The Daily Signal - Cuccinelli on Dems’ Scheme to Change Virginia's Congressional Maps and How to Stop Them

Episode Date: October 29, 2025

Just hours after a donation from Eric Holder’s “National Democratic Redistricting Committee” had been deposited in the Democratic Party of Virginia’s campaign coffers they began to try a scheme so brazen it boggles the mind. First, they want to remove a Constitutional amendment regarding how the Commonwealth’s representative districts are drawn, then they want to create a work around to circumvent the amendment process that has been in place as long as there’s been a Virginia. We sit down with Ken Cuccinelli from the Election Transparency Initiative ta find out what’s really afoot here and how can it be stopped. Keep Up With The Daily Signal   Sign up for our email newsletters:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.dailysignal.com/email⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠     Subscribe to our other shows:    The Tony Kinnett Cast: ⁠https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL2284199939⁠ The Signal Sitdown: ⁠https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL2026390376⁠   Problematic Women:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL7765680741⁠   Victor Davis Hanson: ⁠https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL9809784327⁠     Follow The Daily Signal:    X:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠https://x.com/intent/user?screen_name=DailySignal⁠ Instagram:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/thedailysignal/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Facebook:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.facebook.com/TheDailySignalNews/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Truth Social:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://truthsocial.com/@DailySignal⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  YouTube:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/dailysignal?sub_confirmation=1⁠    Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and never miss an episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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We'd love to talk, business. Thanks for listening to this bonus episode of the Daily Signal podcast. I'm your host, Joe Thomas, Virginia correspondent for The Daily Signal. Before we dive into today's interview, I want to thank you for tuning in today. If you're a first-time listener, The Daily Signal, brings you fact-based reporting and conservative commentary on politics, policy, and culture. And I hope you join our band of regular listeners to our podcast. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and also take a

moment to rate and review us wherever you get your podcast. You can find additional content at DailySignal.com. Now, let's get started with today's conversation right after this. Ken Cucinelli, former DHS director and former Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Virginia, now with the Election Transparency Initiative. I don't know, do you like the phrase anti-holder or is there, we need to come up with a better name for you? I think something a little different. Yeah, well. I'd like no association, really.

That's it. But, you know, when Eric Holder sends $150,000 to Virginia's Democrats, and then the next morning, the Speaker of the House is calling for a special session to try to blow up the process by which constitutional amendments are being passed, just so they can undo a constitutional amendment, and they campaigned almost 10 years to get, it kind of tells you what their agenda is, doesn't it, Ken? Yeah, I don't think there's really any question about this. A drunk four-year-old could tell you what their agenda is on this one.

And it's pretty brazen. It is classic, undisciplined leftism. But look, we can talk about the process all day long. The people of Virginia supported this change to the Constitution by a two to one margin. I worked on this. Frankly, I proposed a redistricting bill when I was in the majority in the state Senate. And the then minority leader, Dick Sasslaw, when I went to him for support laughed out loud. He said, ah, really?

So the victor go the spoils. Yeah. I was like, really, Dick? I thought we were supposed to be governing here. And that was like 2006 or seven. And, you know, 15 years later, working with a bipartisan group, we got some guardrails on redistricting. And a lot of the people who voted for that in the House and Senate are still there. And now they're going to vote the other way.

And they have to get every single Democrat vote to pass whatever it is they end up proposing. Yeah. We don't even know. Apparently Eric Holder. And I don't know that they'll be able to do that. I don't know they'll be able to do that. You know, Eric Holder sent the money, but he didn't send the template legislation, apparently. But this is nationwide. I mean, we're watching Prop 50 in California, and their move there towards just read drawing for whatever wants. And I don't think there's been a time when a population has been so desperate to marginalize another one since the 1929 permanent reapportionment Act, Ken.

And how many radio shows bring up that in the morning, huh? Yeah, zero. This would be the first appearance. Oh, I talk about it all the time. I'm always going on about this and how all the folks who were hanging out with Woodrow Wilson watching birth of a nation were trying to marginalize the growing black communities by permanently capping the size of the House of Representatives. Yeah, which was itself wildly controversial at the beginning of this country, which is pretty

funny, actually. But, you know, George Mason didn't think it was very funny. No, you know, and there's another arcane bit of legislation. that I bring up all the time is their actual proposed First Amendment, which actually laid out what apportionment would be. And I think that kind of indicates to me what they thought the most important thing in American, or at least defending Americans' rights would be, was to keep small congressional districts so that the representatives actually had a chance to know the people that they were representing. Yeah. And that's a big part of, of course, why it was so controversial.

not to mention the history in the colonial period had been with also very small population chunks of for representation and uh and you know then throw in the six year senate which which made some people especially the northeast aghast because their usual term of office was six months oh oh the days oh the days and It's election transparency.org where you find, Ken, and the work he's doing, what fleshes out of this mania right now? Because you have the Republican states, Texas and Missouri and the elk, and then you've got Pritzker and the guys in Illinois and California and now this in Virginia. Where does this flesh out or does it wind up being a zero-sum game? Well, it's a zero-sum game if this all happens at the 2020-2020 time.

period. The Dems are really at a very advantage at this point. And this began with a Fifth Circuit ruling last year in 2024 that you can't combine black and Hispanic Americans to come up with composite majority, minority majority districts. Oh, is that? That explicitly made several districts. There are provisions in all election law regarding how long and public notification of things and rules designed to make sure that the voter is an informed consumer, especially about things like constitutional amendments, that all seem to be violated in these attempts, especially in Virginia, where they have 90-day laws and gosh, oh man, if they're going to count this election as, you know, the intervening one, it's already been taking place for 40 days before we even knew there was going to be a constitutional amendment.

You know, how can they get around those provisions? Or are they just going to ignore them like they ignore shoplifting laws in some of these progressive cities? Well, the 90-day law you're referring to has no consequence with it. And so that makes it nice and easy to. not obey. And the lawsuits over this won't really be ripe until they pass it a second time in January or February. And then the lawsuits over the kind of question you're talking about will begin. I would note that the Virginia Constitution is phrased to be focused more on the subsequent election than on what passes for an intervening election.

So I don't know that any of those things are going to get in the way. This may go all the way to the ballot. My greatest confidence, one, is that even if Republicans don't pick up a seat in the House or more than one, I say one because it's 51-49 and they only need one, is that the people of Virginia are going to reject us. This is not an old constitutional amendment that they're trying to amend, and it passed two to one, almost exactly. two to one, which means it was bipartisan. And I just don't see, I don't see Virginians flocking to the polls to undo that. In fact, look, a lot of people listening to you and me, Joe, probably asked the question or gee, why you run so many negative ads to some candidate or another.

And there's actually reason for that because they're five to six times as sticky, which is a marketing way to say, they're more effective. And remember them. And yeah, well, and there's two ways to motivate, positive and negative, hope and fear. And you see more negative ads because fear works better. Negative works better. So when this is running, it's not like it's going to fly under the radar, even if they put this in March or April or some squirly place on the calendar, run their own election and

spend lots of taxpayer money to do it, which, by the way, I think that would really, require the governor's support. So you can ask Winsome and Abigail whether they would sign such a bill, because it will take not only a resolution on the part of the General Assembly. It'll take the passage of a law to do it. And but at that point, the angry people, the ones angry that you're screwing around with a system like this, are going to be motivated to come out and they're going to vote no. I feel so ignore it, but at the same time, I think that even if they get over the legal hurdles, they're going to get stomped like a bug by the people of Virginia. I really disquieted in this. I'm having such a weird feeling, Ken, because usually I'm the Pollyanna in a conversation. And I'm just, I'm not comfortable in the role of being the nattering nabob of negativism.

So, you know, you've really put me on this. When I became attorney general, I was. I wasn't comfortable being the man. I was used to fighting the man. So there's precedent. Okay, good. But the question I have is, is you talked about money. You know, so we've seen just the smattering of how much money Eric Holder and George Soros and Tom Steyer and these folks can marshal. I think there was something along the lines of $10 million contributed just from one of the Soros back groups in Prop 50. and the hundreds of millions of dollars that have been poured into this, if you add the abortion lobby into this special election

that will have to come in the spring, you're talking about maybe a factor of 10 to 1 add money coming from the left, saying, oh, a woman's right to choose when it's, you know, something as horrific as something Dr. Mangala would come up with. Oh, and it's your right to vote, and it's fight Trump and all of these things. I worry about the narrative that springtime in Virginia is going to bring with this special election that'll have to happen. Yeah, well, I do too.

I think that whenever, if they ever get to the point of holding these elections before 2028, which is when they're supposed to be. Right. That's correct. That's my point is if they defeat all of the legal challenge, that 90-day notice that you reference that statute from Title 30. If they accelerate and change the process, do all those kinds of things. And if they win on counting this as an intervening election, and listeners shouldn't assume they're going to lose on that. They may win on that. It's a bit novel. because we didn't used to have what amounted to do, 45-day elections. The courts have not counted absentee voting before as part of the election. So this is an absentee voting. We don't have an election day. We have election month and a half.

And none of the cases that address this subject have dealt with that particular aspect. Well, yeah. And my worry is they're going to say that because we don't tabulate those. absentee ballots until election night that it doesn't count. I guess it's not really an election. It's an imaginary election. It's amazing. And this is why, and it hasn't published yet, and a mutual friend of ours has got some edits for me to deal with before it publishes at dailysignal.org. But the column I just penned about this brings up what you said at the end of the last segment, which is, you know, Virginians are going to go to the polls by November 4th and

vote for a new General Assembly. If there is a Republican majority, this all becomes academic, correct? Correct. That's right. Well, it doesn't even need a majority. That's why I said all that, if they pick up one scene and it's 50-50 in the House, well, then none of this gets through. Yeah, it's just cold stop. Because the tie is a loss in the General Assembly. Yeah. Right. So yes, a lot of this rides on who gets elected. It's going to be so important. I was told by a member of the General Assembly that there is a model, and I can't imagine what it looks like, that says you could have 10 Democrat districts to one Republican district in Virginia's congressional representative. Can you imagine what that looks like?

It's like the Mercator projection. Yes. Yeah. I mean, look, it looks like the Virginia version of Illinois. where you end up with these just torturously drawn districts with no boundaries on them, which is why Virginians voted two to one to put boundaries on them. No. It's up.

And remember when that happened, that was, you know, the time of that vote, the Dems had triple control. So that happened even when it was one party control. And so a lot of voters knew that their side would have been able to draw the districts. And yet they voted the other way. Visiting with Ken Cuccinelli, the Election Transparency Initiative, this nationwide mania over redistricting there. And Ken, you said something earlier on about how this began with the court ruling in Texas. Bring us back to there because I think a lot of people are presenting this just sort of like, oh, people are just doing this. nilly because they feel like it or they got bored waiting for the next census.

It was, of course, the Trump DOJ that wrote Texas the letter and said, you know, you got this ruling and you guys haven't fixed it. You need to fix it. Right. And, you know, Trump was happy about that because that created the opportunity for a few more, probably three more Republican districts, probably not five. but um uh and that was the where the blow up began and then it's all been crazy since then um but the thing is on the dem republican side of this the dems did this already i mean look at the map in illinois it's 14 to 3 democrats it's you know um and uh california despite their redistricting commission, it's very heavily stacked to the left. And so you have a very heavily

stacked congressional district, set of congressional districts. So they've, and the whole Northeast famously doesn't have a single Republican. They've already done this on the left. The real complaint. I'll never say it this way is here we are mid decade and the Republicans are doing it back in North Carolina where the governor can't doesn't have a role in Texas obviously where they would have had to make the change anyway because of the Fifth Circuit ruling last year. And the funny thing is that is where it started and it started with a ruling that happened while Biden was president, though he had nothing to do with it. And now it's rolled its way into Virginia, little little Virginia.

And we're much more in the, boy, I hope I don't have to say this too much in the coming years. We're much more in the California position because they have to undo a constitutional amendment to achieve the goals they have. Right. And, you know, one of the subtexts of this I think is concerning because I'm told, by those that have been in this knife fight for a day now, that they're also, since they're going to try to accelerate the constitutional amendment process, to count Tuesday's election as the intervening election in between the passage of a constitutional amendment in the vote for, they're going to try and lump two constitutional amendments that are currently on the floor of the Virginia House,

one regarding allowing abortion up till the moment of birth, and the other is elevating the right to marry somebody of the same gender, whatever that may be these days, and they're going to put them all onto the ballot in like March or April and try to accelerate this constitutional amendment process. That bothers me on an even deeper level, Ken, does it bother you? Yeah, it most certainly does. This is this is even more politicization than without changing the process. You know, the I, I almost get mused, not really watching these abortion ads. The Dems are running right now. You know, oh, John Reed wants abortion or, you know, thinks abortion is wicked. No, that's that's that's that's winsome.

Sorry. And well, it is wicked. But, you know, with the legislature, what do you, what do you do about it? The idea that they, you know, they always pose this boogeyman. And the fact of the matter is the kind of things Republicans want to do are things like keep parental consent or get it back. You know, crazy, crazy wild stuff. like letting parents control the lives of their children. And, you know, I just have a certain amount of faith in Virginians that much like we're seeing this argument all over,

oh, Republicans control the federal government. This is their shutdown. I'm pretty sure anybody who cares to pay attention to the news knows about the filibuster. So, you know, I think as a simple matter of respect for intelligence, I don't really feel the need to go around trying to correct people on that because Americans know that. What about the Virginia? And if you look in Virginia's case, there's restrictions and you think they're arcane until you see something like this that say, you know, you have to post the notice of this for 90 days beforehand. Virginia's already been voting for most of its 45-day early voting period. I'm told that they're pulling out the definition of what is is that since we haven't tabulated all those early cast votes, they don't count as votes yet until they're cast on Election Day.

So that's how they're going to try to get around those provisions and those, you know, I guess, like I said, it's the old definition of what is, is we're visiting with Ken Cuccinelli of the election. transparency initiative, election transparency.org, what are you guys working on besides this? Or has this become the fire hose that you're trying to fill a Dixie Cup with? Well, not Virginia per se, but you've got these redistricting fights going on all over the place. And for example, let's take our neighbors, North Carolina, we have been supporting an election bill down there that just needs one thing fixed. They need to get rid of foreign funding for their elections.

It's been weird how hard that's been to do. But that's been, you know, we've been working on that through the summer. And by working on, I mean, finding North Carolinians in the districts of critical legislators who agree with us and connecting them to their own legislators. So the legislators know, hey, look, there's North Carolina support for this. Well, that's all been kind of swamped. OVE, if you will, overcome by events. That's all been shoved to the sideline until their version of this redistricting fight takes place. And they're probably fighting over the change of one seat, one congressional seat.

But in North Carolina, the Dems in a fight with their own Democrat governor maybe 30 or 40 years ago, gave the legislature sole control of redistricting. The governor has no role there, even where the Republicans normally have a veto-proof majority. They don't even need to worry about it in this situation because the North Carolina Constitution was amended when the Democrats had sole control to give the legislature sole control of redistricting. So here it is. Yeah, you wanted it. You voted for it. So that's what we're spending a lot of our time on. Yeah, that's exactly right.

That's exactly right. How dare you hold me up to my words? Ratfing. Well, you know, it gets to the point. and I know your Italian-American heritage is one to, you know, the bologna is getting sliced so thin, it's starting to look like prosciute, isn't it, Ken? Perfect, yeah. Thank you, sir.

You have a great morning. All righty. Talk to you, Joe. Good to talk you. That'll do it for today's show. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss out on new episodes from The Daily Signal. Every weekday you can catch top news in 10 to keep. Keep up with the day's top headlines in just 10 minutes and every weekday afternoon catch Victor Davis Hansen's thoughtful analysis for the Daily Signal.

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