The states in Republicans’ crosshairs in 2010 were the ones that so often pop up in dozens of lawsuits about voting rights—Wisconsin, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Michigan—all crucial swing states in the 2016 election. All four states have also seen demographic shifts over the past 20 years that have increased their importance. Via the well-known REDMAP project, Republicans spent millions in legislative and governors’ races in those states, resulting in huge Republican gains, and also in Republican control over the 2011 redistricting process, which in turn engendered more Republican gains.

While not one of the core successes of REDMAP, Virginia was always a priority in long-term strategy. For one, the architect of REDMAP was Ed Gillespie, the former Republican State Leadership Council leader whom Northam beat yesterday. But Virginia has also been a key proof-of-concept for gerrymandering.

A purpling state with distinct geographic patterns of movement and a burgeoning population, Virginia would be an ideal state for showcasing some of the recent extreme trends in redistricting: packing reams of Democratic voters in Northern Virginia and the Tidewater into a select few districts, and then picking off influential D.C. suburbs and college towns across the state and diluting Democratic votes by placing them in heavily-red districts. And, in the case of Virginia, with well-known settlement patterns, such a map might be drawn purely on partisanship lines instead of using race, a factor in political mapmaking that has recently attracted the ire of courts.

That Virginia didn’t succumb to such a political mapmaking is in part because of the failure of either party to capture majorities in the General Assembly and the governor’s house at the same time. In Virginia, like in many states, the governor has veto power over maps passed by the state legislature, a dynamic that makes compromise necessary if Democrats and Republicans split control of the two branches.

“Democrats were in charge in the [Virginia] Senate, and Republicans were in charge in the House of Delegates,” says Brian Cannon, the director of the nonpartisan redistricting reform group One Virginia 2021. “We ended up getting a bipartisan gerrymander.”

The scheme created by Democrats and Republicans in 2011 that Cannon mentions was a strange one: Yes, it created unnatural districts using tactics that might be considered gerrymandering in any light, but those tactics were used to preserve incumbency and the current balance of power in the statehouse.

With Republicans running the same playbook in REDMAP 2020, and Democrats countering with a well-funded redistricting scheme of their own, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC), the 2017 Virginia election was both the first and one of the most important battlegrounds between the two efforts. According to Kelly Ward, the executive director of the NDRC, “a good portion of the Democratic disadvantage in Congress boils down to seven states,” many of which have seats and governorships on the table in 2018. “You have Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida, Virginia, and Pennsylvania,” Ward says. “If Democrats can win those seats, then we have a seat at the table during the redistricting process.”