A quick round-up of election results for Virginia’s state senate: Republicans maintained control. No incumbents lost. Any seat that was held by a Republican is still held by a Republican. And the same goes for Democrats. Nothing flipped. And, that’s despite big money being spent.
It’s a fairly straightforward calculation: $45 million dollars in campaigning plus low voter turnout equals zero change. Quentin Kidd is a political scientist at Christopher Newport University.
“It demonstrates that you can spend millions and millions and millions of dollars and not change the fundamental outcome of the way lines were drawn.”
What Kidd means is that districts in Virginia are purposefully shaped... so that they are clearly Republican or clearly Democratic. Anything but clearly competitive.
“The primary lesson for me is we really do have a pretty gerrymandered state, to the point that nothing is going to be easy to move going forward.”
But that won’t keep democrats and republicans from continuing to try. Virginia is a critical battleground state in national politics… so it's a prime spot to spend big-party money... all in an effort to gain political momentum down the road.
