Portsmouth, Virginia
L. Louise Lucas was attending a convention in Boston final summer season for state legislators when she realized that a group of Texas Democrats were in town after fleeing their house state to attempt to block a Republican gerrymander carried out at President Donald Trump’s behest.
Lucas, the president professional tempore of the Virginia Senate, made her technique to City Hall to attend their information convention. Before the occasion was over, Lucas had concluded that Virginia wanted to hitch the fight — and stated so.
Her Virginia House counterpart came upon later.
“I was like, ‘Whoa, lady, what are you doing?’” Speaker Don Scott, a shut ally, instructed NCS just lately. At the time, Scott stated, he was targeted on profitable extra state legislative seats that fall and wished to keep away from any redistricting discuss 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 finish, the 82-year-old great-grandmother, who rose from a childhood in the Jim Crow South to grow to be one in all the strongest figures in Virginia politics, helped push by means of what could be one in all the most excessive political gerrymanders of the 2026 election cycle. The map she and different Democrats need voters to again in an April 21 referendum could assist their social gathering win 10 of Virginia’s 11 US House seats in November.
Currently, Democrats maintain six of these seats and Republicans 5. Opponents are preventing again by citing top Democrats’ past statements supporting nonpartisan US House maps, and up to date polling exhibits the state is carefully divided forward of the referendum.
A brand new Virginia map could assist decide which social gathering wins management of the US House in November’s midterm elections. A Democratic-led House would be capable of block Trump’s legislative agenda and open new investigations of him and his insurance policies in the remaining two years of his presidency — underscoring Trump’s urgency in pushing Republican-led states to redraw their maps outdoors of the once-a-decade norm.
Much of Virginia’s Democratic Party institution wished to go for eight or 9 seats slightly than 10. Lucas framed it as a binary selection: “Why would we go through all this for an 8-3 map?” she stated.
“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 instructed NCS. “I know a lot of folks really like their members of Congress, but they don’t have the backbone to do the job.”
To assist advance the map finally placed on the poll, Lucas wielded her uncooked energy 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 internet following amongst Democrats hungry for open confrontation with the Trump administration and leaders of their very own social gathering.
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 additionally extends to any Democrats she views as thwarting her objectives. One Lucas submit in contrast Virginia’s two Democratic US senators to cuckolds and warned them to remain out of the state legislature’s redistricting deliberations.
A Republican strategist in Virginia who opposes each Lucas’ coverage strikes and her on-line exercise stated the 10-1 map now earlier than voters underscores that “she completely controls what’s happening in Virginia right now.”
The strategist, who spoke on situation of anonymity to keep away from a confrontation with Lucas, stated her actions on social media deserve condemnation, not celebration. “Don’t glamorize her.”
Lucas, who has represented her native metropolis of Portsmouth in the state legislature for greater than three a long time, takes satisfaction in speaking and appearing powerful — an outgrowth, she stated, of a life dealing with and overcoming obstacles.
She had her first little one at age 14. As a younger lady, she joined the apprenticeship program at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard and have become the first lady shipfitter there, every day strolling her welding supplies up the plank to the ships that loomed over Portsmouth’s waterfront.
“There were catcalls and all that kind of stuff” from the males she labored 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 stated she was formed by her upbringing in Portsmouth, the eldest of her mother and father’ seven youngsters. On a journey by means of its tidy Olde Towne district, she factors out the places of long-gone landmarks like The Famous, a high-end division retailer the place she remembers her mom, Lillie Boone, could not attempt on hats at a time when segregation nonetheless held sway.
Her teen being pregnant together with her son, Jeffrey, interrupted, however didn’t finish her schooling. She completed college, labored in the shipyards and went on to earn two levels from Norfolk State University, an HBCU simply throughout the Elizabeth River from her hometown.
She entered politics as a member of the Portsmouth City Council after an 18-year profession with the federal authorities. Lucas is now the longest-serving senator in the General Assembly.
Today, elements of Portsmouth bear her mark.
L. Louise Lucas Drive leads guests to the Rivers Casino, the fruit of laws she championed to spice up employment in a metropolis the place the median earnings is lower than half that of northern Virginia cities like Arlington.
Then, there’s the Lucas Professional Center, a low-slung brick constructing about 4 miles from the on line casino that is the hub of her varied non-public enterprises. They embody group houses for developmentally disabled adults, a fleet of vans and a hashish store managed by her grandson that sells marijuana-themed T-shirts and mango- and cherry-flavored CBD slushies.
She co-sponsored laws that would legalize the leisure use of marijuana for adults. She is keen to use for a license to promote subsequent yr.
She brushes apart a query about whether or not working a pot enterprise presents an moral battle, given her legislative function.
“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 repute as a fighter. She owns a number of pairs of Everlast boxing gloves in an array of colours, a marketing campaign gimmick from a few years in the past that has grow to be a part of her warrior persona.
“Where are your gloves?” a on line casino worker requested, jokingly, as Lucas walked briskly amongst the slot machines on a latest weekday go to to Rivers, her flowing turquoise costume gently billowing in her wake.
For those that have heard of Lucas outdoors of Portsmouth or the state Capitol in Richmond, it might be as a consequence of the memes.
One cartoon-style picture exhibits her pulling US Rep. Rob Wittman out of attain of the chairmanship of the House Armed Services Committee. Wittman, the committee’s vice chair, is poised to steer the panel subsequent yr if Republicans retain management of the chamber. But he’s amongst the Republicans whose reelection possibilities could be endangered by the proposed map.
Lucas stated she’s influenced by the younger individuals round her — interns, grandchildren and others — who ship her concepts to think about. “I don’t have a friend who’s my age,” she stated. “They’re all retired or dead.”
She bounces lots of her social media posts off Ben Tribbett, a political marketing consultant who has labored together with her for greater than 20 years. He stated he generally encourages her to take “it down a notch,” however Lucas doesn’t all the time heed his recommendation.
While her workers will submit on her behalf, Lucas stated she approves of the whole lot that seems on her feeds.
Her 62-year-old daughter Lisa Lucas-Burke, a former Portsmouth City Council member who’s working for the workplace once more this yr, stated her mom’s social media habits preserve her glued to her telephone.
“I keep telling her, ‘Can we put the phone down for at least the dinner hour?’”
For all her social media notoriety, Lucas’ actual energy derives from her perch atop the Senate Finance and Appropriations Committee. It’s one thing she famously wielded towards then-Gov. Glenn Youngkin two years in the past to kill the Republican’s plans for a $2 billion monetary package deal for a professional sports activities area in northern Virginia.
She argued the groups’ homeowners wanted to foot the invoice and derisively referred to the venture as the “Glenn Dome.”
(Asked for remark about Lucas, Youngkin spokesman Justin Discigil instructed NCS 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, stated Virginia powerbrokers perceive 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 area episode as proof of her affect.
For occasion, in a textual content earlier this yr to Scott that she additionally shared with Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s chief of workers, Lucas declared she would boycott any extra conferences about map proposals as a result of, 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 textual content, which she confirmed to NCS.
Lucas stated she made Spanberger’s workforce conscious of the correspondence with the speaker as a result of she likes to be upfront in all her political maneuvers. “I don’t throw over a rock and hide my hand,” she stated. “If I hit you in the head, I want you to know I did it.”
In a assertion to NCS, a Spanberger spokesperson indicated that any pushback from the governor’s workplace to a 10-1 plan centered solely on the technical difficulties of finishing up elections utilizing a few of the maps initially proposed by legislators.
“As the House of Delegates and Senate went through their process of drawing a new map,” the assertion learn, “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 assertion added, and is urging Virginians to assist the referendum.
The maximalist strategy pushed by Lucas and others might have been a bridge too far for a lot of Virginians.
A Washington Post poll released Friday confirmed probably voters favoring the map by a 5-point margin, however discovered that Republicans and map opponents had been much more obsessed with casting ballots than Democrats and redistricting backers.
Additionally, Virginians had been divided over whether or not it’s honest to create 10 Democratic-friendly districts. Forty-four % stated the map was a honest illustration of Virginia’s political leanings; 48% responded that it was unfair.
Republican US Rep. Ben Cline, whose Shenandoah Valley district can be splintered underneath the proposed map, has barnstormed the state in latest weeks attempting to drum up the “no” vote. The map seeks to flip 4 seats by snaking districts out from Democratic areas in the Washington, DC, suburbs into rural elements of the state, though the new district boundaries don’t assure a full Democratic sweep of these 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 stated.
His Stop the Gerrymander nonprofit is one in all a number of teams now lively in the marketing campaign towards the map.
As of Friday afternoon, Democrats nonetheless had an unlimited spending benefit on the airwaves, pumping $33.6 million into the “yes” marketing campaign to $3.3 million by Republicans, in accordance with information from the political-ad monitoring agency, AdImpact. House Speaker Mike Johnson is about to attend a fundraiser in Virginia later this week for the opposition effort, and one other opposition group, Virginians For Fair Maps, obtained $5 million on the final day of March from an affiliated nonprofit.
Back in Portsmouth, neatly organized flyers outdoors Lucas’ workplace function a image of former President Barack Obama, urging Virginians to vote “yes” on the map to “stop the MAGA power grab.”
Scott, the House speaker, stated he would see it as “poetic justice” if he and Lucas — two African Americans who each overcame adversity to rise to positions of energy in Virginia — helped their social gathering prevail over Trump in the nationwide redistricting battle.
“It’s really a testament to the endurance and faith of the Black community that we’re here,” he stated. “We have to stand up in this moment.”