Hello, and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Leigh Ann Caldwell, fully back to work, though D.C. feels very quiet right now. Anyway, congrats to the T.S.A. agents who will ostensibly start receiving paychecks again after Donald Trump says he found a pot of D.H.S. money—prompting Democrats to wonder why they weren’t getting paid already. (Other D.H.S. staff are continuing to go without pay as the partial government shutdown continues.)

Today, my colleague Abby Livingston takes you to Virginia, where the newly minted governor, Abigail Spanberger, is finding her post-landslide honeymoon consumed with one issue she never much liked in the first place: redistricting.

Also mentioned in this issue: John Cornyn, Ken Paxton, Mark Sanford, Nancy Mace, Olivia Nuzzi, Ryan Lizza, Mike Johnson, Alex Pretti, Libby Wiet, Barack Obama, Winsome Earle-Sears, and many more…

Trail Mix

Texas endorsement politics: It’s been nearly a month since the Texas Senate primary, and Trump’s promise to endorse either Sen. John Cornyn or A.G. Ken Paxton in the runoff appears to have vaporized. One Texas Republican told me that Trump has decided to “sit it out.” Another Republican operative said he was “hopeful but realistic about the chances” for a Cornyn endorsement. Others acknowledge that the likelihood seems to fade with each passing day.

With two months left in the runoff, neither Paxton nor Cornyn nor the Senate Leadership Fund has spent much money. I’m told that S.L.F. support for Cornyn is coming, but Lone Star Liberty PAC, a pro-Paxton group, did release an ad earlier this month attacking Cornyn for “betraying” Trump. Notably, the ad ran not in Texas, but in West Palm Beach.

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The Sanford comeback?: House Republicans have weathered an astonishing spate of retirements—a record-breaking 36 in all—and members tell me they expect more in the coming weeks. But not every Republican is giving up on Washington. Former South Carolina Rep. Mark Sanford is vying for his old Charleston-area seat—the one being vacated by Rep. Nancy Mace for her gubernatorial run.

Sanford’s comeback attempt may be a sign of Trump’s waning juice. Sanford, who is running on a platform of tackling the national debt, lost his House primary in 2018 because Trump endorsed his opponent. Now he’s making a last-minute attempt to win in a crowded primary, but the former 2020 presidential candidate, two-time governor, and two-time House member, who had a high-profile affair in 2009 (and also dated Olivia Nuzzi… at least according to bamboo enthusiast Ryan Lizza, though Nuzzi’s lawyer seemed to deny this), still has name recognition. And in this political environment, perhaps an anti-Trump posture offers him a better shot.
Shutdown politics: Senate Republicans are still a little surprised that Speaker Mike Johnson and House Republicans rejected their deal, which passed the upper chamber unanimously, to fund D.H.S. except for ICE and Border Patrol—thereby extending the partial government shutdown. But Johnson was looking out for his job and his majority. As one senior House Republican aide succinctly put it, Johnson needs to fund Border Patrol to placate the MAGA base and protect members who could get nuked on the issue in the primaries. The optics of defunding border security were too damaging.

Of course, Border Patrol agents were involved in the death of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, and the agency’s border-security operations were already funded by the One Big Beautiful Bill. But House Republicans decided that they couldn’t overcome the politics. So D.H.S. will likely be shut down for at least two more weeks.

Now on to the main event…

The Mysteries of Spanberger

Abigail Spanberger won the Virginia governor’s mansion on a positive wave of bipartisanship that only an ex-C.I.A. Democratic representative could muster in a purple state. Now, just two months into her term, she finds herself waging a redistricting war and gambling her political capital on flipping congressional seats.

Abby Livingston

Gov. Abigail Spanberger, who campaigned on good vibes and affordability, has found herself in a post-honeymoon miasma of political fury and redistricting hell. Spanberger supported bipartisan redistricting in 2020, but has since reconsidered. Yes, she’s claimed that her change of heart occurred only after Trump’s land grab last summer in Texas. “The governor understands that the landscape changed when states started redrawing their maps to please a president who said he’s ‘entitled’ to more Republican seats in Congress,” her spokeswoman, Libby Wiet, noted. But the shift has not been subtle. Last week, Spanberger and fellow convert Barack Obama firebombed March Madness TV timeouts with ads calling on Virginians to blow up their independent map in favor of a redraw that would effectively decimate the state’s Republican federal delegation.

Naturally, this volte-face has focused attention on Spanberger, herself. Republicans have argued that she’s a hypocrite, while Democrats are fighting among themselves regarding whether her campaign for the new map—a 10–1 draw in favor of Democrats, versus the current 6–5 split—is too partisan or not partisan enough. Virginians will vote on the redraw in an April 21 ballot initiative, and Democrats have outspent Republicans $25 million to $2 million in the campaign, according to AdImpact.

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But some Virginia Democrats don’t like the early numbers they’re seeing. “The real question is, how many independents turn out and how do they break?” said a Virginia Democrat in rural territory. Concerns have crossed the Potomac, where Washington Democrats also fear that passing the map won’t be as easy as Spanberger’s landslide against Winsome Earle-Sears. “Republicans were never energized by Winsome,” one G.O.P. operative told me. “They are energized about the prospect of a Democratic majority, which undoubtedly will launch a marathon of investigations and impeachment hearings. They will be driven to the polls in a way that Winsome Sears could never replicate.”

Whatever the outcome, Spanberger will own it—for good or ill. “She’s gonna get saddled with this,” said a Democratic lobbyist who’s also a constituent. “If she wins, and they win these seats, she’s gonna look great. If not, this is going to hang around her neck.” The referendum will not only risk tarnishing her bipartisan brand, but also test her political skills as a potential 2028 V.P. contender with national security bona fides.

“Virginia Is Not California”

One refrain I’ve heard over the last week among Democrats is that “Virginia is not California”—a sort of No shit, Sherlock observation that is nevertheless worth pondering for a beat. After all, Gov. Gavin Newsom was on his sixth statewide campaign, and supported by Nancy Pelosi, when he and his allies raised $120 million for his redistricting referendum. Spanberger is 72 days into office, and Virginia’s redistricting had already been in motion by the time she was sworn in. The pressure on her mounted, however, when Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore “shit the bed,” as one House Democratic leadership staffer put it, by not delivering Democrats more seats from their deep-blue states. Her objective, as House Democrats have argued, was to not only match the Republican head-count pickup, but also fend off the Supreme Court’s anticipated laceration of the Voting Rights Act, which will allow Republican-controlled state legislatures to gut majority-minority Black districts across the South.

Many Democrats wanted Virginia to preemptively offset those losses, but delays have increased the odds that these maps may not be redrawn in time for the 2026 election—a reminder that this gang war will continue past this year’s election. “It’s not a moment we are living in,” said the president of the Democrats’ redistricting arm, John Bisognano, indicating that redistricting will now occur every time there’s a change in state party control. “This is no way to govern a country.”

It’s Getting Worse

Florida was supposed to be the next—and perhaps only—bright spot ahead for House Republicans. But the expected three-to-five-seat Republican pickup there is now looking awfully ambitious. Over the past year, Florida Democrats have outperformed Republicans in special elections across the state, including the most recent special election, in which Democrats flipped the state House seat that represents Mar-a-Lago, among others.

That seemed to scare Republicans into more vocal pushback against an aggressive Florida redraw. A few weeks ago, Republican Rep. Kat Cammack told The Washington Post that the G.O.P. might pick up three seats “on our best day.” Another House Republican source recently told me that three seats out of Florida feels “greedy”—which means it might actually backfire against the party in power. Last week, Reps. Dan Webster and Greg Steube were the loudest Florida Republicans to push back, warning, respectively, “Don’t do it” and “You could put incumbents at risk.”

What’s also spooking Florida Republicans is evidence coming out of Texas that Hispanic voters are abandoning them. Texas Republicans drew their own map assuming that Trump’s 2024 margins with the bloc would prove durable. So far, though, they haven’t. Republicans will probably still net seats in the Texas redraw, but not the five-seat slam dunk the party expected last summer. A number of polls and special elections have shown a marked Hispanic shift toward Democrats.

Meanwhile, Indiana Republicans resisted Trump’s pressure to redraw their map and send an additional G.O.P. representative to Congress, and now they’re at war with themselves. When the plan collapsed in December, Republican Gov. Mike Braun promised political retribution, and Trump has endorsed primary challengers against the five Republican state senators who opposed the new map. Ahead of the May 5 primary, a super PAC aligned with Indiana Sen. Jim Banks joined in, spending on TV and digital ads targeting the same state Republicans.

Despite the damage, the redistricting rampage continues. As Democrats brace for the V.R.A. fallout—be it this cycle or the next—other blue states are posturing for their own matching redraws in New York, Colorado, and perhaps New Jersey. And even if Virginia’s new map passes, it may not stand for long—it is, after all, a purple state. If Republicans regain state-level control in the coming years, every Alexandria-based G.O.P. consultant will be fighting for the honor of drawing a revenge map.

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