what that looked like. So they’re going to draw Norfolk into some other seat that it has nothing in common with, that people generally don’t even, has no commuting pattern in common with, nothing.

36:48.09

Ben

And they’re going to run the 2nd District to exclude as many black voters as possible through the Great Dismal Swamp, through only include the parts of the city of Chesapeake that are white, not allow black voters in the city of Chesapeake to be included in this either,

37:05.01

Ben

And then run out through Suffolk, the city of Suffolk, all the way out to peanut country to try on the other side of Suffolk to include as many white people as possible and exclude as many black voters as possible.

37:18.40

Ben

And what I called it then was the Klan district. And I called the Klan district not to insult people that live there, but to say, if you had the a white supremacist drawing a district to say, how can I best exclude black voters?

37:33.09

Ben

That’s what they would have drawn. okay And the idea that that’s what the special masters came up with and presented to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court didn’t tell them to F off and fire them and get new special masters, is an absolute disgrace.

37:48.23

Ben

that that’s the district. And you have these communities together that are not do not comprise a core community of interest. So is it political gerrymandering to say that the city of Norfolk should be with Virginia Beach and the Eastern Shore where there’s a bridge that connects those two?

38:07.28

Ben

Of course not. And in fact, if you go through the history of of congressional districts in Virginia before we started this ridiculous computer-based gerrymandering, that was always the core of the second congressional district.

38:21.23

Ben

And the fourth congressional district historically was Chesapeake-Portsmouth and would go westward where there’s a land connection through Suffolk and west and north.

38:32.80

Ben

And the 3rd District would cover the peninsula and would go up the peninsula towards Richmond. So you know when Bobby Scott won that seat in 92, they basically kind of split the peninsula to have some of it in the 1st and some of it the 3rd to get him up towards towards Richmond. But he never came across...

38:52.91

Ben

the waterway because you don’t want to cross major waterways when you’re drawing a district because the people on either side of them probably don’t have commuting patterns that are similar, that they interact in a community of interest kind of way, right?

39:09.74

Ben

So when you think about what does a 9-2, 10-1, whatever you want to call it, map look like for the It actually gets to good numbers by just bringing back the old congressional districts that we have had for, in some cases, have hundreds of years of history, right? And because they’re logical based on geographic boundaries,

39:37.56

Ben

and that would produce Democratic districts because the reason that produces Democratic districts now is that the suburban areas actually share commonality with the urban areas in terms of their political interest enough so that they’re not offsetting each other the way that they were 30, 40 years ago.

39:56.73

Ben

So, you know, another district, for example, that existed historically was prior to the 11th district getting plopped down in the middle of Northern Virginia in 92, 92, you had two congressional districts in Northern Virginia.

40:12.61

Ben

One ran from Alexandria south down the Potomac into Stafford. One ran from Arlington up the Potomac into the Shenandoah Valley.

40:22.100

Ben

Those places have enormous historic commonalities. Right? And restoring those two districts to be in Northern Virginia and then figuring out what you kind of do in that middle core of where the new seats had been created.

40:37.08

Ben

Again, those are likely to produce Democrats. That’s not political gerrymandering. there’s a lot of community of interest along the Potomac River. It’s a major waterway that feeds into the Chesapeake Bay. There’s a lot of environmental issues that overlay. And the last time I checked, a lot of the food supply in a place like Arlington,

40:58.49

Ben

comes from the Shenandoah Valley, right? So this idea that these are like places that are completely different foreign lands that need to be kept separate, that’s a Republican idea. That’s a Republican gerrymander.

41:11.67

Ben

to run districts along the Potomac River and then have interior NOVA districts would make complete logical sense. And again, likely might produce Democratic elected officials, but that’s not because they’re gerrymandered. That’s because Republicans lack the appeal to be able to go win those districts. And if you drew a seat that went from Winchester to Arlington along the Potomac River,

41:34.85

Ben

Would that seat likely produce a Democrat? Yeah, because Republicans have failed to appeal to voters in Arlington. If you look at the historic numbers of what Republicans did in Arlington when they actually talked to those voters and tried to win them over with a message, that seat was always historically Republican and held by Frank Wolf.

41:53.14

Ben

Arlington was represented by Frank Wolf the entire first 10 years he was in Congress because he’d go to Arlington and talk to those voters and represent the federal workers who live there and go score 45% of the vote, which was enough for him to win the district, right?

42:08.23

Ben

And so when Republicans say, well, this is gerrymandered, no, it’s’s it’s not gerrymandered to include voters in there that you have intentionally shut out and not spoken to for... decades, that’s on you.

42:19.71

Ben

And if you don’t like the fact that you’re getting low numbers in the black community, well, you know, Republicans have started to try to do some outreach there. They should try to do some more because those districts could flip Republican if they could get more than 10% of the black vote, right?

42:34.50

Ben

But if they refuse to talk to the voters in those districts and then they can’t win them, that’s on them. And I think that producing a a map that would produce a lot of Democrats would actually look like a map that represented a lot of communities of interest.

42:49.68

Ben

That 10th seat that people are talking about, whether you were to draw it in that way or not, would likely be whether or not you lumped all communities in the Shenandoah Valley together the way it is now, whether they are have commonalities or not into a generic district that produced a Republican, or whether you put together all the different communities in the Shenandoah Valley that are more similar.

43:13.47

Ben

I’m talking about the college towns, Harrisonburg, Blacksburg, past Roanoke and Radford, the city of Roanoke, the city of Charlottesville. You put all that together and you’re probably having a narrowly democratic district.

43:43.56

Ben

And so that’s really what I hope that the the Democrats will be aggressive in doing in this, is put back together these communities of interest. Don’t listen to the Republican whining and let the Republicans go try to compete in these communities that they’ve refused to compete in.

43:58.65

Ben

And they can produce Republican elected officials when they can successfully talk to voters across Virginia.

44:04.79

Sam Shirazi

Well, you certainly are passionate about redistricting and, you know, we’ll see what the Democrats choose to do if they are able to move forward with redistricting once the referendum happens. And it was helpful to get that background because I think a lot of times you just kind of hear things, but you don’t get kind of the perspective why.

44:35.20

Sam Shirazi

Before it it would ever be built, and there would be a referendum because I think that’s the only way we would pass the General Assembly. Do you think that bill is going to happen either this session or during the four years when Spamberger is governor?

44:48.43

Ben

Yeah, I’m really hoping. i mean, you know, I’m a big advocate for this. I think we’re seeing a couple of different reasons why I think it could be successful this year. One is the state and the county are having tough budget years that demonstrate a need for revenue diversification and new sources of money to be able to make those investments that Democrats really care about.

45:07.41

Ben

And I think the second reason that you would see some movement towards that this year is there’s been a real exodus from Tyson’s Corner in recent years. The vacancy rate is rising.

45:19.12

Ben

The utilization rate is much worse than the vacancy rate. And the utilization rate tends to be something that’s a precursor to a vacancy rate because people enter into long-term leases. And so if a company has leased 600,000 square feet of space and they come back in a report and say, we’re only using 150,000 right now and our lease runs out in three years,

45:41.20

Ben

guess how much space they’re going to lease in three years, right? That’s why the utilization rate tends to be such a good precursor. And I’ve heard numbers that the utilization rate may be under 50% in Tyson’s Corner right now, which is obviously an epic disaster that’s coming for both the county and state economies that are driven probably no place more than if you were talking about the economic center of Virginia, it would be Tyson’s Corner.

46:06.50

Ben

And so I think that helping stand that up with New developments that are going to bring young people there that are going to attract a different industry that might attract some tourism money into Virginia would be a huge net benefit to the state and the county.

46:25.24

Ben

And so I think for those reasons, I think it’s likely to be successful. You know, you don’t want to prejudge what a new governor might do, what her position is. Obviously, There’s a lot of gaming issues coming up this session that are besides the Tyson’s Casino.

46:39.47

Ben

And she’s going to have to decide what her policy is going to be on the skill games, on iGaming, on a gaming commission. So I wouldn’t be surprised if some of it might be in a package that’s blessed by the governor.

46:52.74

Ben

But I think that, you know, i think you what you will see if I was predicting this is that Abigail Spamberger has not been shy during this campaign about being assertive to crafting things in the way that she wants to see them done.

47:05.59

Ben

I mean, she showed a lot of courage standing up to the AFL-CIO when she said she didn’t want to do right to work. i I personally not sure I agree with her on that. But I respect the fact that she was willing to stand up and and say that and be the first Democratic candidate in quite some time not to be endorsed by them, to stand by her guns.

47:25.60

Ben

So I think based on how I’ve seen her leadership before, i think you’ll see her come out and strongly articulate what her views are. And I bet that what Abigail wants to have happen probably is what will become law.

47:38.67

Sam Shirazi

Well, we’ll have to see what how that shaped up. And I agree there’ll be a lot of gaming issues. So that’ll be one of the hot topics in January for the General Assembly. Okay, one last question that I wanted to ask you about. It has to be on social media because I know you know you are one of the experts, one of the original people to use Twitter that is now X. So I wanted to set this question up about...

47:59.79

Sam Shirazi

is Twitter X really valuable for Democrats anymore? Because, you know, first there was the trans stuff and the sign lady in Arlington. Then there was the Jay Jones stuff and the Republicans kept posting all day on Twitter and they’d get, you know, hundreds and thousands of retweets.

48:15.89

Sam Shirazi

Who knows how many of them were bots, but obviously they were getting a lot of engagement on X and Twitter. Whereas Bamberger, she would be posting, but usually she’d get ratioed and there’d be all sorts of crazy stuff in response to her posts.

48:29.19

Sam Shirazi

So I guess my question is, you know, X doesn’t seem like it’s real life. Is there still value for Democrat Democratic candidates, I would say, to still be on there? And, you know, is there is that kind of does this election show that, you know, basically X is not real life and it’s not really worth spending too much time or efforts on there?

48:47.93

Ben

Yeah, well, certainly X is not real life, and and that’s been the case in a lot of elections. I find it to be really useful couple fronts. One is the media is still overwhelmingly on that, and so if you’re getting your message out, you know, I’ve worked with them with Senator Lucas for 25 years, helping her with some of her media outreach stuff, and I don’t think she’s issued a press release from her office in, I don’t know,

49:16.86

Ben

We’re probably coming up on quite a number of years. It might even be a decade. She doesn’t really issue press releases anymore. She goes out and puts it out on social media and gets the word out that way. And frankly, that has been more successful than what any other Democrats doing in the state in terms of getting their message out there. I feel like people would say that you know if they were to cite one person that they know, it’s Senator Lucas. Right.

49:59.99

Ben

I look at a place where there’s a lot of opposition as an opportunity, not just for education of them, because you know some of them are just trolls, but more so for if your message can’t survive those attacks on social media, better that you find that out on a tweet than stating it in a debate.

50:26.54

Ben

And you know I don’t mean to you know call out a particular person. like i’m just using this as the example. But I think if Kathy Tran had spent more time on social media personally prior to her introducing that abortion bill that caused all the outcry and in 2019, and committee being able answer those questions,

50:50.04

Ben

in in in committee not being able to answer those questions To me, what struck me when that happened was it felt like she had never had someone ask her those questions before, and that’s why she was unprepared. I don’t think that she was incapable of answering them.

51:08.67

Ben

I think she just had never had it framed that way. In the same way that if you only talk to Democrats and you only hear the term pro-choice,

51:21.46

Ben

and anti-choice, you know, the term pro-life might come as a little bit of a shock to you, like, what’s this term that the other side’s using? Or, you know, like, or they call you pro-abortion.

51:33.13

Ben

You might be like, no, I’m pro-choice, right? They use a different language. They come at it a different way. And so, you know, someone who’s been like an observer of the legislature and campaigns over a long period of time, I didn’t find the questions that Todd Gilbert was asking her that surprising. It’s sort of what he had been talking about in floor debates for years.

52:15.49

Ben

And that whole snowball all started out of that one hearing. So I, i as a political consultant, love it to see our clients get into a place where they can hone their message, where people are being hostile to it. Because some of the hostility you can look at and say, yeah, I don’t agree with that. You know, i don’t care if you say that because I don’t agree. Other times someone might make a point in a way that you’re like, okay, I need to craft this a little bit differently. I need to think about this.

52:45.47

Ben

You know, when we... had the special election this year and the 11th district. I saw a similar situation when they were first putting together the rules of it that, you know, they like they convened a conference call of the committee members people could observe and,

52:59.81

Ben

The first proposal came out of like, this is what we’ll do, how we’ll run the process. And it was going to have no early voting and there were just going to be one day to vote on a Saturday. And one of the members raised a question of, well, how can you only have one day of voting on a Saturday?

53:15.85

Ben

Observant Jewish voters wouldn’t be able to participate because their Sabbath is a Saturday. And you could kind of tell that there were a bunch of people on that committee that either didn’t know that or hadn’t thought about it, right?

53:30.55

Ben

And then when it got raised, we’re like, oh, we need to do something. And then I think someone made a comment to try to, before they realized that it was kind of the momentum had changed on that, that they said, well, why do we have to have an election that like is about Jewish voters?

53:45.40

Ben

And I was like, God, I’m really glad the press wasn’t on this call. You know, because like that’s the that’s the shot that could be heard around the world on Fox News that somebody is like a Democratic official saying like, why do we need to worry about Jewish voters?

53:58.54

Ben

being able to participate in our process. And the committee eventually figured it out and got to a point where they were like, okay, we’re not going to just have a Saturday election. We’ll have other opportunities to vote. But I think that having it in these these forums in which you have to hear from a perspective that is not your own is really enlightening for elected officials. It’s really helpful for party officials if they’ll get on it.

54:20.26

Ben

So the long answer to your question, Sam, is is like what I recommend to people, going on Blue Sky. If you want to get a bunch of compliments and people telling you how great you are go on to Blue Sky. If you want to win an election and be an effective communicator, go on X and learn how to fight it out.

54:37.74

Sam Shirazi

Well, I think that’s a good way to end it I know you will continue to be on X and it’s always good to get a different perspective. So I think that’s, and you don’t want to be in an echo chamber. So I think those are some good tips. And anyways, I appreciate you coming on. Certainly interesting. we covered a lot of ground and yeah, I’m sure it’ll be a fun year in elections for 2026 as well in Virginia.

54:59.02

Ben

Awesome. Thanks for having me Sam.

55:00.63

Sam Shirazi

Yeah. And this has been Federal Fallout and I’ll join you next time.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samshirazi.substack.com