President Donald Trump made a last-minute entry into Virginia’s redistricting referendum Monday evening. Will it be enough to sway voters one way or the other?
“This is really a country election, the whole country is watching,” Trump told voters in a tele rally late Monday. “It’s about the big tax cuts we gave you,” the president added suggesting if Democrats get the extra seats, they’ll “change things at the federal level.”
But for Theodore Kahn, a fraud investigator in the financial sector who lives in Southside Richmond, it was about learning lessons from the election that saw Trump win the White House a second time.
“‘When they go low, we go high,’ doesn’t work anymore,” Khan said outside the Hobson Lodge polling location bright and early as one of a handful of yes votes.
Wayne Robinson, a 77-year-old southside retiree, was also among voters up early enough to feel the morning cold.
“Every vote counts, man,” he said, hands deep in his pockets from the morning chill. As for his vote Tuesday? “To stop Republicans.”
Ashyia Rhett, a 23-year-old Insurance agent, said she was 50/50 on the issue but voted yes in the end. “There's been redistricting in other areas that makes me kind of nervous,” she said.
At Mary Munford Elementary in Richmond’s near West End, security install tech Joseph Clark Wood Jr. said he voted no.
“I don’t think it's fair the way these maps have been [re]districted and I think the rationale behind it is extraordinarily shaky,” he said. A Trump supporter, he added he has “a lot more concerns with how things have gone.”
“But I generally tend to remain optimistic,” Wood said. “I believe the opposition’s direction is much more detrimental than any missteps the president made.”
Wood had an ally at Pocahontas Middle School in the affluent Richmond suburb of Short Pump where Ashton Baskette, a retired veteran, said the referendum was a waste of taxpayer dollars.
Baskette voted no because: “I’m not a communist.”
Also voting at Pocahontas Middle was Brittany Seward, a nonprofit worker who voted yes. As for why?
“Seeing what’s happening in other states and not wanting it to happen here in Virginia,” she said.
When told President Donald Trump said voting in favor of the new maps was a vote against his agenda: “I’m so happy to do that.”
