“We’ll have to see what the court
decides … This could be a case where the line-drawers overplayed their hand, and there will be some modest adjustments” to the state’s election maps, Farnsworth adds. However, Quentin
Kidd
Kidd, chair of the Depart- ment of Government and director of the Wason Center for Public Policy at Christopher Newport University, has some reservations about how the
Supreme Court will rule. “Not being a lawyer or legal expert
in any shape or form, in my mind the Supreme Court has twice made rulings that essentially say that you can’t racially gerrymander in a way that is designed to suppress the one-vote-one person power of minority voters. The [Virginia] case is essentially the same argument. In my mind, it has to have some legs in order for the Supreme Court to agree to hear it,” he says. “But who knows what will happen.
The court could come back and say that, in the case of the states, there are different rules that are applied here,” Kidd says.
Democratic swing The congressional district map imposed
by the Fourth Circuit judges radically redrew the 3rd District and the neighboring 4th District. The changes reduced the num- ber of African-American voters in the 3rd while increasing their number in the 4th. Estimates differ, but the Newport
News-based Daily Press reported in May that the federal court’s ruling reduced the number of nonwhite voters in the 3rd District from 60 percent of the voting-age population to fewer than 50 percent, while increasing the nonwhite electorate from 30 to 40 percent in the 4th District. Along party lines, the difference is
even more stark, according to research compiled by the University of Virginia Center for Politics. Geoffrey Skelley, the center’s media
relations coordinator, says voters now living within the borders of the new 4th District voted for President Barack Obama in 2012 by a margin of 61 to 39 percent. Four years ago the old 4th District voted 51-49 for Republican nominee Mitt Romney. While 79 percent of voters in the old 3rd District voted for Obama in the last presidential
www.VirginiaBusiness.com VIRGINIA BUSINESS 33
election, 68 percent of voters living in the new 3rd did so, Skelley says. That huge swing in Democratic vot-
ers persuaded Forbes, the 4th District’s Republican incumbent, to abandon plans to run for re-election although he had held the seat since 2001. He hoped to take over the 2nd District seat of fellow Republican Scott Rigell, who plans to retire in January after six years in office. In the June Repub- lican primary, however, Forbes lost to Delegate Scott Taylor of Virginia Beach. The candidates vying to succeed
Forbes in the 4th District seat are Repub- lican Mike Wade, the sheriff of Henrico County, and Democrat Donald McEachin, an African-American legislator who has represented the Senate’s 9th District — covering Charles City County and parts of Richmond and Henrico and Hanover counties — since 2008. The Democratic makeup of the
redrawn 4th appears to favor McEachin, who says he decided to run for Congress after it became apparent that the courts would uphold the state’s new election map.
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