‘DIRECT QUID PRO QUO’: Virginia Dems Call Special Session One Day After Eric Holder’s Group Makes Hefty Donation

In the final stretch before Election Day, Virginia Democrats called a special session of the Legislature to focus on redistricting—a session that may take the Republican candidate for governor, Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, off the campaign trail. If this is a last-minute election strategy, however, it may backfire, a former attorney general noted.

“I left the campaign trail because my duty is here, in this building, with the people’s Senate,” Earle-Sears said at the Capitol Monday. She condemned the redistricting effort, saying, “Voters choose their representatives—not the other way around.”

Ken Cuccinelli, a Republican who served as the Old Dominion’s attorney general from 2010 to 2014, told The Daily Signal that the special session may draw more attention to Earle-Sears, not less.

“She’s going to be the highest-ranking, most involved official, she’s going to get a lot of press,” he explained. The special session may help Earle-Sears “not only from prominence but because the Democrats are seizing on the wrong side of a 2-to-1 issue.”

He noted that Virginians voted—66.1% to 33.9%—to pass a constitutional amendment in 2020 creating a bipartisan commission for redistricting.

Why Redistricting?

Redistricting, the process of redrawing districts for representation in the U.S. House of Representatives, gained renewed attention after the Texas Legislature restarted the process earlier this year. President Donald Trump has encouraged Republicans to seek advantages through redistricting, and Democrats responded by demanding redistricting of their own.

Virginia Speaker of the House Don Scott, a Democrat, sent a letter to legislators on Oct. 23, calling the session that began Monday.

Scott’s letter came one day after the National Democratic Redistricting Committee—an organization founded by Obama-era Attorney General Eric Holder to advocate redrawing congressional maps to help Democrats—gave $150,000 each to the Virginia House Democratic Caucus and to Spanberger’s campaign, raising questions about coordination and influence, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. The committee also gave more than $17,000 in three in-kind contributions to the Spanberger campaign.

Quid Pro Quo?

Hans von Spakovsky, manager of The Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative, called foul.

“There seems to be almost a direct quid pro quo between this donation and the Democrat call for a special session, a shameful embarrassment for the Democrats in Virginia,” Spakovsky told The Daily Signal in a statement Monday. “It is almost as if they are saying their legislative duties are for sale.”

He mentioned the 2020 constitutional amendment and warned that “Democrats are defying the voters, engaging in electoral corruption of pay-to-play and interfering in the election process currently going on in the state.”

“I won’t call it so much a quid pro quo as a fundraising ploy” on behalf of Virginia Democrats, Cuccinelli, the former attorney general, told The Daily Signal. “And it worked.”

He warned, however, that the issue will be an albatross around Democrats’ necks.

“Every Republican candidate is going to say, ‘I’m not voting for this. The people of Virginia have spoken. I’m not going to spit in their face,'” Cuccinelli explained.

Democrats have narrow majorities in the Virginia House of Delegates (51-49) and the Senate (21-19).

Why Now?

If the redistricting push may cost Democrats voters, why rush to do it before an election?

For a constitutional amendment to become law in Virginia, the Legislature must pass it before and after an intervening election, and then the amendment goes to the voters. Virginia Democrats may hope to get this on the 2026 midterm ballot, so they are rushing to pass it before Election Day, Cuccinelli reasoned.

Yet the former attorney general pointed to a potential flaw in this reasoning—the 2025 election has already begun. Old Dominion voters cast their first ballots on Sept. 19 through early voting—a process Spanberger herself used. While Election Day doesn’t come until Nov. 4, many Virginians have already voted.

“The next intervening election likely can’t happen until 2027, so the earliest this can go to the ballot is 2028,” the former attorney general said. “Do they really want this fought out on a presidential year ballot?”

While Cuccinelli admitted the point may be debatable, he suggested the legal argument against presenting the amendment to voters in 2026 will likely prevail.

Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, condemned the special session as “a desperate grab for power.”

“We’re just in shock that they would play this crazy, crazy card and pull everyone back, including Winsome Earle-Sears, who is campaigning—and they’re also doing it to get her off the campaign trail because they understand that this race has tightened so much,” Youngkin told WTOP radio on Friday.

As lieutenant governor, Earle-Sears presides over the Virginia Senate and can cast a tie-breaking vote. If she is absent, Democrat L. Louise Lucas, president pro tempore, will preside over the Senate, and Earle-Sears will lose her tie-breaking vote.

No More Moderates

Cuccinelli said Virginia Democrats called the special session because they represent the more radical wing of the national party.

“The Democrats now in the Virginia General Assembly are those foaming-at-the-mouth, rabid, fire-breathing left-wing nutjobs that we say the federal Democrats like [Senate Minority Leader] Chuck Schumer are afraid of,” he claimed. “There are no conservative Democrats, there are no ‘blue dogs,’ they’re gone.”

Neither the Spanberger campaign, nor the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, nor the office of Speaker Don Scott responded to The Daily Signal’s request for comment by publication time.

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