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stretching from Roanoke to Bristol, fail to meet that criteria and the same is true of Southside districts from Petersburg south to the North Carolina border.
For Senate seats, the ideal size will be around 153,000 persons and again the same two regions come up short.
Most of the Valley seats can be configured without any serious harm to the political clout of that region.
But make no mistake, Northern Virginia in particular is going to come out of redistricting like gangbusters and Tidewater will also do well.
There are some present Northern Virginia districts, for example, that have more than 100,000 people or nearly 40,000 more people than the ideal House seat and the same is true of some Senate seats in that region.,Thus the most affluent section of Virginia, and the section with the lowest percentage of native Virginians, will become the dominant force in the state’s legislature.
That will be quite a climb from an era barely two decades in the past when Northern Virginia was looked upon by many of the state’s conservative leaders as an alien land inhabited by liberals who preached such strange notions as environmental protection and mass transit and did not demonstrate proper respect for • ^tradition and Jeffersonian principles.
Tidewater will gain some ground in redistricting but not nearly so much as Northern Virginia. The big winner will be Virginia Beach and to some extent the Newport NewsWilliamsburg region.
Norfolk, however, stands to lose since all seven of its present House seats are below the ideal population figures.
Reapportionment is, of course, both a mathematical and political exercise and deals are already being struck. It has also become in modem times somewhat of a judicial exercise and it is an iron-clad certainly that no matter what lines emerge for the 100 House of Delegate and 40 State Senate seats that all or parts of the plans that are enacted will be challenged in court by someone.,
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