How Louise Lucas defined Virginia’s redistricting fight with raw legislative power and memes
Portsmouth, Virginia —
L. Louise Lucas was attending a conference in Boston last summer for state legislators when she learned that a group of Texas Democrats were in town after fleeing their home state to try to block a Republican gerrymander done at President Donald Trump’s behest.
Lucas, the president pro tempore of the Virginia Senate, made her way to City Hall to attend their news conference. Before the event was over, Lucas had concluded that Virginia needed to join the fight — and said so.
Her Virginia House counterpart found out later.
“I was like, ‘Whoa, lady, what are you doing?’” Speaker Don Scott, a close ally, told CNN recently. At the time, Scott said, he was focused on winning more state legislative seats that fall and wanted to avoid any redistricting talk that could “throw a monkey wrench in our election.”
But Lucas was insistent. “We’ve got to fight fire with fire,” she recounted telling Scott.
In the end, the 82-year-old great-grandmother, who rose from a childhood in the Jim Crow South to become one of the most powerful figures in Virginia politics, helped push through what could be one of the most extreme political gerrymanders of the 2026 election cycle. The map she and other Democrats want voters to back in an April 21 referendum could help their party win 10 of Virginia’s 11 US House seats in November.
Currently, Democrats hold six of those seats and Republicans five. Opponents are fighting back by citing top Democrats’ past statements supporting nonpartisan US House maps, and recent polling shows the state is closely divided ahead of the referendum.
A new Virginia map could help determine which party wins control of the US House in November’s midterm elections. A Democratic-led House would be able to block Trump’s legislative agenda and open new investigations of him and his policies in the final two years of his presidency — underscoring Trump’s urgency in pushing Republican-led states to redraw their maps outside of the once-a-decade norm.
Much of Virginia’s Democratic Party establishment wanted to go for eight or nine seats rather than 10. Lucas framed it as a binary choice: “Why would we go through all this for an 8-3 map?” she said.
“This is about pushing back on Donald Trump having what I consider unchecked control of the Congress because they don’t have backbone enough to push against him,” she told CNN. “I know a lot of folks really like their members of Congress, but they don’t have the backbone to do the job.”
To help advance the map ultimately put on the ballot, Lucas wielded her raw power as the chair of the Senate’s Finance and Appropriations Committee and trolled Democrats and Republicans alike with “10-1” memes and a dose of profanity.
Lucas has developed an online following among Democrats hungry for open confrontation with the Trump administration and leaders of their own party.
Consider her response to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s criticism of Virginia’s 10-1 map as a “brazen abuse of power.”
“You all started it and we f**king finished it,” she fired back on X.
Lucas’ trash-talking also extends to any Democrats she views as thwarting her goals. One Lucas post compared Virginia’s two Democratic US senators to cuckolds and warned them to stay out of the state legislature’s redistricting deliberations.
A Republican strategist in Virginia who opposes both Lucas’ policy moves and her online activity said the 10-1 map now before voters underscores that “she completely controls what’s happening in Virginia right now.”
The strategist, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid a confrontation with Lucas, said her actions on social media deserve condemnation, not celebration. “Don’t glamorize her.”
Lucas, who has represented her native city of Portsmouth in the state legislature for more than three decades, takes pride in talking and acting tough — an outgrowth, she said, of a life facing and overcoming obstacles.
She had her first child at age 14. As a young woman, she joined the apprenticeship program at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard and became the first woman shipfitter there, each day walking her welding materials up the plank to the ships that loomed over Portsmouth’s waterfront.
“There were catcalls and all that kind of stuff” from the men she worked with, she recalled. “I gave them the middle finger a lot of days with the words that go along with it. You had to be tough. You had to dish it out.”
“I speak two languages,” Lucas joked. “I speak English, and I speak shipyard.”
Lucas said she was shaped by her upbringing in Portsmouth, the eldest of her parents’ seven children. On a ride through its tidy Olde Towne district, she points out the locations of long-gone landmarks like The Famous, a high-end department store where she remembers her mother, Lillie Boone, could not try on hats at a time when segregation still held sway.
Her teen pregnancy with her son, Jeffrey, interrupted, but did not end her education. She finished school, worked in the shipyards and went on to earn two degrees from Norfolk State University, an HBCU just across the Elizabeth River from her hometown.
She entered politics as a member of the Portsmouth City Council after an 18-year career with the federal government. Lucas is now the longest-serving senator in the General Assembly.
Today, parts of Portsmouth bear her mark.
L. Louise Lucas Drive leads visitors to the Rivers Casino, the fruit of legislation she championed to boost employment in a city where the median income is less than half that of northern Virginia cities like Arlington.
Then, there’s the Lucas Professional Center, a low-slung brick building about 4 miles from the casino that is the hub of her various private enterprises. They include group homes for developmentally disabled adults, a fleet of vans and a cannabis shop managed by her grandson that sells marijuana-themed T-shirts and mango- and cherry-flavored CBD slushies.
She co-sponsored legislation that would legalize the recreational use of marijuana for adults. She is eager to apply for a license to sell next year.
She brushes aside a question about whether running a pot business presents an ethical conflict, given her legislative role.
“There was nothing written into the law that said I couldn’t get a license,” Lucas responded. “I should have thought about that when I did the bill for the casino, but I didn’t. So I said, ‘That’s not going to happen this time.’”
It’s clear that she revels in her reputation as a fighter. She owns several pairs of Everlast boxing gloves in an array of colors, a campaign gimmick from a few years ago that has become part of her warrior persona.
“Where are your gloves?” a casino employee asked, jokingly, as Lucas walked briskly among the slot machines on a recent weekday visit to Rivers, her flowing turquoise dress gently billowing in her wake.
For those who have heard of Lucas outside of Portsmouth or the state Capitol in Richmond, it may be due to the memes.
One cartoon-style image shows her pulling US Rep. Rob Wittman out of reach of the chairmanship of the House Armed Services Committee. Wittman, the committee’s vice chair, is poised to lead the panel next year if Republicans retain control of the chamber. But he is among the Republicans whose reelection chances could be endangered by the proposed map.
Lucas said she’s influenced by the young people around her — interns, grandchildren and others — who send her ideas to consider. “I don’t have a friend who’s my age,” she said. “They’re all retired or dead.”
She bounces many of her social media posts off Ben Tribbett, a political consultant who has worked with her for more than 20 years. He said he sometimes encourages her to take “it down a notch,” but Lucas doesn’t always heed his advice.
While her staff will post on her behalf, Lucas said she approves of everything that appears on her feeds.
Her 62-year-old daughter Lisa Lucas-Burke, a former Portsmouth City Council member who’s running for the office again this year, said her mother’s social media habits keep her glued to her phone.
“I keep telling her, ‘Can we put the phone down for at least the dinner hour?’”
For all her social media notoriety, Lucas’ real power derives from her perch atop the Senate Finance and Appropriations Committee. It’s something she famously wielded against then-Gov. Glenn Youngkin two years ago to kill the Republican’s plans for a $2 billion financial package for a pro sports arena in northern Virginia.
She argued the teams’ owners needed to foot the bill and derisively referred to the project as the “Glenn Dome.”
(Asked for comment about Lucas, Youngkin spokesman Justin Discigil told CNN that the former governor “will never dignify Louise Lucas’ pathetic trolling on social media with a response.”)
Stephen Farnsworth, a political scientist at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, said Virginia powerbrokers understand that if “you want something out of the legislature, figure out a way to get Sen. Lucas on board.”
“Because if you don’t, you won’t get very far,” he added.
Lucas likes to invoke the arena episode as proof of her influence.
For instance, in a text earlier this year to Scott that she also shared with Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s chief of staff, Lucas declared she would boycott any more meetings about map proposals because, she argued, the “governor and her staff are hell bent on doing anything other than 10-1 map.”
“Let me be clear: I am about to go freaking Glenn Dome on their ass because nothing else will make sense,” she added in the text, which she showed to CNN.
Lucas said she made Spanberger’s team aware of the correspondence with the speaker because she likes to be upfront in all her political maneuvers. “I don’t throw over a rock and hide my hand,” she said. “If I hit you in the head, I want you to know I did it.”
In a statement to CNN, a Spanberger spokesperson indicated that any pushback from the governor’s office to a 10-1 plan centered only on the technical difficulties of carrying out elections using some of the maps initially proposed by legislators.
“As the House of Delegates and Senate went through their process of drawing a new map,” the statement read, “the Governor’s principal goal was to make sure that map could successfully be implemented by Virginia’s elections administrators given the constraints of Virginia’s data system and the short timeline before them — and multiple 10-1 maps initially proposed by the General Assembly could not.”
Spanberger “personally understands the urgency of winning congressional seats as a check on the president,” the statement added, and is urging Virginians to support the referendum.
The maximalist approach pushed by Lucas and others may have been a bridge too far for many Virginians.
A Washington Post poll released Friday showed likely voters favoring the map by a 5-point margin, but found that Republicans and map opponents were far more enthusiastic about casting ballots than Democrats and redistricting backers.
Additionally, Virginians were divided over whether it’s fair to create 10 Democratic-friendly districts. Forty-four percent said the map was a fair representation of Virginia’s political leanings; 48% responded that it was unfair.
Republican US Rep. Ben Cline, whose Shenandoah Valley district would be splintered under the proposed map, has barnstormed the state in recent weeks trying to drum up the “no” vote. The map seeks to flip four seats by snaking districts out from Democratic areas in the Washington, DC, suburbs into rural parts of the state, although the new district boundaries do not guarantee a full Democratic sweep of those seats.
“It’s really insulting to the people of Virginia and insulting to the folks in rural areas like the ones I represent, who are seeing the Shenandoah Valley cut into five different districts and parceled out like candy to even out these districts out of northern Virginia,” Cline said.
His Stop the Gerrymander nonprofit is one of several groups now active in the campaign against the map.
As of Friday afternoon, Democrats still had an enormous spending advantage on the airwaves, pumping $33.6 million into the “yes” campaign to $3.3 million by Republicans, according to data from the political-ad tracking firm, AdImpact. House Speaker Mike Johnson is set to attend a fundraiser in Virginia later this week for the opposition effort, and another opposition group, Virginians For Fair Maps, received $5 million on the last day of March from an affiliated nonprofit.
Back in Portsmouth, neatly arranged flyers outside Lucas’ office feature a picture of former President Barack Obama, urging Virginians to vote “yes” on the map to “stop the MAGA power grab.”
Scott, the House speaker, said he would see it as “poetic justice” if he and Lucas — two African Americans who both overcame adversity to rise to positions of power in Virginia — helped their party prevail over Trump in the national redistricting battle.
“It’s really a testament to the endurance and faith of the Black community that we’re here,” he said. “We have to stand up in this moment.”
