Virginia's Democratic governor, Abigail Spanberger, is now urging her party to stop talking about redistricting, weeks after the state's highest court voided the very gerrymander she signed into law and championed at the ballot box.

In a Friday interview with the New York Times, Spanberger cast the November midterms as the priority and dismissed further map-drawing talk as a "distraction." The pivot comes after Virginia's Supreme Court ruled on May 8 that Democratic lawmakers violated the state constitution's procedural requirements by advancing their redistricting amendment after early voting had already begun. The U.S. Supreme Court then declined to hear the appeal roughly a week later.

The result: an $80 million campaign, backed by groups linked to left-wing billionaire George Soros and endorsed by former President Barack Obama, went up in smoke. And the governor who threw her weight behind the effort now wants everyone to pretend it never happened.

From champion to bystander in two months

The timeline tells the story better than any spin can.

In early March, as early voting opened on the redistricting referendum, Spanberger publicly urged Virginians to vote yes. She framed the amendment as a defensive response to Republican-led redistricting elsewhere in the country:

"As early voting begins tomorrow on Virginia's redistricting amendment, voters should know that Virginia's approach is different. It is temporary, directly responsive to what other states decide to do, and, most importantly, it preserves Virginia's bipartisan redistricting process for the future."

She went further, casting a vote for the amendment herself and telling voters they had "the opportunity to take action in response to this extraordinary moment in history."

On April 21, Virginia voters approved the measure by a narrow four-point margin. The map it authorized would have redrawn the state's congressional districts to favor Democrats by a staggering 10-to-1 ratio, translating to roughly four additional Democratic House seats from Virginia alone.

Then came the courts. On May 8, the Virginia Supreme Court struck down the referendum, finding that lawmakers had pushed the amendment through too late, after early voting was already underway. The procedural violation was fatal. When the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene, the gerrymander was dead.

Spanberger's sudden change of tone

By May 22, the governor who had personally campaigned for the referendum was telling the New York Times that any redistricting discussion was premature:

"It is outrageously premature of us to be talking about any sort of redistricting or map-changing effort when we have to win the most consequential midterms of my lifetime this November."

She singled out House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries by name:

"Anytime someone, whether it's Hakeem or anyone else, talks about some other point off in the future, it is a distraction from the task at hand, which is winning in November."

"That time is over now," Spanberger added.

The shift is hard to miss. Two months earlier, the governor was telling Virginians that redistricting was so urgent they needed to act during "this extraordinary moment in history." Now she calls the same subject a distraction. The only thing that changed between those two statements was that she lost.

Internal finger-pointing within the Democratic Party

Spanberger's attempt to move on hasn't stopped fellow Democrats from assigning blame, much of it aimed at the governor herself. The Washington Examiner reported that Virginia Democratic strategist Ben Tribbett pointed directly at Spanberger's mixed signals:

"When Louise Lucas first said that she wanted to do this in August, [Spanberger] immediately came out and said she did not want to do it. Had Abigail come out and said, 'Yes, we need to get this done. I support it completely,' we might have done it faster."

That delay proved decisive. Democratic advisory council member Brian Cannon laid out the legal math plainly: "Passing this on Oct. 31 was illegal. Had they done this on August 31, according to the court's opinion, it would have passed muster."

In other words, the governor initially distanced herself from the redistricting push in August, only to embrace it later, and the months of hesitation cost Democrats the procedural window they needed to survive court review. The very court ruling that sank the gerrymander hinged on the timeline that Spanberger's own indecision helped create.

When Fox News covered the court's decision, it noted that the ruling prompted widespread celebration and mockery from Republicans and legal observers who had warned the rushed process was constitutionally defective.

The map that would have been

The stakes of the failed gerrymander deserve a clear look. Virginia currently sends its representatives to Congress under a map that splits roughly 6-5 in favor of Republicans. The referendum Democrats pushed would have redrawn those lines to produce a 10-1 Democratic advantage, a near-total wipeout of Republican representation in a state that remains genuinely competitive.

Jeffries made no secret of the ambition. An RNC Research post from May 19 quoted the House Minority Leader saying: "We're going to work as hard as we can in advance of 2028 to restore that 10-1 map." The campaign to pass the referendum consumed nearly $80 million, a sum that reflects just how much national Democrats invested in the scheme.

Spanberger's framing of the gerrymander as "temporary" and "directly responsive" to what other states were doing was always a stretch. Florida and Tennessee had approved redistricted maps seeking to add a combined five more Republican House seats, and South Carolina appeared poised to follow. But none of those states attempted to convert a competitive delegation into an 10-1 monopoly for one party.

Democrats tried to force out members of the state Supreme Court after the ruling went against them, a response that said more about the party's respect for judicial independence than any press release could.

Spanberger's standing with Virginia voters

The redistricting debacle hasn't helped the governor's already shaky approval numbers. A Washington Post poll released in early April found Spanberger less popular than each of the eight previous Virginia governors, a group that includes both Democrats and Republicans. That's a remarkable distinction for a governor who won office promising pragmatism and bipartisan credibility.

Her early March statement pitching the gerrymander leaned heavily on the idea that Virginia's approach "preserves Virginia's bipartisan redistricting process for the future." But a map designed to hand one party 10 of 11 seats is bipartisan in name only. Voters may have approved it by four points, but the courts saw through the packaging.

Meanwhile, Republicans are pressing their own redistricting advantages in states where they hold power. The difference is that those maps remain in effect. Virginia Democrats spent $80 million and got nothing.

What the record shows

Strip away the messaging and the sequence is straightforward. Spanberger hesitated on redistricting in August. She reversed course and endorsed it. She signed the gerrymander into law. She personally campaigned for the referendum. Voters narrowly approved it. The courts struck it down on procedural grounds that trace back to the late timeline her own indecision helped produce. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to bail Democrats out.

Now she wants to change the subject.

Spanberger's call to focus on the midterms may be smart politics. But it doesn't erase the record. She championed a redistricting scheme that would have turned a competitive state into a one-party delegation, watched it collapse under its own procedural sloppiness, and is now asking her party, and voters, to forget the whole thing.

When the plan was alive, it was an "extraordinary moment in history." Now that it's dead, it's a "distraction." That's not leadership. That's damage control.