The Daily Signal - Inside Virginia’s Redistricting Fight: What’s Next for Republicans?

Episode Date: May 3, 2026

Recorded live inside the Virginia General Assembly Joe Thomas gets perspective on what happened and what needs to happen next for the states’ redistricting battle from one of the newest voices in the General Assembly, Delegate Andrew Rice of Virginia Beach and one of the most seasoned, Delegate Tom Garrett of Louisa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I saw my friend on the other side of the street. I was heading to school with the kids. I let go of mom's hand to wave. I had already forgotten their lunches. I ran over to hug her. She came out of nowhere. And then... It stopped.

Sometimes the moments that never happen matter most. Volvo's automatic emergency braking helps ensure a safe ending for everyone. Learn more at volvocars.caps.caps.ca. Joining us to talk a little bit about this is Delegate Andrew Rice of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Delegate Rice, thank you first and all for coming by and visiting with us last night and visiting with us this morning. Absolutely, Joe. It's my pleasure. Well, you say that now. I haven't asked my first question. Well, that's true.

So one of the questions that came up is where does the Republican Party go? Now, you're a young fella, you're new into the party system. At least publicly, you may have worked behind the scenes before you got elected to the House of Delegates, but this is your first term, correct? That is correct, yes. I was elected St. Patty's Day in March, and I'm replacing Barry Knight, who was a longtime family friend, personal friend of mine, and we're going to continue his good work, and we're going to do some of our own. But coming in as a newer person.

I want your thoughts on this because a lot of folks have said, what does the Republican Party have to do? We went back to 2020 when the redistricting was taken out of the hands of the politicians. And there are 1.3 million fewer votes cast than there were in that election. How do we get those people back? Where have they gone? Are they just folks who only vote in presidential years? So as a new set of eyes into the Republican Party, what has to happen now? So thanks, Joe, for that question.

Those 1.3 million people, I think, were just sitting at home. This was a special election in April. Virginia is not used to that. We're used to special elections in other months. But April's not really our month. And this was a quick turnaround from the constitutional amendment that was passed in session to the vote yesterday. This was a very quick turnaround.

And as far as the Republican Party goes, I'm not a doomsday guy. I'm not a, I'm not a, I appreciate that. I'm not a doomsday guy. And so I actually am encouraged by the vote, although it's not the result that perhaps we wanted. I do think that the amount of grassroots efforts

that came out and the amount of messaging that, the Republicans did in Virginia is something that we can build on. If you look at the results, less than 100,000 votes, and when you're talking about the amount of money that was spent in this race, $33 million versus $3 million, we clearly have a good message. Now, the question that you asked that I've been avoiding is how do we get that message out? Well, it's usually see you're new at this usually it's that's a great question joe and let me tell you why it's a great question and that gives you a time to vamp to it there so uh but yeah go ahead so so the message of the republican party when i was campaigning i was told that it was tired that it was that it was

the same old messaging that people wanted new ideas and i really took that to heart and i don't think that's true what i think people want us to do is just articulate why our our ideas maybe they are the same ideas that we've always had but why they are beneficial for the citizens of the Commonwealth lower taxes tough on crime keeping the government out of your out of your life and that resonates with people and what I think these election results show is that when we have a concerted effort when every single member of the Republican caucus and when every single conservative leader in Virginia is coming out and saying, this is wrong, people take note. And so consistent messaging and being able to articulate why this gerrymandering map with five districts coming out of Fairfax hurt rural voters,

that resonated with a lot of people. I was very proud that Virginia Beach, the largest city of its size in Virginia, went for vote no on this referendum. them. And I think the reason for that is because they didn't want somebody in Northern Virginia telling them what to do. Right. So like I said, the results aren't what we wanted, but the path is clear. Can it resonate into the midterance? I made this case, and there's some arithmetic. If you go to DailySignal.com, there's a whole column about it. I think it may be in the video blogs, but I do the arithmetic. If you base, because we don't register as party.

members, there's no real way to know who's in these districts. This is just an extrapolation on the 2025 gubernatorial election results. If you take the 2021 election results, it's completely different because Governor Yonkin won a lot of these places. So I think if you do the math, it's very close to where the Republicans actually pick up a seat. these districts. If that effort is there, do you think that now with enough time to get into the election season, that effort could be there? I do, actually. I think that what you're seeing in Richmond right now and what you saw last night is a direct reflection of people not trusting the leadership in Richmond right now. And they, we're going to have to capitalize on that and go back

to those ideas that I was talking about earlier and get that messaging out there. And I think that, you know, Governor Yonkin had a great strategy of he was a big tent conservative. And we need to get back to that. Now, I'm a big tent conservative myself. I think that diversity of thought, lots of ideas, bringing more people in. And I think Ronald Reagan said, if you agree with me 80% of the time and disagree with me 20% of the time, you're not my enemy. you're my friend. Well, it's been my experience, and delegate Andrew Rice on with us from Virginia Beach.

It's been my experience that, I mean, even beyond the solutions, and I think in solutions, we will vary greatly in a lot of cases. But we can admit problems. So Virginia Beach, you have issues. You have issues with crime. You have issues with curfews. You have issues with pop. And these are real issues that traditionally, and I mean traditionally in the 2020 paradigm of Republicans, they would avoid those topics because in their mind, these were not Republican topics that they could win with. But they were real and they were losing touch with voters who were saying, well, hold it, I can't pay my bills. Why should I listen to this delegate candidate who's not talking about it? that. Here live from the Virginia General Assembly, we're here. It is what they call veto day or reconvene day, if you want to be more polite about it, where the General Assembly

will sit down and pretend to hold the governor's feet to the fire because she's now part of their team. So that, you know, it was much more contentious when Glenn Yonkin was governor here. But we're talking about the vote yesterday, still gobbling up the national headlines as well as Virginia, by a very slim margin, voted to approve the Democratic Party's plan to scrap the election districts of our 11 congressmen and redraw them fancifully. One of them actually looks like a scorpion. I don't know how they did this, but they redrew them so that by election results, you have majorities of Democrats in all but one of our 11 districts. Delegate Andrew Rice is a particularly interesting case because he's new to the General Assembly,

was just elected, you said on St. Patrick's Day of this year to come in and fill a seat. And tell me what you saw when you got here as a fresh set of eyes. You obviously were politically aware. It wasn't like you were walking down the street and somebody tapped you on the shoulder and said, hey, you got a few days? you don't want to come to Richmond and be in the House of Delegates. So were there impressions where you said, I can't believe this happens here? Or were things better or worse than you thought when you got here?

Well, the stuff that was coming out of Richmond for my subject matter expertise was just alarming. And so that was really the catalyst of saying... Just for the record, what is that subject matter expertise? So I'm a prosecutor by trade, Commonwealth attorney for the city of Virginia Beach. And so I was looking at these criminal justice reform bills and giving voices to the offender and not the victim. And I thought to myself, well, there at least needs to be one voice up there that can go up there and advocate for victims' rights. And that is, so the last, we went to break on the idea of places Republicans have for decades blanched away. from. And I think after George Soros realized it costs a lot less to pay for a bunch of

Commonwealth attorneys to get elected than it does a bunch of Congress people to get elected, and he can lean his thumb on the scales of justice, we've seen these progressive prosecutors take hold all across the country, not just in Virginia, and have acted, and I made this case before you got here, that why should we expect the Virginia House of Delegates and State Senate to uphold the law? And they've broken the law. I found out last night at this event we were at, that there's a fourth instance where they broke the law in establishing this constitutional amendment. Why should they follow the law if the citizens in their district are not going to be held accountable to stealing, to drug possession, things like that? If that isn't going to be

prosecutable, what is in this world? Right. I mean, it's alarming that people can just use their discretion to not uphold the statutes that are on the books already. So when you got here, you said you were kind of surprised by how that was being treated. I didn't mean to kind of get off on that tantal. I'm like President Trump. I grew up in Queens and I have an unusual haircut.

But I do come back to my points eventually. Yeah, so I mean, I just was looking at those bills and I was thinking I've got to be able to go up there and advocate for the other side. And that's really one of the things that drove me to do this. Here in the Virginia General Assembly, the oldest continuously operating elected representative body on the planet. Some of them had to suspend themselves because World War II. But Virginia's continued, you know, hell or high water since 1619. And Tom wasn't here. He's our host, but we were talking about you in absence, and you must have heard your ears ringing and came in. This is the fellow who's seen it from inside the Virginia Senate, the Virginia House, and the U.S. House. So winning is a key here. So the drive-by media is all packing up their gear this morning. Virginia's stopped being as interesting because our election they think is over. They'll be back when the Supreme Court has to rule on that. They'll scramble. They don't even have to rule on it, but keep going.

So as they get ready to go, what is the lessons learned from this? We brought up the fact that in 2020, albeit a presidential election year, 1.3 million more people voted in the referendum that took away redistricting in the first place. So what do we have to do to get those 1.3 million people back? Because they seem like they're conservative. Well, we try to do it in our office. We got beat so badly in the elections, the House of Delegates elections in Virginia in 2025 that I spent an hour looking backwards and then the next six hours looking forwards and created a plan. And the plan essentially said that if you want to win hearts and minds, you have to get eyes and ears. The left has, and so, and so I if, and I said this last night a couple of times, if Thomas Payne were to write common sense in 2026, I don't know whether it would show up first on Reddit or on Facebook, but that is the new public. square. Substack. Right. And so it's this is Joe Thomas. He always says to quibble. That's the new public square. So we have to take our message boldly to the public. Republicans, I've studied on Olinsky's rules for radicals. He may have been evil, but he was an evil genius. It works. And it says hold them to their own

standards. Yep. And one of our standards is that we were polite and kind and deferential. And that doesn't win in the current discourse. You have to tell the truth as loudly and as boldly as others are willing to lie. Our message is a winning message. It was a winning message yesterday, right? But you also have to, there's two types of people that run for office. George Will said this. And then my mentor, Bill Janus, kind of picked it up and I've stolen it from him. People who want to be somebody and people who want to do something. Tragically, both parties are infiltrated and co-opted by be-sumodies. They like the title, a lapelpin, prestige. They like to look at the mirror and think somehow they're more than, better than, et cetera. We threw off the crown of British.

royalty because we as Americans didn't believe that that was in our fiber, right? And so we've got to find people who are doing this to do it, to perpetuate the greatest nation ever to exist on earth. And everything comes to an end, right? I mean, I view life is a plane ride to paradise, right? God is going to take me and perfect me, which is a lot of work one day, but this is what I got to go through to get there. And so on that plane ride, I could stub my toe. I could get food poisoning. I could have the most amazing conversation I could ever imagine. I could make a lifelong friend. But the plane ride's not the purpose.

Paradise is. And so America, too, will fail, fall, it will teeter. It will do all these things. Our job is to make sure that it's not on our watch, right? That is why we are elected to be stewards of the resources of the people. We've gotten away from that, right? This is, what can I get from me and my people? Here's what the Democrats just did.

And I pointed it out very loudly while no one else was because Republicans were afraid to. They found a minority group that the people. they didn't like. They needed to count their heads for the purposes of representation, but find a way to silence their voices. Sound familiar, Jim Crow? Right? So if it was wrong, then it's wrong now. And that's a winning message, but we got out spent four to one while having a four to one national cash advantage after having spent 96 million RNC dollars so that John Cornyn, who's sketchy at best, could defeat a Republican conservative Ken Paxton, right? We've got to do it differently. And I'm going to tell you something else, Joe. I know I'm on a solo here. You ought to

walk down to Capitol Square after this is over with them, watch Democrats and Republicans walk by. We just got beaten. We just lost our voices. We just got disenfranchised. We're smiling and they're not. They're miserable. And they're going to be miserable because they're doing this for the wrong reasons. And I know, at least for me, I'm doing it for what I believe are the right ones. So in 1776, 250 years ago, you may have heard, we overthrew an occupying army. We created an occupying force by our Declaration of Independence. So we were creating a new government. How do we take the same paradigm and do it from the inside out?

Because Jefferson, I was just reading him in to the public record, it's understandable that you don't want to change stuff that you've grown accustomed to. Well, I don't think it's my job as a legislator to foist my Christianity on people, but I'm very, very open about my faith and how much better my life is with Jesus. and now eight years of sobriety as a result of that. And I think that our country needs a spiritual reawakening. I believe that John Adams was absolutely correct when he said our Constitution and founding documents, paraphrasing here, are wholly adequate only for a moral and religious people. No, it can't be self-relevant.

The lies are the coin of the realm. I'm sure you've covered this on your show this morning. The wording of the referendum said, and I quote, in order to restore fairness. Yep. That is a bald-faced lie. When we lie to the government, it's a crime. when the government lies to us, it's politics. I've had enough of that.

Well, we just read Hakeem Jeffery's lying bold face about how this all began. But that was actually yesterday's program. Deep down inside, though, they know they're wrong. That the hearts and minds have to come when you go to where the issues are. You can't blanch from poverty, cost of health care. You can't blanche from these because we have better answers, but we stop because we're like, oh, they're going to win 80% of that. So we cede the other 20% and they get 100% of those people.

I've never been invited to an African-American church I didn't go to. I mean, I love it, right? And I used to go, it was Goetland County. NWACP would have a candidate for him, and I would go to that. And I would surely imagine that if you took a straw poll leaving the room, that the Constitutional Conservative might not have won. But everybody in that room afterwards knew I respected them, that they were my brothers in the fellowship of man.

And you've got to go in the rooms and you got to do that work. But here's the real problem. And this is a tough one. I hadn't figured it out. 30 seconds, by the way, for the real problem. All the easy answers go left. All of them do. Should there be poverty?

No. Should we have access to affordable health care? Yes. You got to teach kids critical thinking. You got to get down into the weeds. How do we eradicate poverty? How do we pay for health care? What is health care?

Does that include general mutilation? Right. These are the tough ones and we have to explain. And if you're explaining, sometimes you're losing. Thank you.