Upcoming election will have long-term impact

BY CHELYEN DAVIS

Date published: 6/17/2007

BY CHELYEN DAVIS

RICHMOND--The 40 state senators elected this coming November will be the senators who redraw the state's political boundaries through 2021.

Changing the geography of the districts in 2011 could determine which party will hold control of the General Assembly for the next decade.

That gives both parties extra incentive to try to win control of the Senate this year.

Even if voters aren't considering such things, politicians and parties are "absolutely" thinking that far ahead, says a political analyst.

"The Democrats and Republicans have had very powerful lessons delivered to them when they were in the minority," said University of Mary Washington politics professor Stephen Farnsworth.

"They are very mindful of how important it is to be able to draw the lines. Elected officials care greatly about being re-elected. It is the focus for many of them as they go through politics. And the single biggest threat to being re-elected as an incumbent is somebody changing the district lines on you."

Legislative-district boundaries are reset every 10 years after a national census, because legislative districts comprise a set population. Over 10 years the number of people in a district may shrink or swell, necessitating changes.

Ideally, perhaps, the composition of a district would be based primarily on that population figure, as well as other requirements that districts be "compact and contiguous" and not drawn in such a way as to disenfranchise minority voters.

But that's not how it works in practice.

In Virginia, as in many states, the elected officials themselves are the ones who determine the redrawing of the district lines. The party in power generally gets to push through the districts it wants, and it's practically expected that the majority party will draw the districts to benefit itself.

For instance, in 2001, the last time Virginia did redistricting, Republicans--who had just gained the majority for the first time since the Civil War, and had suffered under Democratic redistricting for decades--gleefully drew two powerful Roanoke Democratic delegates into the same district.

One of them, former Del. Chip Woodrum, made the mistake of telling a reporter that in fact the Republicans had gotten his address wrong and had actually not drawn him into the same district as then-House Minority Leader Dickie Cranwell.

Date published: 6/17/2007