The new 5th
Virginia’s 5th Congressional District is no longer the same sandbox in which Tom Perriello challenged incumbent Virgil Goode in 2008 and then lost to newcomer Hurt in 2010. It is, in the words of Dustin Cable, a demographer at UVA’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, “a completely different animal.”
Not only that, the current race couldn’t have existed without the radical redrawing of the district. Douglass is challenging Hurt because the new lines put his Fauquier home within the boundaries of the 5th, giving him the option to avoid running against the long-established 10th District representative Frank Wolf.
Before last year’s redistricting, the 5th included a chunk of central Virginia, but its identity was still solidly Southside—the land of southern piedmont farms and the manufacturing legacy of Danville and Martinsville. At 8,922 square miles, it was already Virginia’s largest district and bigger than the state of New Jersey, running along the North Carolina border from Brunswick County in the southeast to Martinsville in Henry County to the southwest, and north along the eastern slopes of the Blue Ridge in a roughly tapering triangle past Albemarle to Greene County.
When it came time to redraw Virginia’s Congressional districts to account for the population shifts and growth detailed in the 2010 census, Republicans controlled the General Assembly, and, ultimately, the new boundaries.
Gerrymandering is nothing new, but the process of determining border lines has changed significantly in just the last few decennial rounds of redistricting, said Cable, largely due to technological advancements.
As recently as the ’90s, redistricting was a much more tedious process. “You literally took out maps, and with pens and pencils drew lines and calculated totals yourself,” he said. Computers have changed everything. Mapping software has vastly improved, and politicians have huge amounts of data at their fingertips to help them custom cut a voting bloc that suits their needs —a process known as microtargeting.
“They can draw lines around whomever they want and don’t want in a particular district. They have information down to the city block, down to the neighborhood level on voting history and population demographics,” Cable said. “Virginia has a very long history of doing this, more so than perhaps other states.” It’s aligned with the legacy of Jim Crow, he said—Virginia is among the states that still has to have its district redrawings precleared by the Justice Department per the Voting Rights Act.
Many experts have drawn a line connecting the development of redistricting into a science for both political parties and the rise in partisanship nationwide, said Cable. Both parties have tried to secure wins by creating districts more likely to vote in their favor. “With increased polarization of these districts and polarization of the candidates, the more of a sure thing these elections become,” Cable said. That alienates voters, especially those in the middle, he added, and it discourages turnout. “Soon, the only people who show up to vote are the most polarized people in the electorate. It feeds off itself.”
So it was in 2011, in Virginia and beyond. “The current Congressional district plan was pretty much developed and agreed upon as an incumbent protection map,” said Cable. “These districts are designed to keep whomever’s in office in office.”
The mapmakers forged north to find the population they needed to flesh out the district, snatching territory from the former 1st, 7th and 10th districts in order to tack on a long appendage that includes Madison, Rappahannock, and most of Fauquier counties. At the same time, they sliced away the Southside city of Martinsville.
The 5th’s new NoVA top hat is partly the result of Republican’s desire to pad other districts with more right-leaning voters, said Geoff Skelley, a member of Larry Sabato’s election-handicapping staff at UVA’s Center for Politics.
“They kind of created this little channel that goes all the way from the bottom of Virginia to the top,” Skelley said, in part made up of leftovers from the slice-and-dice needed to shore up the strength of Wolf’s 10th and the House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s 7th.
The result is a 5th that is significantly larger—now the comparison is to the state of Massachusetts, which is just a few hundred square miles bigger than the newly redrawn district—and, in the eyes of some, void of much of its former identity.
“You’re talking about having three different parts of the state included here,” said Skelley. “You’ve got Southside, you’ve got Central Virginia, and a little of what could be included in Northern Virginia,” all of which are significantly different culturally, economically, and politically.
And that’s a problem, said Cable, because one of Congress’ priorities in redrawing districts is to preserve “communities of interest,” areas defined, however loosely, by those very factors.
“Now it pretty much stems from Northern Virginia to the North Carolina border,” said Cable. “It encompasses areas of Virginia that you would normally not think would be a part of the same community of interest that you’re supposed to be drawing these districts around.”
Former 5th District Representative Tom Perriello said the redrawn boundaries have resulted in a significant shift in what the 5th represents. It might, in fact, be more representative of the state and the country as a whole, he said—as before, there are high-growth, high-tech areas like Charlottesville, exurbs like those around Lynchburg, and conservative “Falwell country,” and now there’s a slice of the outer rings of the greater D.C. area.
“But they really destroyed the notion of this being a Southside district,” Perriello said. “There was some sense of an area and economy that you represented.” There have always been divides in the 5th, he said—divisions between white and black, small city and countryside, conservatives and liberals. “But there’s a sense of closeness,” said Perriello. “You can know the community. And there’s a sense of what it means to represent it.”
Now the center of gravity for the 5th has moved north. “If you drive down 29 from D.C., you’re basically hitting Hurt signs and Douglass signs as soon as you get off 66. It’s going to start feeling like just another Northern Virginia district eventually.”
One thing pretty much everybody agrees on: The new boundaries do make the 5th safer for Republicans, if only by a slight margin. The loss of Martinsville contributed to a shift in racial demographics—the district went from 73 percent white and 23 percent black to 74 percent white and 21 percent black—which is expected to skew the vote a little to the right. And while Northern Virginia is often considered a bluer corner of the Commonwealth, the north-central channel carved out by the creators of the new 5th is rural farm country, and both sides expect it to favor GOP candidates. Skelley said added together, the changes will likely push the 5th a percentage point more Republican—not a seismic shift, but it inches up the hurdle just a little higher for a Democratic candidate.