From Red Oak to Greenville, Bluefield to Orange, and Goldvein to Silver Beach, the Virginia Press Room features the voices of Virginia's press corps from every corner of Virginia. The podcast is a joint production of the Virginia Public Access Project and VPM News. Now, here's the host of the press room, Michael Pope. In the press room this week, we are joined by an all-star panel of journalists from the Virginia press corps. First up is the statehouse reporter for the Richmond Times Dispatch, Anna Bryson. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me, Michael. We are also joined by the founding editor of the Virginia Scope, Brandon Jarvis. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. Rounding out our all-star panel is the statehouse reporter for VPM News, Jad Khalil. Thanks for joining us. Hey, guys. All right, let's get right into it with our headlines of the week. So, Jack, Lill of EBM News, you're first with us. What's your headline of the week? I think it's what everybody's been thinking about this over the past few weeks, actually, which is that Virginia got some new maps on Thursday. So kind of the top headline is that Virginia, before these maps came out, or I should say that Virginia currently has six Democrats and five Republicans in Congress. And if these maps go into effect, which is going to take a couple of steps still. Democrats think that they can get 10 seats in Virginia's congressional delegation for the U.S. House of Representatives. So it's kind of, I think if you look at the map, just top line, you'll see that there's lots of sort of arms that are reaching out into NOVA. That's because there's a lot of Democratic votes there, and that's going to make a bunch of districts that are more friendly for Democrats. So the map jars also put out some stats on the political breakdown of the potential districts. And we have a couple of districts that are a little tighter. There's one, the second district, which is in Hampton Roads, that's 51% for Democrats if you're only counting Democrats and Republican votes in the 2024 presidential election. uh it's a little friendlier for democrats if you only look back to november so that's 54 percent um democrat votes and then the sixth district which is kind of this like uh it looks like a kind of this i don't know what kind of shape i would call it this is the new parlor game in virginia politics figuring out which animal most represents these new congressional districts let me see two-headed dragon i don't know it's uh it's sort of a long one it goes from like kind of like a big block around Charlottesville and kind of thins out as it goes down to Roanoke and also goes to Blacksburg. So I think a lot of people have also pointed out that this district has a lot of colleges. So they have some younger folks there. And the other, so sorry, that map is also a little more swingy. It's like a plus four or like 52% Democratic votes in the 24 presidential election and 56% in the 25 governor election. So those are only two of the 11 districts that Virginia has. There's a lot that have changed. And, you know, I think me and everybody else is going to be dissecting these for a while. Yeah. So how many districts ended up like, or which localities ended up getting split into like a crazy amount of districts? I think if you go to Nova, for example, that's really, there's a lot of really kind of interesting thing. So like, I got this map up right now, obviously, the listeners can't, can't hear it. But you know, there's, there's points where it's like these three, three districts kind of converge at Bailey's Crossroads ish. I don't know, Michael, you're the sort of the, the Nova resident here. I don't know. Is that what locality would you call that? Well, if you look at Prince William, it's split up into five different congressional districts, right? So I mean, when, if this goes to a referendum, you're going to be asking people and Prince William to split their county up into five congressional districts. That's what they're asking people. And the people might not care about that, but the registrars definitely will. That's a busy primary day. Yeah, and these districts don't necessarily kind of represent communities of interest. Is that the term of art they always use in Mac making? So the thing that strikes me is where I live in the 8th congressional district, it is going to, according to this map, it includes Alexandria, and then it goes all the way down to York County as part of the 8th Congressional District. So, I mean, what kind of community of interest includes York County and Alexandria? The 8th District is the, I like calling it the Brontosaurus District. Brontosaurus. Brandon Jarvis of the Virginia Scope, what's your headline of the week? So it's kind of along the same lines, but it's more about the process of how Democrats got here to release this map last week. Earlier in the week, last week, details started to leak about why there was a delay, because Democrats originally said we were going to see the maps before the end of January, and then the end of January got here and we didn't have maps. So we didn't really know what was going on. And then details started to leak that there was a disagreement between House Democrats and Senate Democrats on how they wanted the boundaries to look. And then you also had to take into account the governor, Abigail Spanberger, her chief of staff was calling around asking people if they would accept a 9-2 map instead of a 10-1 map. So all those details, they were behind the scenes, not getting along. And then Wednesday night, Don Scott, Speaker of the House, and Louise Lucas from the Senate came together and had a long talk. And essentially, Abigail Spanberger sent them a few maps that her administration believed that they could implement before primary day. And then Don and Louise chose the map. And that's how we got the press release or the press announcement. I'm hearing that in the Senate, a lot of people didn't know that they had the map ready until the press was at the Speaker of the House's office hearing them say the maps were being released. So there was a lot of disagreement between Democrats, but in the end, they came together, got the map, and all seem on board in public, at least with what they produced. Damn. I mean, not knowing that this was happening, and I guess you would have to keep it sort of under wraps because otherwise they're going to get lots of calls because everybody wants to know what their own political futures are going to look like. But definitely a pretty hard task, I think, to balance all these things. Not just the political, but like you were saying earlier, the practical stuff. And I think last week we had the governor talk about how a bit about that logistics in terms of this is a map that we can implement and run. Yeah, it was definitely complicating. And weren't there essentially kind of two different camps? There was the 10-1 camp with Luis Lucas and people that wanted to max out the Dems. And then there was kind of a separate camp of people that wanted maybe like a 9-2. I think Tim Cain was in that group of people. And I think there was some thought that maybe Spanberger was in the 9-2 camp. But then she said Friday morning that she was going to sign this map. Well, she did. if you read my story about a private December meeting with Spanberger in the Virginia congressional delegation she specifically said you know Dawn and Luis have been talking 10 10 10 And she said I have specifically told them be careful what you wish for with a 10-1, because, you know, based on the year that you're running the numbers off of it, you know, it might not actually be a 10-1. So Spanberger has been hesitant on that from the start. I think she has wanted a 9-2 map, but that's obviously not the position she's in right now. I learned a term in the course of my reporting, which was if you get a gerrymander that's too aggressive, it's called a dummy mander because you can actually like draw too many districts that are too tight. And then if just the pendulum swings even a little bit, you basically lose all those seats that you could have probably kept. Dummy mander. You heard it here first, folks. All right. Anna Bryson of the Richmond Times Dispatch. What's your headline of the week? Well, the House of Delegates passed an assault weapons ban and a whole bunch of other gun control legislation. And this is legislation that a lot of it is familiar. It has been passed before, but our former governor, Youngkin, has vetoed it. There was a lot of talk last week about the assault weapons ban. Not all Democrats were on board. There were no votes on the gun bills that had every single Democrat, but they all passed. And Spanberger has said throughout her campaign that she wants to sign what she calls common sense gun control legislation. So Spanberger said she's going to sign them. Junkin vetoed all of these things. So these should be clean sailing through to the governor, correct? We would think so, yeah. I mean, it still has to go through the Senate, but it's very highly, highly likely. She can also amend them, so we can wait and see. I know a lot of times governors pick up on stuff that the legislature didn't because they have a sort of a different legal review process. So it'll be interesting to hear what changes she makes, if any. Yeah, it's definitely the talk among Republicans. I took a gun class earlier or last week and the instructor brought up Spanberger no less than 50 times about all these things that she was going to do. And a lot of it wasn't true. But the Republican gun, you know, echo chamber is really up in arms about these laws. Well, in one point that the Republicans have is that the Bruin case that the Supreme Court said, basically, you cannot outright ban assault style weapons. And Democrats mostly kind of sidestepped that question. But they brought up that in Maryland, they have a similar law on the books in the Supreme Court last year declined to hear the case. So they think Virginia might be in the clear, but Republicans are talking about, you know, this might be a very expensive law for Virginia. Yeah, I think Republicans are probably super eager to figure out a way to campaign against the Democrats and sort of use this stuff as leverage. And Anna, I'm wondering, is there a potential for blowback here against Bamberger? Like because the Republicans can criticize her for being a crazy liberal who wants to take away your assault weapon. right and i mean they do have a lot of that stuff on taxes but this is one thing i mean spanberger has said from the start i was with her i think it was last summer and she was at a gun control rally and she said when i'm elected governor i will sign these bills so i don't think that this is something that people will be surprised from spanberger if they've been you know listening to her campaign. All right. Well, now it's time for some insider info. This is when our top reporters reveal the story behind the story, giving us an inside scoop on Virginia politics. Brandon Jarvis of the Virginia Scope, you're first with us. What's your insider info? Yes. So on Thursday, Tim Griffin, Delegate Tim Griffin, was in the Health and Human Services subcommittee, I believe. And he went on a bit of a rant about abortion, and it wasn't really related to any of the bills. And the chair of the subcommittee, Marcia Price, she kept trying to get him to calm down and stop and stay germane to the subject, you know, stay on topic. And then they eventually went at ease. And it's unclear what Griffin said while they were at ease, but it made Democrats very angry. So throughout the rest of the day on the full House floor and House committees, Republican bills were getting killed left and right. These were bills that wouldn't have necessarily been killed, but they were getting killed as retribution for how Griffin behaved. I hear that Republicans asked Griffin to apologize, and he refused, and he sat in the back of the chamber, right, Chad? Yeah, so I was there, and I had no idea what was going on. And like all of a sudden there's like sometimes you're on the floor and then there's you can tell if there's some sort of floor strategy that's going on. So there were bills that were getting pulled out of the block and then they were getting sent back to committee. All the Republicans were sort of talking to each other. And I'm sitting there like, what is going on? One of the delegates is whispering at me. I think he's like trying to tell me what's happening and I can't because he's he's got to be doing his vote. So but so eventually Tim Griffin sits, you know, in the chairs with me and I lean over at him because I have the opportunity to actually like. have a full conversation with somebody. And I go, what's happening right now? Like, what's going on? And he's like, oh, you got to ask Kilgore. So Kilgore is like marshalling the sort of the floor strategy at the same time. I mean, at one point I heard him say like, oh, we got to try something different. So there was a moment where he was able to talk to me and he's like, oh, I heard there was a dust up in one of the committees. And then kind of looked into it from there. But yeah, I mean, I think it speaks to also the speaker's sort of style of how he manages the floor in certain ways in terms of making sure that if something doesn't go his way, that there is some sort of cost, even if it's just time that happens. And I was told that the speaker approached Kilgore, the Republican leader, and said he needs to apologize, and Griffin just wouldn't apologize. And from what I've heard from multiple people, Republicans are like, you really should say sorry. and he never did. But as of Friday morning, Republican bills were back on track, not clear about Griffin's bills in the future because from what I know, as of today, Monday, he still has not apologized. But it's complicated and it just shows that egos and personalities really can clash to have an impact on the entire state. You know, killing bills as revenge this way actually has a long and storied history in Virginia. back in the 1990s there was a house leader who when he heard something the republicans said that he didn't like or he was insulted by or he just felt like it was a breach of decorum or if he heard something from the republicans that he didn't like he would hold up three fingers and the idea was that the democrats would kill the next three republican bills and it didn't matter what the bills were they could be important bills they could be insignificant bills but the Democrats would kill the next three bills as a matter of revenge. And so, um, yeah, the time honored tradition in Virginia politics, killing bills out of revenge on the house floor. We need that strategy in the press room somehow. Anna Bryson of the Richmond times dispatch. You're next on this. What's your insider info. Joe Morrissey is going to jury trial tomorrow. Uh, he is suing somebody who tweeted the following about a photo of a female delegate and Senator Scott Survelle He tweeted if anyone curious the guy to the left of her helped a fellow state senator get a pardon for raping his 17 employee but hope you had fun at the meeting And the person he is suing is Kevin Saucedo Broach, I think is how you pronounce it. He's a former House candidate who lost a primary to Adele McClure in 23. So that's wild, but Joe Morrissey is no stranger to legal trouble in Virginia politics. He tends to sue people who say something negatively about him on social media. He sued Jimmy Lee Jarvis, who is not related to me. Jimmy Lee eventually won his case. This is right on brand for Joe Morrissey. He's subpoenaed my text messages before and lost to me in that case. So he loves suing. He's a lawyer. I don't know if he's legally allowed to practice law right now, but he finds his ways around it at times by showing up with a bar licensed attorney to go in the room with him when he talks to clients. And that guy's always in the news. He's a fighter, fighting Joe. Fighting Joe, yeah. Any chance of him trying to make a political comeback and running for something? I mean, I would never count him out, but I can't imagine in this environment he would be successful. The first session I ever covered, Joe Morrissey spent his nights in jail and then was driven to the Capitol to be a delegate during the day and then back to the jailhouse at night. All right, so welcome to Virginia Politics. All right. Chad Kalula, VPM News. You're next on this. What's your insider info? So my insider info is not as it's a little more boring, I would say, because it has to do with taxes and inflation. So I got a doc that is about Virginia's revenue. So we're in a tight budget year. There's sort of the Republican argument out there is that we've had lots of surpluses. Virginia's revenue growth is really strong. So there's no need to raise taxes or make changes. But this was a document that was sent to a senator that was, you know, kind of outlined how much of the growth that we had over the past couple years is due to inflation. So if you take sales tax, for example, if the price goes up, the portion of the tax that you're collecting on, that also goes up because it's a percentage. So if you look at the fiscal year to date revenues, and sorry for that term here because that's what I got, so I just want to be a little more exact. We saw a raw growth of 8.6%. And if you made adjustments to that, this estimate that the tax department made, that's actually 4.2%. So the growth is less than half. And this is for fiscal year to date. So the fiscal year starts in July 1st. So that's until whenever this document was made. So I think it's also interesting because this wasn't even the biggest time that we had the highest inflation in Virginia. Because if you remember during when everyone was going crazy over egg prices, this is before this time period. So I think this is going to come up again because you're going to have Democrats talk about how some of our growth has come from inflation, so it's not as strong as it used to be. And we're still waiting on things like impacts from federal policies too. One thing that I thought really struck me about Yunkin's time in office when in terms of budgeting is that every year there was always this huge surplus and everybody got to go like on a spending spree because you have this huge surplus. So you could look at that and say, well, gosh, isn't doing isn't Virginia doing great because it's got this big budget surplus. But then there's another way of looking at that, too, which is it's a colossal failure of your estimates, right? Like they've totally got it wrong when they estimated how much money they were going to take in and how much money they were going to spend. Yeah. I mean, the speaker has brought this up many times is that he thought that Yunkin was sort of underestimating because then he would be able to basically have surpluses that were prime for taxes. I do want to also add that in this, you know, the document, the letter that I got, the tax department also made the point that, you know, tax revenues aren't necessarily the right tool to approach the question of Virginia's economic strength because it's only linked to some economic activity, they say. So that's one caveat that probably should add. Well, you can add that caveat to our game show segment, buy, sell, or hold. I'll present a topic and our panelists will make a choice. Do they want to buy, sell, or hold? Our topic today, the brown belted bumblebee as the official native pollinator. Now you might be asking yourself, doesn't Virginia already have an official state pollinator? Yes, the European honeybee, but that's not a native pollinator, which is why Senator Mark Peake has a bill that would designate the brown belted bumblebee as the official native state pollinator. But does Virginia really need an official native state pollinator? Anna Bryson, you're first with this, buy, sell, or hold on the brown belted bumblebee as the official native state pollinator. I'm going to say bye on this one. I love a brown belt, and I think that it's a great choice for Virginia. Brandon Jarvis, you're next on this. What's the buzz on buy, sell, or hold on the brown belted bumblebee as the official native state pollinator? I wish everyone could see the look that Brandon just gave. What's the buzz? I'm a big bye because Europeans have a terrible history of trying to colonize in virginia and then getting kicked out so i support a repeat of that history right now jad khalil buy sell or hold on the brown belted bumblebee as the official native state pollinator i think i'm a buy on the brown belted bumblebee also um these sort of bills are kind of fun um but aren't there too many of them i mean one criticism of this is do we need an official state this an official state that and you're really adding especially since virginia already has a pollinator. You're adding another second pollinator? It's also funny when they kill those bills. You know, it's just like, I don't know, like killing or delaying or continuing those bills is kind of a funny idea. It's like, I don't think we're ready for the brown belted bumblebee yet. You know, let's study making the brown belted bumblebee the official state pollinator. These bills can be kind of fun to talk about. And one thing that jumped out at me is that on the senate floor you could hear the senators making animal noises buzzing specifically um usually it's the house floor where you hear animal noises and the senators feel like oh we're too good to make animal noises over here no they're not i can tell you because i heard it this uh last this year so i was in the committee when they were hearing this and it was funny because some senators actually voted against it because they wanted to make senator peak talk about it on the floor um also Mark Peake saying brown belted bumblebee is a great narrator for the name. He is a great narrator. And one of the committee members asked him to say brown belted bumblebee three times really fast. And he successfully nailed it. So, yeah, maybe he's got a future in radio at some point. I don't know. You can have him on the podcast. Maybe. I don't know. All right. Now it's time to open up our reporter's notebook. this is when our top journalists tell us what to be on the lookout for this week anna bryce of the richmond Times you first with us What in your reporter notebook So I going to be paying very close attention to gubernatorial appointment confirmations this week There are four Yonkin appointees on the State Board of Education who were appointed after the last General Assembly session. So in theory, Senate Democrats could move to get rid of all four of them. And because of the schedule of the State Board of Education, Spanberger could have a majority on the board by July because the vice president bill is leaving and they have four more. It's a nine member board, but they're only moving to remove three out of the four that they can. They're keeping on Beth Ackerman, who ran the education department at Liberty University for years. And so that is an interesting little tidbit. So they're just getting rid of three of the four? Yes. Why not four? Well, that's a really good question that the Democrats have not had a great answer for yet. They technically, you know, they always say, oh, we don't talk about, you know, why we kick people off. But there's really not a strong answer for this one yet. We'll see what happens. Jack Galil of EPM News, what's in your reporter's notebook? So today, the last time I checked, there are some tax bills that are up in some of the House finance subcommittees. This has obviously been something that Republicans have had on repeat. They're raising your taxes, they're raising your taxes, they're raising your taxes. There are some tax raises in here. There's also some changes in some of these bills. Tax policy is something that is kind of hard to get into on a podcast, but I would recommend tuning into that if you're a Capitol watcher. I feel like Republicans are really eager for this discussion and they're, they are eager to make the Democrats look like a bunch of tax and spend liberals because they want to raise your taxes. They want to put new taxes on Netflix and Hulu and Amazon prime and every app that's in your phone plus haircuts and dog walking. And I mean, I think the Republicans are really eager to talk about this topic. I think it's also one thing that's missing from the conversation is that, you know, I think given that Virginia's, the way that Virginia's tax structure is now, there would have to be like absolutely massive changes to even, you know, put a major dent in the tax cuts that were in the big, beautiful bill. So, you know, the Virginia, whatever Virginia tax policies that we have aren't going to go into effect until the next tax year. But, you know, especially at the top of the income brackets. After the caboose has left the station. After. Toot, toot. And closing out our podcast with a very strong finish, Brandon Jarvis of the Virginia Scope. What's in your reporter's notebook? So I'm looking at efforts to expand rank choice voting in Virginia. Skyler Van Valkenburg, a state senator from Henrico, has a bill that has already passed in the General Assembly, but it was vetoed by Governor Glenn Youngkin. With a Democratic governor, He's hopeful that that will not happen. His bill basically makes technical changes that the boards of election asked them to do. It would also allow towns across Virginia to hold rank choice voting for like mayor and town council. And it also gets rid of the sunset clause on the legislation that is already enabling for localities to do rank choice voting for local elections so that they could do it permanently. So I'm going to follow that along and talk to Van Valkenburg and see where we're at. Do we know where the new governor stands on ranked choice voting? We do not, or at least I do not, unless someone else has an answer to that question. And one thing that strikes me about this conversation is that it tends to be partisan, right? I mean, like, usually it's Democrats who are talking about this and Republicans are critical. Why do you think that's the case? Republicans say it's complicated and it's hard to follow. And, you know, Republicans these last few years have been all about election integrity and everything. So their main message is it is hard to understand, hard to message to the voters how to vote ranked choice voting because it's not just, it's not super easy, but it's not super hard either. So that's the biggest concern that I've had with Republicans. And so far, Democrats have done it. But ironically, the 2021 gubernatorial nomination convention was a ranked choice process where it was seven Republican candidates and Glenn Youngkin came out in round one winning, but didn't have enough, then I think the two nobody candidates essentially lost. Then Kirk Cox lost and his votes went. And then Amanda Chase came in third, I believe. And at the end of that round, Glenn Youngkin had enough votes and went on to win governor. So you say it's not super complicated, but I think it's one thing if you're electing one person to one race. Like there was a Republican primary that was one position you were trying to fill. in arlington they had a very complicated ranked choice voting where they were electing members of the arlington county board and so there were two vacancies on the board so they had a rank choice voting for these two vacancies so you could rank i think there were like six or seven candidates and you could rank them you know by your first choice and your second choice but it was kind of complicated because the the election machinery wasn't sophisticated enough to be able to rank all the candidates. You could only rank some of the candidates because they didn't have the machines to allow the voters to rank all the candidates. And then also there was the issue of you're actually only getting one vote and you slice your one vote up multiple ways. And I think a lot of voters didn't like that. Well, I think the state board of elections after that election said they want these changes and those are included in Van Valkenburg bill to address stuff like that. It's interesting if you think about this approach to voting in light of the redistricting stuff. So if we're going to have 10 seats, if it ends up being the case, if we have 10 seats that are essentially the Democratic primary is the race to win. And some of these primaries that we've seen in special elections, too, there's like 10, 14 people that are running in primaries for this sort of thing. so you end up having somebody win with you know 20 30 percent of the vote then they're in a safe seat and it's really hard to to uh to challenge that incumbent in that sort of way so that's something i always think about when i think about ranked choice voting this is the press room we're busy that's it for this episode of the virginia press room a joint production of the virginia public access project and vpm news if you enjoyed the show please consider supporting vp and supporting vpm hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcasting app and hey write a review on apple podcast this means you chad do you do you listen to apple podcast or you're a spotify person aren't you i do um i do apple podcast okay all right go on apple podcast and write a review of the press room make me all right we'll be back next week for the next episode of the virginia press room i'm danny noakes and here's a look at some exciting things happening at vpm This month, VPM is excited to expand its When Then 90 by 5 Children's Education Initiative into the Charlottesville region. A collaboration with the Robbins Foundation and Thrive Birth to 5, the 90 by 5 initiative provides parents and caregivers who have children under the age of 5 with resources that encourage positive daily interactions to influence future learning. Learn more at vpm.org. VPM. Thank you.
