Democrats hope gerrymandering Virginia will give them the edge they need to win back the House. But Tuesday’s special election is proving more competitive than they’d like.

Tight polling and concerns over voter turnout in an atypical April election have many Democratic party strategists and officials preparing for a close finish.

“I always thought this campaign would be close [and] 24 hours out, I believe that to be the case,” Democratic strategist Jared Leopold said on Monday, before the final day of voting.

“Anytime you’re on the ‘yes’ side of a referendum, you’ve got the burden of proof,” he added. “It doesn’t matter what the referendum is, but anytime you’re arguing for ‘yes,’ the other side is going to be arguing for the status quo.”

The party anticipated its campaign to redraw the state’s congressional maps would be boosted by its massive war chest and a favorable political environment that helped elect Gov. Abigail Spanberger last November. If approved, the aggressive partisan gerrymander could deliver Democrats a 10-to-1 seat advantage in Virginia, which amounts to a net pickup of as many as four House seats.

“I think it was always going to be close,” said another Democratic strategist, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “One side is giving [President Donald Trump] power and the other side is doing a reform that a lot of them don’t really want to do. That’s your choice.”

The election will serve as a test of whether voters in the light blue state will set aside long-standing distaste for partisan gerrymandering to counter a redistricting fight set in motion by Trump last year. With primary elections already underway, this is one of Democrats’ last shots at offsetting or even overcoming the gains Republicans made in Texas and elsewhere before November.

If the ballot referendum fails, it would be an early embarrassment for Spanberger as governor and a high-profile loss for a Democratic Party that has cast Trump’s efforts in existential terms as “election rigging” that undermines American democracy.

The campaigns have drawn heavyweight national involvement from former President Barack Obama and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, among others, who have campaigned on behalf of Virginians for Fair Elections, which is leading the “yes” effort. On the Republican side, former Gov. Glenn Youngkin has been a vocal critic of the measure. And, after largely staying on the sidelines, Trump made a late push Monday night for the “no” campaign, joining Speaker Mike Johnson for a tele-rally where he sought to remind voters of the stakes.

“Tomorrow, your commonwealth has an incredible, and really, an important election in every sense of the word that will have major consequences for our entire country this November,” Trump said. “This is really a country election. The whole country is watching.”

Public polling suggests the race will hinge as much on persuading voters about the need for new maps as on mobilizing them to the polls for an out-of-cycle election.

A Washington Post-Schar School poll conducted last month shows the “yes” campaign leading by roughly five percentage points among likely voters. That same poll found Republicans are slightly more likely than Democrats to say they planned to vote in the special election or already had — 85 percent to 79 percent.

Many Democrats say they remain cautiously optimistic. There has been an uptick of early voting in recent days, particularly in counties in Northern Virginia, which tend to be blue-leaning. Overall, more than 1.3 million people cast early ballots, according to the Virginia Public Access Project, not much lower than the roughly 1.48 million who cast early ballots in 2025, when Spanberger was running.

“I don’t think there’s been an alteration to whether or not people like gerrymandering,” said John Bisognano, president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. “What I do think is, if this is the only way that we can keep the U.S. House of Representatives as a representative body for this nation, people are willing to do it.”

Virginia Democrats have also recently put pressure on the governor to more aggressively campaign on behalf of the “yes” effort and be more outspoken about the stakes of the special election. She was on the campaign trail over the weekend urging voters to back the measure.

“Ultimately, I do think this is more of a persuasion election than a turnout election, and so it’s a test to see if [the] ‘no’ campaign has done an effective job reaching voters,” said Noah Jennings, a Virginia-based Republican strategist unaffiliated with the “no” campaign.

Complicating Democrats’ pitch are two factors: The Virginia Supreme Court could still nullify the redistricting effort after the April election. And, in 2020, voters approved a constitutional amendment that established a bipartisan redistricting commission seeking to limit the partisan redrawing of maps.

That history has given the “no” campaign a potent line of attack.

Conservatives have painted Spanberger as a flip-flopper on redistricting and slammed her for caving to pressure from national Democrats. GOP-aligned groups have also sent out misleading mailers or run ads using past comments opposing gerrymandering to suggest that both she and Obama are “no” votes on the ballot measure.

“The Democrats have deployed over $60 million to rig Virginia’s congressional maps and yet the referendum is extremely close — as all sides acknowledge,” said Mike Young, of Virginians for Fair Maps, the group encouraging voters to vote against redistricting. “That didn’t happen by accident or dumb luck.”

Jennings said if the “no” effort wins on Tuesday, “that’s a very clear showing that there’s a line that you cannot cross.”

“Virginia does have that larger middle that does move independently, and I think those people don’t like the gamesmanship, and they don’t like it from either side,” he said.

The “yes” campaign says it’s unfazed.

“While Republicans have spent nearly $34 million flooding this race with MAGA misinformation, the YES Campaign has been doing the work — knocking over 600,000 doors, communicating directly with Virginians, organizing in every corner of the state, and driving historic early vote turnout,” said Dan Gottlieb, a spokesperson for Virginians for Fair Elections.

The outcome of Tuesday’s election could reverberate well past Virginia. After Trump pushed to redraw congressional boundaries in Texas last year, the fight escalated into a tit-for-tat battle, with each party trying to lock in an advantage ahead of November.

In California last year, voters overwhelmingly approved new congressional districts, offsetting GOP gains out of Texas. Florida could redraw its own maps as soon as next week, which could counter any Democratic gains in Virginia — should the ballot measure pass.

The GOP’s escalating infighting over immigration now has a pair of PACs lining up millions of dollars on opposing sides of Republican primaries across the country.

The dueling pledges turn a congressional fight over Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar’s (R-Fla.) Dignity Act into an electoral proxy war between hardliners and moderates over how far the Republican Party should go on immigration reform. It’s putting the bill’s 20 House GOP co-sponsors in the spotlight.

The Homeland PAC, backed by immigration-restrictionist Republicans, launched last week in an effort to primary some of those co-sponsors. Meanwhile, American Business Immigration Coalition Action, a pro-immigration group, secured $1.2 million to protect them through its Building America’s Economy PAC and hopes to raise $5 million in total, according to plans first shared with Blue Light News.

The Dignity Act, a bipartisan bill, has faced an onslaught of criticism from conservative MAGA influencers and allies of President Donald Trump, who view it as a nonstarter. While the bill doesn’t create pathways to citizenship, it would allow millions of unauthorized immigrants to eventually gain work permits and remain in the U.S. legally.

Republicans like battleground Reps. Gabe Evans (Colo.) and Brian Fitzpatrick (Pa.) have signed onto the bill. But critics pan it as “amnesty” and signal that the future of the Republican Party hinges on this debate.

“Donald Trump is not going to be around forever,” said Ryan Girdusky, the GOP strategist behind Homeland PAC. “The goal is to focus and to put our efforts into the future, and make sure Republicans know that the demand for stronger borders and for reforms to legal immigration and illegal immigration means something. We are not going to roll over and go back to business as usual.”

The clash is playing out as the White House recalibrates its own message on immigration amid plummeting public perception. The administration has shifted away from using the phrase “mass deportations” in public messaging and says it is focusing on deporting the “worst of the worst.”

“Extreme-right internet influencers have escalated their attacks, and we want to ensure the leadership on commonsense immigration reform are protected,” said Rebbeca Shi, CEO of ABIC Action, whose PAC is seeking to defend Republican co-sponsors of the Dignity Act.

Salazar has defended her bill, saying it offers workers “dignity.” But former Trump adviser Steve Bannon called it the “screw American workers” bill. Conservative pundit Megyn Kelly said the bill “is not going to go over well with the GOP base, with the America Firsters.” And conservative members of Congress, including Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas), slammed the bill as a betrayal to Trump’s base.

Girdusky, whose Homeland PAC is dedicated to “ending the career of every Republican who supports amnesty and sells out the American people on immigration,” won’t reveal which specific lawmakers he’s targeting or how much money he plans to spend. Several of the Dignity Act’s cosponsors are retiring or represent competitive districts, but Girdusky said his group will focus on those in safe-red seats with primary challenges.

“If any of these members have a change of heart and say, ‘Wow, this is actually a terrible bill for American workers and for the border and enriches human traffickers, I’m going to drop my support of it,’ I’m not going to challenge them in a primary,” he said.

Several hardline immigration groups have jockeyed for influence with the Trump administration, hoping to convince the president to keep his promise to enact the largest deportation initiative in history. But leaning into such an approach risks turning off voters, many of whom disapprove of the president’s handling of immigration so far.

New results from The POLITICO Poll shows that Americans’ views of Trump’s deportation campaign remain broadly negative in the three months since its enforcement surge in Minneapolis. Half of Americans, including one quarter of Trump’s 2024 voters, said his deportation campaign is too aggressive.

Shi said her group will defend the Dignity Act’s cosponsors — both Republicans and Democrats — in primaries, as well as Republicans who voted to reinstate temporary protected status for Haitians last week. She believes signing off on a bipartisan immigration reform bill like the Dignity Act would be a smart political move for the White House ahead of the midterms.

“The White House is very sensitive to the polling on this, and the numbers haven’t changed since Minneapolis,” Shi said. “That’s why the next logical step to win in November is to actually have solutions.”